Surface Pro 4 - Screen won't wake from sleep

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

Let me add my voice to the 30+pages of people dealing with this issue.

I use mine in court and have had it fail to wake up just when the judge is calling our case for a hearing. That was not good. The same day It totally locked up, froze entirely, when playing an important video for a client using the installed Microsoft Windows Media Player. This occurred twice in a row during the meeting with the client. 

I previously was in contact with MS Support and they did not fix the wake up issues. Last week they wrote the email below:

**"**Hi Jon,

I hope that you are doing well today. This is to confirm if you're still experiencing the same issue with your device. I want to make sure that the issue is resolved prior to closing the case. Your satisfaction with us is very important to me. Please reply to this email so that you can keep me posted."

I replied describing the problems that still exist. It's been over a week and I haven't heard back from them. So I am making do with hibernate, (but be sure NOT to press the power button to turn it on when the keyboard is folded back), and I will try my luck with the VLC media player. This is my second SP4. I returned the first one due to the same glitchy performance.

Now I travel with my ancient Lenovo X201 tablet PC, running Windows 7, if I need to be sure that my technology will work. The X201 reliably does "instant on" and plays video using WMP with no issues.  

For me, the rollout of the Surface Pro 4 is a black eye for Microsoft. My guess is that they have determined that not a high enough number of SP4 computers are having this problem, so it's not a priority. Perhaps they don't want to publicly acknowledge the issues because it's the holiday season and they're pushing to sell as many as possible, intending to deal with the problems after the first of the year.

Whatever. All I know is that my SP4, I7 computer is not ready to do business.

I should have known. People did warn me to wait six months before buying the SP4 so that Microsoft could iron out the issues, but I refused to believe they would release a computer with huge issues and I could tolerate minor problems.

So, Microsoft, if you are listening, please fix these issues or at least let us know that you have a plan.