Today I swapped my old Lot 1601 SP4 (i5/8/256) out for a newer "identical" one from Lot 1618.
Too soon to tell much, except that I started it up and ran the updates while at the MS store while I was waiting for the Reset/erase to complete on my old one, and it woke when I got it back to my home office. (So that's 100% success with a staggering scientific
sample of one, but see notes on slight weirdness to this below...)
BTW, the Microsoft Stores are well aware of this problem on both the SP4 and the SB and call it "Dark Wake" rather than our somewhat more colorful "Sleep of Death". They are as frustrated as we are that this hasn't yet been fixed.
General observations so far - a few of them interesting and a bit surprising:
- Although the difference is very subtle - I *think* the LED backlight is a bit more even, and blacks may be *slightly* blacker, but if there's a difference, it's not terribly noticeable in daylight.
- If anything, the "Intel Droppings" problem is worse - the example below is a screenshot of the post above, as it shows on my screen while I write this. Not (probably) related to the wake problem, but clearly an Intel display bug...
!\[\](http://fud.community.services.support.microsoft.com/Fud/FileDownloadHandler.ashx?fid=fc1217ea-0c08-4882-8f81-4bca284ef3a0)
- This one is as quiet as my second SP4, which is to say, much quieter than the first one, and just fine.
- Again, time will tell, but this one seems to make a slightly more reliable connection to the SP3 dock. I've actually touched the screen several times today (happens all the time when you're otherwise trained to be able to do that when it's not docked...)
WITHOUT inadvertently causing an undock - which was a big relief, since I spent most of the afternoon restoring the backup of the old one, and the backup drive is connected to a USB3 port on the dock, so there's no telling how ugly a disconnect might have
been there. We'll see if this continues to be better, I sure hope so.
- Updates aren't exactly what I expected. The new machine seems to have had all firmware updates already applied right out of the box. It did update, but only the few things listed below, and all seem to be Windows proper, not hardware/driver updates,
except for a WD "SES Device" update I hadn't seen before. A quick web search shows SES is "SCSI Enclosure Services", and according to my quick scan of the docs, it doesn't seem to be anything that would even be required except for some external WD drives:
"Western Digital My Passport/My Book hard drives require a special communications channel (SCSI) between the PC and the hard drive to enable certain features such as password protection, LED control, and access to the drives label
if applicable."
(No external drives or other hardware were connected when I did the first update in the MS Store. Go Figure...)
!\[\](http://fud.community.services.support.microsoft.com/Fud/FileDownloadHandler.ashx?fid=14a631e5-6784-4c49-a9fe-d660e8bd2bd1)
6) Windows Hello seems to be slightly flakier I didn't turn it on - It did that on its own once I connected the local account to a Microsoft account. (I create the local account first so that my home directory is \Users\Dub, which makes life easier for
me.) I have some suspicion that the recognition DB for Hello is stored in the cloud and gets re-loaded when you reconnect - I only trained this one with one image, but it seems to recognize me in ways that indicate it knows something of my previous training
for it. (It recognizes me at the top of the screen, when I stand up at my desk, and it recognizes me without my glasses - both of which took additional training earlier...)
- At the moment, ALL power management settings are still set at default. (I'm going to leave them that way unless I'm forced to change them to make the system usable.) Even though it's set to sleep after 10 minutes when plugged in, this
one seems to either not really do that, or it's waking quickly and correctly. It's only slept once on power that I'm sure of, but it woke successfully from that. (It's relatively easy for me to detect sleep when docked, since the LEDs on my Wacom tablet
turn off when the Surface is sleeping (at least deeply enough to turn off USB...)
- Lastly, the behavior on the first and only real wake attempt so far was slightly odd: The SP4 was asleep in the bag while I had lunch with my wife (there's a CPK next to the Austin MS Store, yum). (I didn't pay attention, but I think I just closed it
to put it to sleep.) When I got back home, I first tried to wake it by just opening the Type Cover, and was rewarded by the keyboard lighting up for just a few seconds, but a black screen, leading me to think it was SoD again. I then pressed the power button
and it proceeded to wake up just fine. Weird, and just close enough to the SoD problem to make me nervous. I've never been able to prod a successful wake after a "failed" one (or what looked like one) before, though. This seems to indicate that wake may
still not be 100% dialled in yet (it should wake on opening the Type Cover, right?), but I can live with this behavior.
That's all for now, folks, I'll keep you posted on how things go from here. I'm crossing my fingers that maybe this will *finally* be the way to get an SP4 that does work correctly. Thoughts, prayers, and hearty good wishes all appreciated...
![](data:image/svg+xml, %3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' height='64' class='font-weight-bold' style='font: 600 30.11764705882353px "SegoeUI", Arial' width='64'%3E%3Ccircle fill='hsl(128, 8%, 22%)' cx='32' cy='32' r='32' /%3E%3Ctext x='50%25' y='55%25' dominant-baseline='middle' text-anchor='middle' fill='%23FFF' %3EA%3C/text%3E%3C/svg%3E)
