Surface Book Taskbar Previews close too quickly (when battery status updates)

Anonymous
2016-02-02T02:09:06+00:00

Sometimes when I hover over a Taskbar Preview of an open window, it stays visible until I click it or move the cursor somewhere else. Sometimes it just disappears almost instantly, while I'm still trying to see what it shows. I've discovered what triggers the sudden closing:

As you can see in one of the lower reports, my charger is active. But every few seconds, the top line changes to "Not charging", one of the batteries changes to "in use", and then the top line says "Calculating", and then finally they all agree both batteries are charging. Every cycle of this closes any open Taskbar Previews!

It happens most frequently when the batteries are almost fully charged. Sometimes, probably depending on the CPU load, it keeps happening for hours when the batteries should be fully charged. Unplug the charger and it never happens (that I've noticed).

There are several threads, going back to Win7, describing similar issues with power management and Taskbar Preview. Like:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows\_7-desktop/taskbar-thumbnail-preview-disappear-too-quickly-to/b0aeb6e1-ba60-4caa-a09a-19ce4d3b3dc8

But those are with third-party power managers for other brands of notebook, with control settings I don't have. I have Microsoft's own flagship Surface Book - how can it be that this relatively ancient problem plagues the interaction between Microsoft hardware and software?

Has anyone found a solution other than running on battery?

Surface | Surface Book | Power and battery

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  1. Anonymous
    2016-12-16T09:59:02+00:00

    Thank you Steve for your answer,

    I’ve contacted Microsoft Support and they don’t have records of this problem yet (I live in Spain). Anyway they’re replacing my power adaptor although I don’t know which model they’ll provide me with. They encouraged me to contact them again if the problem persists with the new adaptor indeed.

    Thank you as well for the link of the Word document (I tried to access it before posting yesterday, but the one in this thread didn’t work), I’m too busy but I’ll try to catch up with the official thread and the document since I’m concerned with the matter. I’ve invested a lot of money on this product and I’m afraid the replaced Surface could have been damaged during these two months as well (although I performed a full test with the Surface Diagnostic Toolkit and it seems everything’s fine by the moment. I’ll try to figure it out when I read all the info, if it happens again out of warranty and this was de cuase… that would be terrible).

    I’m an Insider, but since I use my Surface as a daily driver, I’m not sure to do it, I’ll think about it. CU will be released in March so if they don’t merge the update into the Current Branch, I’ll have to do it.

    Thanks again,

    I’m at your disposal.

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-12-16T10:17:19+00:00

    Hi Pepe,

    I really hope that they'll give you the 65 W power supply.

    Sorry, I just realized that I posted the wrong link to the Word document. Here's the correct one:

    https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1293973/Microsoft Surface BUG Report--Thumbnail Previews Disappear.docx

    To me, the 14986 build seems very stable. It feels like it's better than the current production release. Also, if you install it and encounter problems, you can always go back to the production build.

    I wouldn't worry about your Surface too much. I'm confident that Surface Support will do the right thing and make sure that you're a happy customer.

    Best Wishes,

    Steve

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