Surface Pro 4 - Screen won't wake from sleep

Chicagoland,

And I completely agree with you. If you have the luxury of being able to return and replace the computer, do it. Only that will make the manufacturer actually feel your pain.

However, I feel that until the time this is (hopefully) fixed, I would much rather just restart the system gracefully, rather than do a hard power off every time. In case I keep it, I know that it has been treated better. And it's really just two steps: Win+D and Alt+F4, Enter ;)

Good luck and happy holidays,

R

Hello fellow sufferers,

Just a quick tip to decrease your power user pain:

If you have the Type Cover or another keyboard attached to the Surface and you notice that the backlighting comes on (but the screen doesn't), you can do the following to restart the Surface Pro 4 in a soft way rather than the awful hard power off, which is what holding the power button does:

1. While the screen is black, the OS is still responding although you won't be able to see anything you're doing. This allows you to perform a soft restart of the system blindly.
2. [Optional:] Press Alt+F4 a couple of times to close any open windows neatly.
3. Press Win+D to give focus to the desktop.
4. Press Alt+F4 to bring up the "Shut Down Windows" dialog.
5. [Optional:] The default action will probably be Shut Down. You can press the letter R on your keyboard to select Restart instead, as the focus is always on the action drop down. If you have a localized version of Windows other than English, this may be different for you.
6. Press Enter to confirm the selected action.
7. Wait a few seconds and the device should switch off normally, unless a program like an unsaved Word document is halting the shutdown. You can try pressing Enter if it hangs for a longer time to allow for "Turn Off Anyway". (Haven't tried this, let us know if you figure it out, please.)
8. Unless you've opted to Restart, power up the device again to continue working normally.
9. Enjoy having given your software the chance to store its state and not break the filesystem by accident.

Note that the keyboard backlighting may not come on if you have indeed turned it off for your Type Cover. This makes no difference to the process described above.

You can try this process once while you can actually see what's happening on the screen to get a better idea of what you are doing. Later, you can feel like a ninja in the dark.

Also, Microsoft, please get your act together with Intel. This "quality" of your high-priced devices' drivers is unbelievably low.

Best,

Roubo

Roubo,

With all due respect, if this is what it takes then I completely give up.  This should be a standard feature that works without 9 steps and a reboot.  If this isn't fixed by January 14th I'm getting a refund from BestBuy.  I can't use this for business yet but I'll continue to use it at home until the return timer is up.

An old problem? I found this by doing a google search.

http://www.winbeta.org/news/microsoft-surface-pro-refusing-wake-sleep-mode-due-power-setting

This was 2 years ago.

I find I can put my SP4 to sleep and it always wakes up if it has been a short time but if it has been sleeping an hour or so it fails to wake up some of the time.

Hello fellow sufferers,

Just a quick tip to decrease your power user pain:

If you have the Type Cover or another keyboard attached to the Surface and you notice that the backlighting comes on (but the screen doesn't), you can do the following to restart the Surface Pro 4 in a soft way rather than the awful hard power off, which is what holding the power button does:

1. While the screen is black, the OS is still responding although you won't be able to see anything you're doing. This allows you to perform a soft restart of the system blindly.
2. [Optional:] Press Alt+F4 a couple of times to close any open windows neatly.
3. Press Win+D to give focus to the desktop.
4. Press Alt+F4 to bring up the "Shut Down Windows" dialog.
5. [Optional:] The default action will probably be Shut Down. You can press the letter R on your keyboard to select Restart instead, as the focus is always on the action drop down. If you have a localized version of Windows other than English, this may be different for you.
6. Press Enter to confirm the selected action.
7. Wait a few seconds and the device should switch off normally, unless a program like an unsaved Word document is halting the shutdown. You can try pressing Enter if it hangs for a longer time to allow for "Turn Off Anyway". (Haven't tried this, let us know if you figure it out, please.)
8. Unless you've opted to Restart, power up the device again to continue working normally.
9. Enjoy having given your software the chance to store its state and not break the filesystem by accident.

Note that the keyboard backlighting may not come on if you have indeed turned it off for your Type Cover. This makes no difference to the process described above.

You can try this process once while you can actually see what's happening on the screen to get a better idea of what you are doing. Later, you can feel like a ninja in the dark.

Also, Microsoft, please get your act together with Intel. This "quality" of your high-priced devices' drivers is unbelievably low.

Best,

Roubo