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

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

Hi Janette,

Thanks for reaching out. In answer to your questions:

• Can you take a video to show what happens and upload it? - The issue is too infrequent or short to take a video. Essentially when it does happen the screen blanks for 1 sec and then returns back to normal. It could be days before the next time it happens. The error 4101 is always present when this happens.
• When you said you reinstalled device, is it the driver? - From device manager I have uninstalled device/reinstall(update) like this:

• 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? - As discussed, the issue is too infrequent for me to practically do that.
• The error you mentioned has something to do with the graphics system. Does it happen on any activity with your device? - Im assuming that its a graphic issue due to the event log error. Nothing unusual when it happens - no gaming, application stress - just basic work i.e. outlook, word .

**Regarding your "**steps to troubleshoot the issue." - I will take a look at these and post back my results

Thanks

Thanks for the detailed responses and answering my questions, Carlo_GLA.

We await for the outcome of the steps that you will take and do observe the device. 

Regards,

Janette_Z

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?