Surface Laptop 3 - Event 4101 "Display driver igfxn stopped responding and has successfully recovered."

Hi Janette,

I have an update with this issue. First of all, my company has now noticed the same issue on all 4 of surface products: 1 Surface Pro 7 (i7 intel) and 3 x surface i5 intel models. Exact same symptoms:

1. Screen very briefly blanks out for about 1 sec
2. Event log shows the same error Event 4101: "Display driver igfxn stopped responding and has successfully recovered."

Each one of these surface products were purchased from different suppliers at different time. The only commonality between all of these products are they are Intel versions of the the surface lineup. We also have an AMD surface laptop 3 that does not exhibit the issue. 

I suspect this issue is more widely experienced by other surface users but because its quite infrequent and short lived its not being reported widely. I think Microsoft need to investigate this issue urgently and issue a fix.

Can you suggest where we go from here?

I'm just jumping into this thread aswell - I've noticed the same issue on my Surface Laptop 3 (i7, 16Gb).

I'm running the Windows Insider (slow ring) on mine though, but am using the latest drivers & firmware for the device.   

I suspect it's a driver issue as like Carlo_GLA mentioned, it's very random.  Sometimes it will happen several times in a row, sometimes I only notice it happening once that day.

I also have the same alert in the System Event Log.  "Display driver igfxn stopped responding and has successfully recovered" Event ID 4101

I have the same issue with my Dell 5320 (11th gen Intel i5, Iris Xe, 16GB RAM). I only use the laptop for work where on Teams/Zoom etc it is all OK, even in video meetings.

Where the machine consistently crashes is when it is under significant load by Zwift (a cycling app). It may happen 5 mins in to a ride, or it may be 45 mins / 1hr, but it will crash with the same message in event viewer as others have stated.

I haven't done too much yet in terms of trying to resolve it, but my steps so far:

• I updated all OEM offers drivers and UEFI BIOS.No change, still crashes.
• Removed all display drivers using DDU (display driver uninstaller) and installed the drivers via Intel's updater. No change, still crashes.

- Removed any Intel 'game' specific settings, optimisation it claims to do. Still crashes.

- Tested on/off mains power. Still crashes.

- Tested with external display (1080p/60). Still crashes.

- Removed and reinstalled Zwift. Still crashes.

On the other hand, my old Surface Pro 6 (i5, Intel 620, 8GB) runs it just fine with no stability issues.

I want to let you know that I had been talking with Intel Customer Support and apparently they are working on a fix for this problem for the Xe generation.

I've found a way where I can more or less constantly reproduce the issue now.

If I'm in another app for several minutes, and say I have Outlook open but it is behind the app I'm currently in, if I move my mouse down to the task bar and hover over the Outlook icon so I get the thumbnail preview, then click on the preview itself like I want to go to that app - that's when it happens.

All video will pause for a second or two, the screen will go black, then everything will come back and Outlook will be maximized full screen.   

It's definitely something to do with the graphics driver.

Hi, CarloScattini!

Thanks for reaching out to Microsoft Community and posting your concern. We are sorry to learn you have issues with your Surface Laptop 3's display. Thanks for taking the time to let us know about this and allowing us to help you out. We need to ask questions for us to understand the situation:

• Can you take a video to show what happens and upload it?
• When you said you reinstalled device, is it the driver?
• Can you open the Device Manager and make it show on your screen so you can observe your device? If ever the display blanking happens, do you see a yellow bang on the driver before it shuts off?
• The error you mentioned has something to do with the graphics system. Does it happen on any activity with your device?

 For the meantime, please do the following steps to troubleshoot the issue. 

• Force shutdown the device and restart.

1. Press and hold the power button until the screen turns off (about 10 seconds), then release the power button.
2. Press and release the power button to turn your Surface back on. You should see the Microsoft logo.

If that doesn't work, here's how to make sure your Surface turns off completely:

Press and hold down the power button until your Surface restarts and you see the Windows logo screen (this about 20 seconds), then release the power button.

• Update the display driver or rollback the driver from Device Manager.
• If you recently installed Windows Update, please try to do a system restore by going to Settings> Update & Security> Recovery> click on GET STARTEDunder Go back to the previous version of Windows 10.

Let me know how it goes and we hope this helps! Otherwise, don't hesitate to respond to this thread if there’s anything else that needs to be addressed.  

Kind regards, 

Janette_Z