Surface Pro 4 - Screen won't wake from sleep

I have been following this thread since Nov last year, when I bought my Surface Pro i7/256/16 as a replacement for my Pro3. From the beginning it didn’t felt good, the windows 10 install took me several hours (also like the 3 other reinstalls of win10). In the beginning I had sometimes the ‘black screen of death’, after the February update the wakeup problems came more and more frequently  (also the hot back, and battery drain). I have no exclamation marks in the Device manager and I tried everything from this threat:

• All the updates. (Correctly installed. now Dutch win 10: 1511 built 10586.218)
• The sfc /scannow check, and did the DISM command for the opencl.dll error
• with the Surface Diagnostic Toolkit I Installed two missing drivers (Watchdog and Thermal subsystem)..

Now after the April 19th update, I had only one wakeup problem this morning. So it seems for me, that Microsoft is on the right direction. But now my gestures are driving me crazy. Sometimes in explorer it spontaneously opens a lot of links while I’m not touching the surface. And another times it won’t response at finger swipes at all. After a restart everything is working as it should, so I think it’s not a hardware failure. I want to know if I’m the only one with this problem, do I have to go to the longtime of reinstalling win10, or is this because of the April update and do I have to wait for Microsoft to solve te problem.….

Absolutely.  I suspect that the surface sales are small enough that they think they can get away with it.  If something like this happened with Apple, its users would be howling with indignation.  The pc community is much more relaxed in waiting for firmware and trying to work out problems themselves, however our patience has served us badly here.  I just don't understand why microsoft doesn't own up to it and issue a recall for certain lots.  They can afford it, and it would go a long way to generating trust.  But for now, yeah the word should go out about this experience.

I'm starting to suspect that Microsoft may be engaged in a "silent recall." Meaning they know about the issue, and really doesn't put up a fight when someone shows/calls up with the sleep issue - at least they can minimize the loss or spread the loss out over a long period of time and avoid the PR mess (on this "one of the least serviceable devices") - I think it's a good idea to get the media involved provide user feedback on Microsoft shop and Amazon (from customer's perspective). From Microsoft perspective, denial is very damaging as Pentium floating point issue showed, so maybe they've elected to be silent. I'll see if my new machine continues to show no sleep issues as software gets installed (I'll report back)..

• Peter

Hi,

I was the original guy who said - "hey let's run CPU-Z and see if there are any CPU differences!"

After I posted my results, no one with the properly working sleep posted their result. I have a buddy at work who has a surface with no issues with lot number 1602 - I had him run it and concluded that CPU/MB/GPU were "identical"  - at least as far as CPU-Z knows - to mine.

After 2/17 update, and numerous hypothesis and failures - the 4/19 update was what boiled over my frustrations. I finally gave up and went to the Microsoft Store - ready to start speaking loudly with lots of customers around.

I was pleasantly surprised that they didn't force a debugging cycle, asking me to come back after they debugged it, etc. They said - ok we can probably exchange this for you. The only caveat was that I had to make up the difference between my "for sale price" that I got my i5/8GB/256GB ($1050) to the current price of $1299 - I said, "are you serious?" The guy then spoke to his manager and removed that requirement offered me to sell me the Microsoft Complete Warranty - My device was 2.5months old I had thought the opportunity to purchase the plan was over - so I did take the offer based on this exchange. I had previously bought the Squaretrade's 3-year warranty for the original purchase - but it seems Microsoft Complete may be a better option for me (being fairly close to the Microsoft store). By the way, it was a classy thing that the guy who helped me thanked me for putting up with Microsoft and staying with them. I told him that an iDevice was just not going to cut it and I really like the device but the sleep issue is really annoying.

By the way, from the time I walked into the store, I told the guy who was helping me that I was not going to take a replacement that has a lot number less than 1602. He brought out a new box with the lot number date of 1604.

About the new device - I've just set up the device with basically no software, but with my account and all the Microsoft updates. I have repeated the steps that reliably crashed my old device in a long sleep. But this thing isn't crashing. I'm going to install all the software that I had in my old device and see if it goes bad. I'll post my results later. If the new device continues to work, there is something to the theory that there was some sort of a hardware change on the SP4 and that's responsible for the difference in behavior.

• Peter

Hi I'm sorry I didn't get back to you with that.  Been busy with other things.  I ran cpuz on my replacement and the results were identical to your flawed machine.  So I'm still inclined towards my original theory that the fault lies with the display manufacturers and possibly faulty power regulation in the devices.

Since getting my replacement a couple of weeks ago, lot 1602, I still have had no sleep crashes yet.  There is also no flicker at low brightness either.  I can only continue to stress to the forum that the differences between the machine I have now and had are in the hardware.  This machine performs flawlessly and is what I expected in the first place.

Really glad to see that some of you are going to the store to exchange.  Theres no reason for anyone to put up with this, and at this point its safe to say, that if your device still crashes after the latest updates, no magic firmware is coming to save the day.