Surface Pro 4, Screen Flickering, Shaking

My flickering mostly goes away for a week or two at a time if all I do is browse the web and light office apps.

However, if I play a game for more than 45 minutes or watch a movie for more than hour or two or perhaps just go to a web page that uses tons of flash while charging the battery for a sustained amount of time....flickering may happen..usually just a minimal amount, sometimes barely noticeable...but if it is a very hot day and the sp4 is being stressed it can get very bad such that I have to power down and let the unit cool.

Note that the system temperature itself isn't that bad...mine almost never goes above 54 degrees C even under stress...but I'm reading those temperatures only on a few places (cpu, mainboard)...and I suspect heat/temp is spiking at a certain point of the video controller or some other critical point that doesn't have a sensor.

As I've said before.  I think the flickering is heat related hardware damage that once begun inevitably results in an unusable display.....however, from what I've read and heard, the speed of deterioration is variable...  for some, 2 weeks..for others 6 months. 

I'll be surprised if any of the i5 or i7 sp4's last a full 3 years with any kind of real daily use.

As for Microsoft's attempt to fix the problem w/ software, I'm almost certain they're being vague because they know the software fix is only about preventing or limiting new damage.....e.g. if they find out that a certain behavior is causing the damage, the software may attempt to detect such behavior and slow down or cool the system via increasing fan speed or reducing power usage.   I'd be heavily surprised if the software fix actually makes an unusable SP4 tolerable again.

And, given how much Microsoft redesigned the SP 2017 to have much greater thermal tolerances....it's clear that they're basically acknowledging the issue...just in a way that minimizes liability on their behalf.   They don't want to send out replacement units to affected customers now because until they have a software fix, it will just result in the system dying again.  Yet, it's unclear how much they can do in software.....  it may be that the SP4 was just a flawed design and that the SP 2017 is the true fix.

Of course, as others have said, SP4's w/ i7/16GB/512GB SSD were not cheap products that can afford to be thrown away.  So far, Microsoft hasn't paid much of a price in public relations...but if the problem gets worse and more visible, the proper solution on their end would be to give a significant discount towards upgrade to the SP 2017.

Good question.

I pretty much use the SP4 in the same manner before and after my attempts to fix the flickering problem. Typically, I would have both Firefox and Edge running, each with about 10 or more tabs open with news, live stock quotes, emails, youtube, etc.. I also frequently run spreadsheets for updates. And I usually have my SP4 up and running during my waking hours.

Hope this helps.

Have you tried testing it by running heavy load program? If you only use for few hours and take a light task for sp4, then the problem might be still there. If not, this might be a solution. I don't really know how you did it but I do not install iCloud on my laptop. When I contacted Microsoft Support, they have numerously uninstalled and updated the display adapter software.

I have my SP4 screen flickering problem fixed recently and wanted to share my experience with you in the hope that what I did might somehow help you resolve yours.

I posted my problem on 7/17/2017, "MS Surface Pro 4 display flickering - when will it be resolved by MS?"  MS Support informed me to follow this link to troubleshoot, which I did. And I uninstalled iCloud for Windows and updated my display adapter software as a result. Although the actions I took did not work right away, I noticed that 2 days later, after a couple of reboot, my SP4 no longer flickers. And it has been working perfectly well since then (7/26). Best of luck to you all!