Surface Pro 4 - Screen won't wake from sleep

I've never changed the resolution on my SP4, and I've had plenty of wake problems.  Almost all of my wake issues are when undocked.

That said, I went for my round of Monday morning meetings today, and it actually woke up properly every time(!!!), although it took long enough at least once that I'm thinking it came back from hibernate instead.  (I'm running default power settings, with the exception of "never sleep when plugged in".)

The weirdest thing is that absolutely NOTHING has changed - last update was a Win10 update on 3/22, and I've (unusually) added or removed NO software in the last week.   Again, it was a delight this morning - I just wish I could count on this working reliably all the time.

I'm ready to tear my hair out with frustration over this, but I suppose working for no reason is better than not working for no reason.  But boy, am I ever gun-shy about pressing the power button or opening the Type Cover now!

(Ahhh - maybe that has something to do with it.  I undocked it (I *think* before pressing the power button to put it to sleep, but I'm not positive), then put it in the sleeve *without* the Type Cover connected.  An hour or so later (so it might have hibernated on its own?), I woke it with the power button, used it for a while, then attached the Type Cover and used it that way for a while longer.  After attaching the Type Cover, I was (I thought) putting it to sleep when I closed the Type Cover, but given the very rapid rate that the battery was discharging at (down to under 60% in just over an hour, with a projected life of about 2:45 left), I wonder.  Didn't notice heating, but it was in the open on a table and I wasn't holding it.  Opening the Type Cover did not wake it, but pressing the power button did.  I've *never* had it wake more than once or twice before with the Type Cover attached - maybe attaching it just before the first wake attempt has something to do with this - this still looks like a race condition and/or weird state machine interactions to me...  These details probably only mean anything the people we hope and pray are trying to fix this thing.

It even woke up properly in the dock when I got back - I've been through several sleep/wake cycles today, but without a single forced reboot, which has never happened before.  Maybe it's just my lucky day, since there's no apparent reason for it to work all of a sudden - we'll see, I guess...

I have 14 Surface Pro 4's here, they are all suffer intermittently from the black screen on system resume problem.

(note some of our apps aren't able to handle text scaling hence the different resolutions)

On average 50% of system resumes are just blank screens.  100% of these are recovered by pressing and holding the following keys in order:

Control

Windows Key

Shift Key

B

There are a few things I have noticed:

Surface only Resolution set to 1440 x 900                   Device suffers from intermittent blank screen on system resume

Monitor only Resolution set to 1920x 1080                 Device suffers from intermittent blank screen on system resume

Surface and monitor both connected as above          Device suffers from intermittent blank screen on system resume        

Surface only and set to 2736x1824 (recommended)   Device is fine and resumes every time!

I have tried several different resolutions, single monitors, dual monitors (Unfortunately we have no monitors with a high enough resolution to set the same as surface's native resolution and test though)

Everything has the intermittent blank screen problem apart from when set to Surface only and 2736x1824

(all devices 100% up to date with firmware and windows updates)

Anyone found similar?

Thanks for the heads up :-)

I'll only be trying it on my test devices so not too worried if there are side effects (but hopefully there wont be!)

Is anyone running in a resolution different to standard (2736 x 1824)

I only seem to suffer from the problem when running at a different resolution than the above.

I get it frequently if i run a single monitor only at 1080x1920

                                            Suface only at any other resolution than 2376x1824

If i run the surface at 2736x1824 without any monitors connected the Surface comes out of sleep every time

Anyone else able to check / reply?

I have exactly the same problem with 14 Surface Pro 4's.  Tilting the screen between landscape and portrait using the auto rotate feature /Gyro  consistently brings them all back to life.  Incidentally I also have the same problem with Dell XPS13's but no tilt feature in these, then Windows key and P  4 times then leave for 15 seconds seems to force the display bus to rescan and the screens come to life.

I think it is an Intel Display Driver issue as both the sp4 and xps13 use the same driver.  I am going to try loading on the Iris 540 beta drivers from the Intel site to see if these fix the problem (version ending 4404)

Glenn

Hi Glenn,

I would urge caution on this. I've been able to use Intel Drivers on older Surface models without problem but this one specifically blocks it unless you do it manually via the inf file via device manager to force it. I've known of a few instances where forcing this driver causes erroneous behavior with the touch input and causing phantom touches .... just a friendly heads up.