Surface Pro 4 - Screen won't wake from sleep

Anonymous
2015-10-27T05:32:42+00:00

I received my Surface Pro 4 today and it worked fine. I put it on "sleep" for awhile, came back and turned it on. Once again it worked fine. I made an error and instead of putting it on "sleep" I  hit the power button to turn it off when I finished. Now it won't come on at all. The screen stays dark. If I push the power button I can see lights under the keyboard keys, then if I hit the power switch again they go off. But nothing happens to the screen no matter what I do. Has anyone else suffered from this?

Surface | Surface Pro | Display and screen

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Anonymous
2016-08-19T19:27:34+00:00

It works fine for me after the Anniversary Update to Windows 10 Pro (Version 1607). It no longer goes into a coma.

I just traveled all week. Put my Surface Pro 4 (SP4) to sleep 10 to 20 times each day, and currently my task manager shows the up time to be 7:21:35:21 - 7 days! It is actually working the way I expected it to when I bought it!

It was such a relief to not be scared to put it to sleep during meeting breaks to save battery when working with my Pen and OneNote. For the past 7 months I've had to have it on power when in meetings so that it wouldn't go into a coma. That was always so embarrassing.

You can update to the latest version of Windows 10 by opening Settings > Update & security > Windows Update, and selecting Check for updates.

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  1. Anonymous
    2016-03-19T01:19:06+00:00

    One more observation - I said that I didn't know whether the computer had crashed during sleep some time or the computer is actually fine, but could not turn the display on. I have an interesting observation.

    I have the pen eraser button mapped to open Notes when I press it. So when the computer has the black screen after a long sleep, when I press the button, the keyboard light turns on. This indicates to me that the computer is alive and thinking, but is not able to put on the display - much like a catatonic patient.

    So it's probably not a computer crash, it's probably display hardware/driver crash. It seems ctl-shift-win-B should bring it back, but it does not.

    Which got me thinking - if the computer is actually responding to the pen eraser click - maybe I can map this to something more extensive - like resetting the display driver or other things - dump the state of the display driver, etc. That could lead to what it is that is crashed.. I'm not much of a Windows programmer (much more adept at Linux stuff), so I'll need to see if there is anything out there that someone else has already written.

    • Peter

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-03-19T01:46:17+00:00

    You may be able to create a dos bat or cmd file to do what you want using the devcon.exe(Device Console) utility.

    See THIS.

    Devcon is part of the WDK, Windows Driver Kit, and should be downloadable from Microsoft.

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-03-19T02:42:11+00:00

    The screen is black on wake, but I can call up OneNote with pen erase button. However, there is no window widget of this OneNote, and there is no <- icon for me change page either. It seems that the machine wakes up, but Windows 10 desktop manager (if it is similar to POSIX workstation) does not.

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  4. Anonymous
    2016-03-19T08:31:47+00:00

    So I tried to set my computer back to allowing sleeping - and it was really hard to get it to crash the display - I had to wait 30 minutes after sleeping to make it happen. (20 minutes didn't do it).

    So after finally getting it to crash, now I noticed that the keyboard doesn't light up when I click on the pen eraser. When I press the keyboard, it still lights up. So now I'm confused, it looks as if it had crashed during sleep - not some sort of a display crash.

    Has anybody else tried the pen erase button to see if the keyboard lights up while you get the black display?

    I also tried plugging in a wireless mouse. I have a version of the dongle that lights up green when the computer connects to it and it is active - I noticed that it was non-responsive on my SP4.

    It does look like it's a computer crash, not a display crash for this particular session.

    Incidentally, when I set up sleep after 1 minute and hibernation after 10 minutes, the SP4 successfully enters hibernation.

    • Peter

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