Surface Pro 4 - Screen won't wake from sleep

Anonymous
2015-10-27T05:32:42+00:00

I received my Surface Pro 4 today and it worked fine. I put it on "sleep" for awhile, came back and turned it on. Once again it worked fine. I made an error and instead of putting it on "sleep" I  hit the power button to turn it off when I finished. Now it won't come on at all. The screen stays dark. If I push the power button I can see lights under the keyboard keys, then if I hit the power switch again they go off. But nothing happens to the screen no matter what I do. Has anyone else suffered from this?

Surface | Surface Pro | Display and screen

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Anonymous
2016-08-19T19:27:34+00:00

It works fine for me after the Anniversary Update to Windows 10 Pro (Version 1607). It no longer goes into a coma.

I just traveled all week. Put my Surface Pro 4 (SP4) to sleep 10 to 20 times each day, and currently my task manager shows the up time to be 7:21:35:21 - 7 days! It is actually working the way I expected it to when I bought it!

It was such a relief to not be scared to put it to sleep during meeting breaks to save battery when working with my Pen and OneNote. For the past 7 months I've had to have it on power when in meetings so that it wouldn't go into a coma. That was always so embarrassing.

You can update to the latest version of Windows 10 by opening Settings > Update & security > Windows Update, and selecting Check for updates.

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  1. Anonymous
    2016-08-24T23:30:38+00:00

    This may or may not help, but some problems directly involving Surface hardware can be fixed by the following procedure (I have to do this periodically to fix my SP4's occasional loss of contact with its accelerometer/gyroscope, so it can't tell when it's rotated (one cue this has happened is that the "Rotation Lock" button in the Action Center will have vanished, in addition to not responding to rotation...)) 

    1. Save your work and shut down all programs you care about restoring - you will be rebooting soon.
    2. Right-click on the Start Menu and pick "Device Manager"
    3. Scan up and down to see if there are little yellow "Warning" triangles on any of the hardware devices or families.  (If this is your problem, I'd guess the offending device is "System Devices/Microsoft IR Camera Front"; for the rotation problem, the offender is "Human Interface Devices/I2C HID Device")
    4. If you don't have any warning triangles, you're out of luck, and this procedure won't help you.  Go buy a Guinness and cry in it.
    5. If there is one (or more), then navigate down to the actual device itself (with the warning triangle), right click on it, and choose "Uninstall".
    6. Confirm you want to yank the driver rug out from under the hardware, then reboot  (Windows button/Power Icon/Restart).
    7. When Windows reboots, it will realize it's missing a driver, automatically reinstall it (yes, really!), then come up as normal. (Why it can't just nuke the driver on its own when it realizes it's hosed (warning triangle), and then ask you to reboot so it can fix it, is a deep mystery...)
    8. Do Step 2 again, and ensure the warning triangle in Device Manager is gone.
    9. Restart again (Step 6) just to be safe.  Yes, this sometimes matters.  Go figure.
    10. If you're really paranoid, Do Step 2 one more time, just to be sure it's still fixed. Don't worry, though, something similar will probably spontaneously break in the future, and you'll have to do this whole mess again, because inexplicably, 16 years into the 21st Century, Windows still can't fix these things on its own.  (And people think we're going to have self-driving cars...)

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-08-24T09:53:01+00:00

    After the Anniversary update ... SP4 usually wakes ok, but have had the error that it cannot turn on the camera. This is a new error. I'm almost giving up.

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-08-19T18:31:40+00:00

    OK, now that I've given it a couple of weeks, I'll say this:  The *classic* SoD is gone, at least for me, but has been replaced now by new and different (although mercifully, less frequent) failures.  I've had numerous failures to sleep or wake that are different , but still require YAPORRAC (Yet Another Power-Off/Reboot/Relaunch Apps Cycle).

    In most of these cases, the difference is that when I try to wake the SP4, there is no response at all (as opposed to the classic SoD, where it at least lights up the keyboard on a wake attempt...)  Like the original SoD, short sleeps seem OK, but longer ones are much more likely to fail.  At least twice this week, my SP4 has failed to wake in my home office dock in the morning, after putting it to sleep with the sleep button on my keyboard.  Unexplained hard hangs at the Windows Hello/Password/PIN screen are also alarmingly common, requiring YAPORRAC.

    There is also a very serious problem with Bluetooth and USB hardware sleeping, or rather, failure to sleep with USB and BT things connected.  This failure mode is new and curious:  after around 15-20 minutes (I haven't timed it, but will), the system attempts to go to sleep, but apparently, because there are active BT and USB devices, it fails to do so.  As a result, the system repeatedly tries to turn off each of these devices, fails, and turns them on again.  This winds up happening several times a second, preventing the computer from ever entering sleep and resulting in really annoying behaviors like 1) flashing the lights on my Wacom Bamboo tablet (USB) on and off several times a secons, and 2) FAR more annoyingly, playing the "Bluetooth device connected" and "Bluetooth device disconnected" sounds just as often through my Harman/Kardon Onyx BT speaker.  (The latter, BT bug has been around a long time (two years, at least), but it used to trigger the sounds (this is WIndows, NOT the speaker)  just every minute or so (which was plenty annoying enough) - now it's a constant, loud, BEEPBOOP-BOOPBEEP--BEEPBOOP-BOOPBEEP..., apparently as fast as the system can make and destroy BT connections to the speaker.)  This can at least be stopped by any input (keyboard or mouse), but as soon as it tries to sleep again.

    Lastly, as I mentioned before, what half-broken fixes we do have seem to have come at the expense of battery life:  I've tried several times now, and 3-4 hours seems to be the best I can expect now, less than half of what  we were told we should get in battery life on an SP4. (The SP4 is supposed to run longer than the SP3, even though it has a much smaller battery - this was supposed to be the benefit of Skylake's new SP0 power state, which is in reality, a miserable, stuttering, cluster-foxtrot.)  I really like Windows 10, but I'd move to ARM in a heartbeat, given how effectively Intel has created the worst experience ever for SP4 owners.

    So, as I wrote before, SP4 power management under Win10v1607 is better, but nowhere close to fixed - Microsoft still has lots more work to do, and nearly a year on, our PCs still aren't fully capable of being used the way they were advertised.

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  4. Anonymous
    2016-08-18T23:06:04+00:00

    Well, I am also on 1607 now  (m3), and just got the first SoD after the update. This problem is not solved at all. By this time, Microsoft should have put all available resources on fixing it once and for all, since it makes Surface look like unreliable garbage. And this effort has obviously failed. So, where is the admission that a large number of SP4s have a hardware fault that can't be adequately mitigated in software, and when can we have the inevitable recall?

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