Surface Pro 4 - Screen won't wake from sleep

Coming up on 48 hours of flawless operation with the new--lot 1613--SP4. Not only is it waking from sleep, but it is clearly faster and has better battery life. On my original, I got about 4 hours run time playing video at 50% screen brightness. This one gets 6 hours. That's a 50% improvement. Sleep battery usage sees a similar improvement at about 1/2 percent per hour as opposed to 1% per hour. (Both with connected sleep disabled.) I have no doubt that something in the hardware is better/fixed. Perhaps my first three SP4's were defective and this one is not--I hope. Or, perhaps MS or Intel fixed a production problem. I have no idea, but this new SP4 is much better. ****, Chrome hasn't even crashed yet.

Thank u Mike!

Hi,

This is interesting. I have an SP3 which at start-up hangs at the Surface logo, i.e. Windows won't start. I have been looking into this since the beginning of March 2016. Sure, the 2-button restart works. I have really mastered the technique now and can do it in less than 5 minutes :-) The latest suggestion from the very helpful Barb Bowman is to re-image. That's a lot of work for me and, in my humble opinion, does not have a high probability of success.

The connection between this thread and my SP3 hanging is that I stumbled across "Intermittent problems occur while peripherals are attached to a Surface Pro 3 device". Pursuing this leads to a hotfix dated August 2015. As of May 2016 this hotfix remains untested and there are plenty of warnings that I'll be on my own if I apply it and there's no cure or worse.

Now, here's the rub. The hotfix asks me to check in Device Manager / Surface Pro System Aggregator Firmwarethat the version after installation is 3.9.450.0 [dated 29 July 2015]. When I checked that a few days ago I found I'm on version 3.9.750.0 dated 28 September 2015. I conclude that it doesn't seem wise to apply this "fix"; for details see https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3087655

I guess the screen, as seen by an SP3 or SP4, is just another device which the Surface Pro System Aggregator Firmware sometimes fails to successfully enumerate.

What version of this firmware are you guys with SP4's on?

I'm now hoping that the next major release of Windows 10, "Redmond" slated for June / July, will address the problem but I don't think this type of problem is high on the list of Microsoft's priorities.

My SP3 is still under guarantee. It'll be a shame if I have to return it and try to get my money back on the basis that being able to use it as a laptop replacement is "not as described" and "not fit for purpose" (UK English legal jargon).

I'm still waiting to swap again - I've been through eight or nine SP3s/SP4s since January 2015, and have had to do restores and/or resets on most of those to satisfy Microsoft's pitiful efforts at support, so I really don't have much of an appetite for swapping out yet again unless I'm SURE it's going to actually going to make a difference.

So far, nothing ever has, and so far today Microsoft and Intel are 0 for 2 on wake attempts - both failures required hard poweroff and reboot, and the first one lost application data.  In the second failure, the machine had only been asleep (put to sleep via power button w/o keyboard attached) for about ten minutes.

Maybe there are *finally* SP4s being built with Intel parts that are not fatally flawed, but I really kind of doubt it - if that were the case, I think Microsoft would be crowing about it from the rooftops.  In any case, we DO NOT know how to distinguish an SP4/SB that may have a chance of working from another one that will likely fail.

(And keep in mind that one of the Techs at the Microsoft Store here in Austin said it's still a craps shoot and that there's no sure fix that they know of.)

I'd love to have a working SP4, but we've heard way too many reports (some by me) of "everything seems to be working now", only to find that wake failures reoccur within a short time, or after the next updates are pushed out.

I'm also convinced that Microsoft really doesn't even begin to have a handle on application compatibility in Win10 - among many other things they really don't understand about their own flagship software product.  I myself have anecdotal evidence that some *desktop* programs appear to work perfectly after installation, except that *Windows* corrupts itself after they are installed, refusing to allow some or all Win10 *apps* to run.  (This appears to be the cause of Win10's failure to run ANY Modern/UWA/UWP app, including the Start Menu and Activity Center - this most severe form of failure has bitten me twice, and a machine swap or a full OS Reset is the only way to fix it.  Microsoft's techs tried for 2 days to fix this before giving up and offering me my latest swap.)  Oddly, some portions (even all or most) of the Win10 system will work correctly after installation of these programs, but the problem will eventually affect more or even all Modern apps at some indeterminate time in the future when a forced poweroff/reboot cycle triggers some kind of fatal self-corruption.

This is just one more instance of the hideous Frankenstein-like seams that show where the "Modern" Win8/8.1/10 OS has been clumsily stitched, stapled, lashed, and taped onto the old "desktop" Win 7 OS. 

Since it now looks like we're stuck with non-functional PCs until the release of the "Redstone" or "Anniversary Update" indefinitely scheduled for "later this summer", we can only hope they finally get some of this insane brokenness fixed, and may finally come clean about swapping hardware when there really is an effective and reliable SP4/SB hardware available.  (It looks like Intel is abandoning Skylake as unfixable and pinning their hopes on the upcoming Kaby Lake, so we're all probably screwed, though.  This may be as good as the SP4/SB hardware gets.)

The Microsoft and Apple dinosaurs may rule the current Jurassic computer world now (and believe me, I'm a fan of real OSes), but they had better watch it - those scrappy little Chrome/Android mammals are eating their eggs.  Especially after my experiences of the last year and a half with machines that aren't usable and don't deliver what they promise, I'm ready go for a Chromebook just to get something that I can turn on.  Give me one with a good pen and I'm outta here...