Surface Pro 4 - Screen won't wake from sleep

Today marks the one week anniversary for my lot 1613 SP4. So far it is nearly flawless. Not one crash, not one fail to wake. The only issue I have is that occasionally the mouse cursor will freeze for a few seconds. A couple of weeks like this and I'll revise my reviews I've left in numerous places.

Here's background for new readers who don't want to wade through thousands of posts: My first SP4 purchased in November was horribly flawed and returned. My second SP4 purchased in late November was flawed, but most issues were fixed with the December update, with the notable exception that it would very often fail to wake from sleep. The forced restart would often corrupt numerous system files. None of the updates helped even a little bit. On May 20, I exchanged for what I believe was a refurb at the downtown Portland MS store. The tech insisted it was brand new, but it came in a plain cardboard box. This exchange unit was even worse than the unit I exchanged. The next day, May 21, after considerable discussion and purchasing an extended warranty, I exchanged the refurb for a brand new lot 1613 SP4. Night and day difference from the first three. Not only has it not crashed any programs--I was beginning to believe that crashing programs was a feature of windows 10--it has reliably recovered from sleep without fail. As a side bonus my battery life is considerably better--up to seven hours runtime watching video as opposed to four on the first three-- and performance is very noticeably better. I have no doubt that the hardware on the first three SP4s was flawed.

OK, technically with modern hardware, it's never a pure hardware or software problem. I work at a system company where I design the ASIC that supplies to a big system composed of other off-the-shelf ICs and software. Most of the problems can be solved by a combination of software and hardware. Often, it is too expensive to modify/replace the hardware and software workarounds are developed, so many of the hardware shortcomings can be overcome with pure software, with or without some sacrifice to functionality or performance. There are situations where there is absolutely no solution with software workaround - the only solution is to revise the hardware.

My suspicion is that Microsoft and the hardware supplier has figured out a key issue and addressed it between lot 15xx and lot 1604 in hardware - at least dropped the probability of occurrence to a very low level, and would very much like to address the older hardware issue with software patches instead of replacing them. The big question is whether there exists a software patchable solution or the solution is very difficult that Microsoft will not be able to figure out before the next version of SP comes out and the attention shifts away.

Speaking as an engineer, with modern systems it's a bit tough to call things "software issue" or "hardware issue" - the line is very blurry.

• Peter

Honestly and truthfully there is code in this week's firmware.  Will it fix 100% of the issues? Prob not.  But to now at this point in time to say that this issue is 100% due to hardware, I would beg to disagree.

100 hardware%? Probably not. 99 hardware%? This is my guess right now. Certainly there are still software problems. But logic dictates that hardware is the biggest issue. How else to explain 3 SP4s running absolutely miserable, and one new one running great? And two of those failed while loaded with identical software and updates to the newest one which is running just fine. Plus, the newest one has significant performance advantages as I detailed in earlier posts. Those first three definitely were either defective or MS has fixed something in the latest builds. I don't pretend to know which is correct. I'm going to guess that either QC or design has improved. Or, I just got lucky.

That is not possible in Canada for example.  You describe advanced exchange and, at least in my country, they have 'for business reasons' discontinued advanced exchange and only allow standard exchange.  I've checked twice.  That means not having a working unit for as much as two or more weeks.  If they allowed advanced exchange I would have done it by now.