Surface Pen makes screen flash black

I've tried the fix with gpedit to increase scheduling, but I seem to already have everything in place so this wasn't a valid fix for me. What worked was reinstalling the intel graphics driver.

I have then fixed it on my laptop and wanted to share the solution that worked for me in case it helps anyone.

Basically, you have to reinstall the intel graphics drivers. I'll walk you through the steps if you're interested.

Uninstalling the Intel Graphics Drivers

This fix involves reinstalling the intel graphics drivers, so we need to fully uninstall them, then reinstall them

1. Press Windows Key + X or right-click on the windows icon
2. Click on "Device Manager"
3. Expand "Display adapters" (click on the small arrow)
4. Right-click on the intel graphics
5. Click on "Uninstall device"
6. When prompted, tick the box saying "Attempt to remove the driver for this device"
7. Lastly, click uninstall

Don't freak out if your screen flashes a bit and the screen resolution changes. This is normal

Installing the Intel Graphics Driver

Here you have two ways of installing the drivers.

The first method is easier and involves installing the drivers from windows update

1. Open Windows Settings
2. Click on "Windows Update"
3. Click on "Check for Updates"

If it doesn't find the updates the first time, wait a minute or two and check for updates again

This should start downloading an Intel Display Driver automatically

You should wait for it to finish downloading and installing, then click restart now

If for some reason Windows update doesn't work, you should proceed with the next method. It's a bit more involving

The second method would depend on your device manufacturer and you need to install the drivers manually

You should search the drivers for your specific device model. If you have a dell laptop, you can try to google search "Dell laptop drivers". Normally you'd need either the device model name or the serial number. You can find these on a sticker under your laptop or deep in the about section in the settings.

After opening the drivers for your device, look for display drivers and download the intel display drivers.

Next, you should normally install the drivers and restart your device. This should work flawlessly.

TL;DR

You'd want to do two things: uninstall the intel graphics drivers from the windows device manager, then install them again using one of two ways. First, let windows update check and install the drivers automatically; or second, download the drivers manually from your manufacturer's website.

Hope this helps someone like it did to me!

I'm a student so taking notes is essential to my workflow. Thankfully this helped me continue my work!

Hey thanks, but why you need to remove all the other drivers?

I updated the driver to the intel one because I was having some issues waking up back from sleep. I am surprised that this has been a thread for so long and no fix

Hi Erwin, 

There seemed to be overlap and incompatibilities amongst driver packs as far as I could tell. Thought it was best to just start with a clean slate and use the latest driver pack only. Force uninstalling and deleting the Intel Iris graphics driver ensured that Windows update didn't install the wrong driver version before the Surface Pro 7 driver package was installed.

This has been bothering us for months. Every time one of our users went to use their Surface Pen on their Surface Pro 7 in OneNote, their screen would flash black. At times, it would disconnect them from Miracast. Sometimes the entire device would freeze requiring a forced reset. Other times, Teams would crash in the background and black out requiring a forced quit via task manager. All of these issues were caused by using the pen. We have over 100 Surface devices in our environment (school), all with this problem. 

After weeks of digging and trial and error (with growing frustration amongst staff), I narrowed it down to a DWM.exe crash (as reported in event viewer):

Faulting application path: C:\WINDOWS\system32\dwm.exe

Faulting module path: C:\WINDOWS\System32\KERNELBASE.dll

As far as I can tell, this being caused by an incompatible Intel Iris Graphics driver that installed itself as part of the 2004 or 20H2 update.

This is the solution that has worked for us on our Surface devices (I'm not sure if this will work on other devices, but I would certainly recommend trying the removal of the Intel Iris Driver and reinstalling the driver on the support website of the device you are using):

On one device (I have scripts for SCCM below as we had to patch this issue in bulk):

Open control panel and uninstall any Surface Pro 7 Updates.

Navigate to the Surface Pro 7 drivers download page. Download the latest driver package but do not install yet. 

Open device manager and locate Intel Iris Graphics under display adapters. Uninstall and delete the driver (the display will go black and everything will go tiny or huge, this is normal!).

When the driver uninstall is complete, install the driver package which was downloaded. It will take about 5 minutes and the screen will flash back and return to normal as the Intel Iris driver is reinstalled. 

Reboot the machine. 

In bulk (this was tricky to figure out):

The below batch file and powershell script will automate the above and so can be used with SCCM. 

Save in a batch file:

msiexec /x {AA26C76B-D228-43FF-87FC-842F5345A910} /q

TIMEOUT 5 /nobreak

msiexec /x {5A867CF1-0AA2-4AA5-B424-11F49C66DB45} /q

TIMEOUT 5 /nobreak

msiexec /x {D4802CD5-4E1E-4FA5-BC63-DB99D5EC8DA3} /q

TIMEOUT 5 /nobreak

msiexec /x {5F97074F-E0DB-4DD5-BDC5-FBE3BADBF2AC} /q

TIMEOUT 5 /nobreak

powershell.exe Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

powershell.exe -file "uninstalldriver.ps1"

TIMEOUT 20 /nobreak

msiexec /i "SurfacePro7_Win10_18362_20.101.8580.0.msi" /q /norestart

TIMETOUT 20 /nobreak

copy OneNote_Blackscreen_Patched C:\

shutdown.exe /f /r /t 60 /c "The patch is complete. Your Surface Pro will force restart in 60 seconds automatically. Please save any opened work or restart manually if nothing of importance is open." /d p:4:1 

Ensure that in the path you run this script, you have a txt file called OneNote_Blackscreen_Patched.txt (I used this for the detection method for the SCCM application deployment). You should also have the latest Surface Pro 7 update package which in our case is SurfacePro7_Win10_18362_20.101.8580.0.msi. You must also have the below powershell .ps1 file:

$oemfiles = gci c:\windows\inf\oem*.inf

foreach($file in $oemfiles){

    if(get-content $file | select-string -pattern 'igfx' -SimpleMatch)

    {pnputil /uninstall /delete-driver $file.name /force}

                           }

Running the batch file automates the whole process. 

I hope this helps other IT admins that have been dealing with this issue for as long as we have. Such relief to finally have a solution.

This happened to me after a Windows update about a month ago. Every time I just taped the screen with my stylus or finger (like when dotting an 'i' while taking notes) the screen would go totally black. I had to restart my computer to get the screen display back. Very annoying! I just did what you suggested and so far, so good. Instead of deleting the adapter I just disabled it in case I need it in the future.

Microsoft needs to fix this ASAP, but your reply was helpful.