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

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.

I have exactly the same problem. Bought an surface Pro 4  in 2017, recently the battery swollen and the screen popped off! I have spoken to CS support which is not helpful at all. they told me that because my warranty is up, I would have to pay $400 to replace the laptop with a refurbished unit. This is absolutely insane to ask your customer pay to exchange an defective item. Shame on you Microsoft.

As I dig deeper into this fiasco I am finding more and more about the possible cause of these battery issues. Going over my battery report I am finding something very strange, first I see that for the first 58 weeks using the system I am seeing an average overcharge on the battery of 278 to 314 mWh and this stops once the May 2017 Firmware and UEFI (103.1684.256.0 improves battery life during sleep.and other Surface drivers) updates are installed in June of 2017. From here I can trace the degradation of the battery immediately after each and every Firmware and UEFI update to the day. The worst degradation I've noticed is immediately after the Aug 2019 Firmware update (Surface – Firmware – 103.2614.257.0) where within a matter of 2 weeks the mWh dropped from 34972 mWh to 28634 mWh and it has been staying within a few hundred mWh per week since then.

I would suggest that everyone do a battery report;

1. Right-click on Start menu
2. Select Command Prompt
3. Type following command “powercfg /batteryreport” and hit Enter key. It will generate the battery life report and save it to the current location you located with a file named “battery-report.html”.

And then compare it to the windows updates located at 

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4023489/surface-surface-pro-4-update-history

The funny thing is.......I was never asked to do a battery report by the "Customer Support person".

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.

Same issue here.  Bottom right side of the screen is bulging away from the frame.  Didn't an issue like this cause Samsung to replace everyone's phones and then pull them off the market for a while?  I can't fathom why this isn't a class action at this point.  

Sure, it's a four year old system but I've had laptops last far longer than that with no issues.  Moreover, a swelling battery is actually dangerous.  Microsoft, if you're listening, this is a problem that is going to blow up in your face if you don't do something soon.  

On a side note, UbreakIfix can repair this for about $150.  That's my current course of action.