Surface Pro 4 - Screen won't wake from sleep

I'm an end user, just like you. MVP's and Community Moderators are unpaid volunteers. I understand your pain and I also see the lack of knowledge inside various support organizations (although some of the stores have really sharp tech people).

Clearly the screen won't wake issue is a big one. And there are enough posts here showing the pain customers are feeling. Some people HAVE had success exchanging their Surface tablets, others have not. Microsoft must feel this is a software issue. The fixes are not coming fast enough. The have not committed to a timeline to fully fix this.

I don't have any answer for you. If it were me, I'd try to return the tablet.

Hi again Lord Zemus and others:

Sunday morning report is there has still been no blank screen on wake.  Defective early batch seems more and more likely to be the culprit.  Tested with all the bells 'n' whistles, including Hello facial recognition, second user also with Hello, lots of applications installed and running concurrently - no problem waking from sleep.  Battery drain is with barely a few low-key things running, such as Mail, Edge (which I gather is at the heart of many a problem) and perhaps File Explorer.

BUT after putting build 14316 back last night, some of the original problems do seem to return.  I think it's Hello in particular that trips up the waking from sleep: I see the infrared light on, but screen blank, and that's it.  Had to hard reboot a couple of times.

So as seems to be the larger diagnosis, it's the OS itself that is botched - they need to fix this problem permanently (one that, for some miraculous reason, no other tablet maker on the planet seems to be plagued by...).

Hi, I'm glad you've finally got a working unit.  Regarding the display, I work with digital photography and so I'm a little sensitive to the whites and resulting color accuracy of displays.  For my replacement the screen was definitely of a different order than the last. 

Regarding your battery life, what kinds of programs to you tend to run daily?  When I received my replacement the battery was drained completely, however it seems fine now.  As an example, I use firefox (because I like to browse use the page navigator bar as opposed to drawing pictures with my finger),  and it reports 12-13 hours remaining at 94% battery.  Now I'm assuming that in reality this is a little overblown, but still thats pretty good.  If I use edge as a browser, I get less.  Other more intensive programs can drain the device much faster, but I'm satisfied with that.

I'd like to report to everyone on this forum, that I've still had no sleep crashes with my device since receiving the replacement.  I also tried replacing the drivers manually on my last device as suggested here and it certainly didn't work.  As far as I'm concerned the fact that Microsoft is now delivering high quality units which are clearly much more reliable than the old batch is good evidence of a hardware defect.  It is completely wrong of them to hide this information from the consumers and try to coerce people into being satisfied with defective units by promising arcane, future updates and procedures that are always 'about to be released'.  The original devices didn't work that well to begin with, and the Feb 17 update most certainly broke them. 

Every single one of those defective units needs to go back to microsoft.  I think this thread should become a center of information about this problem.  If you have a device that won't wake up from sleep after the feb. 17 update, do whatever you can to return it.  If you're thinking of placing a bulk order for your company, verify that every unit you receive does not exhibit black screen sleep with all current updates applied.  Send everything back that exhibits this defect.  Don't waste your time looking for a fix because there clearly is none.   If Microsoft gets a reaction like this they will certainly think twice about this behavior in the future.

Well the original moderator of this forum, Josh, seems unable or unwilling to reply.  Would anyone else from Microsoft care to respond to anything I've said here? 

Barbara,

I understand there isn't much you can do, I was just saying whether it's special or not is irrelevant. Then I wanted to explain the issue in detail for what everyone on this forum is going through. And Josh F is a Microsoft employee on the answers forum, he SHOULD be a voice for us inside Microsoft! As are all the other support staff customers on this thread are going to and getting poor answers and failed workarounds.

Again TIME is MONEY!

You hit the nail on the head below. My 4 year old, cheapo HP Laptop doesn't have any issues with sleep, or anything else for that matter.

(one that, for some miraculous reason, no other tablet maker on the planet seems to be plagued by...).