Surface Pro 4 Bulging Battery / Screen. 3 1/2 years old.

I purchased my Surface Pro 4 in February 2017 an having same issues.   I think this warrants a class action lawsuit.   

Since this issue has been well-known for some time, I think a class-action lawyer or two would have already jumped on this if there was a case to be made.  I, too, would be happy to join.

I decided to bite the bullet and get a Surface 7.  Still the best machine for my needs.  I hope they figured out how to make them right since my Surface 4 and I don't have another time bomb on my desk.

Be well

That's really helpful for technicians doing diagnostics.

My surface was replaced the first year by Microsoft and does show 34972 just like yours - but this machine was replaced last year by Microsoft because it was still under warranty.

But, but, but it still heats up to where its extremely hot. The fan is always on high speed. My co-worker and I pair programmed today on Microsoft Teams and I kept hearing a loud squeaking sound. 

He says, "it comes from my Surface fan. It's always hot, so the fan is running. The squeaking sound started recently."

Meanwhile my other co-worker had to drive into the office 1 hour 48 minutes to drop off the surface in the photo above (with the exploding battery) because he was afraid the thing would catch his home on fire.

Our Team of developers, today, was talked in stand-up about how much productivity we loose having to rebuild these surfaces and get the configuration, software and special settings we use within our developer tools right.

It's just sad.

When we got these surfaces for work, I bought one for college the same year and it was a nightmare. Slow and the disk space continue to fill up with updates from Microsoft.  I gave up on it and gave it away - the surface, pen, keyboard, special Microsoft dock for my multiple screens and all the software to my Son.

Why, because after several months of heavy usage, I found myself uninstalling important software I needed for productivity. Microsoft Updates took up so much space I had less than 64 GB of space for my person stuff. I purchased a 128GB SD Card to make up for the space but couldn't install software on it, which is what I needed seeing I was loosing space on C:

Visual Studio didn't like access external drives for projects. PHPStorm likes to install your configurations on your root profile; it just wasn't working out from a development perspective.

I'm just not happy with the Surface. Microsoft had 5 years of my developer experience to improve the Surface and it has not improved. It has maintained, in my opinion, a steady decline.

The issue is with timing. The problems with the surfaces happens so randomly and unexpected. But all of the signs are there. Overheating which is damaging to electronic parts, the fan always on high speed. Unfortunately, because the building we worked in had loud exhaust fans we never really heard the surface fans blowing and because they sat on our desk connected to Microsoft docking stations we never touched them until we had meetings or took them home. That's when we noticed the heat.

When my surface started overheating I noticed parts of the surfaces display getting lighter starting in the top right corner and white spots appearing. Sometimes the surface would disconnect from the docking station and my dual-monitors would switch or one would turn off and on, or one of two would only work. Restarting was the only way to fix the random monitor thingy. 

It got worse over the next few months. One day I had to take it home and attempted to close the keyboard cover and it would not lay flat and was very hot to the touch.

I turned off OneDrive because it was always stuck trying to backup meta data from PHPStorm, Docker settings, Node modules and other project artifacts. Changing how and what OneDrive backed up was a nightmare, and caused other problems. So I couldn't use that feature. As far as meta data files it seems OneDrive didn't know what to do with the files. Some were prefixed with special characters like dots, which caused onedrive notifications to turn red and kept the CPU usage high.

After turning off OneDrive I was able to lower the CPU usage and some of the initial overheating - but it was too late.

The other surfaces happened randomly about 1 year from my problem. So it's hard to really make a case to the Attorney General when it is not consistent behavior.

The more I read the more evident it becomes that this problem is known to Microsoft and is very widespread.

I am sure that Microsoft monitor these forums so I think its about time that we got some sort of comment from Microsoft.

Seemingly, from the comments I have seen there is a general view that the cost of a like for like replacement is exorbitant given the value Microsoft put on the devices if used as trade ins and many people would be happy to purchase newer devices if a decent trade in allowance were offered.

Come on Microsoft lets hear from you and start a dialogue!