Surface Book 2 screen flicker issue

Anonymous

Hi,

I have the 15" SB2 and am experiencing a screen flicker issue. Here are the details:

You have to be using battery only, will not happen when charging SB2
You have to have brightness below say 35 or 40% - harder to see when brighter though still seems to me to be there
They way to reproduce this is as follows:

a. Choose a solid background - I used the "Cool Blue" solid color.

b. Have a window with a lot of WHITE background available

c. With nothing open, just desktop background with solid color, open window with a lot of WHITE background

d. Look at the white area and do you see flickering?

e. Looking closely at this, if you see it, you can see there is a stepping function of some sort that goes about 10 times getting slightly brighter each time/flicker. After the 10th or so time, it stabilizes and stops.

f. Next, if you close the window and go back to just the solid background, you see it do a similar flicker and you can see it step back down in brightness about 10 times and again stabilizes/stops.

I did call Microsoft yesterday about this and they had two 15" models and saw this on both and said it shouldn't do this and there would be a fix for this coming.

My reason for posting this is I have two questions:

Microsoft, can you tell me when this will be fixed and how I can find out about the fix? I am assuming it will be a software fix? I forgot to ask this...
Is everyone seeing this or just a good number of SB2's?

Obviously, I just got this SB2 and if everyone is seeing it, I am less concerned as I expect a fix will be coming. However, if there are only a few SB2's seeing this, I am wondering if I should return it and get a new one as perhaps it might be just a couple SB2's.

Thanks!

-DM

-Dave

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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Anonymous

Hi,

I have a significant update:

Over the past couple of weeks I have been working with Microsoft Tech Support (who was interfacing with MS Engineering). Today, I spent some time with tech support testing out a possible fix for this issue. I am VERY PLEASED to report, it appears they have given me a fix that WORKS!!!!!

The fix is a very simple registry setting. I have been playing with things since making the change and have not seen the issue anymore...

This clearly works with Surface Book 2. I don't know if it will work for other surface devices but if you have this registry entry, you can try making the change. The step to fix is as follows:

Open up Regedit (to edit registry)
Backup your registry before making the change - Once in Regedit, Right-Click on Computer, then Export to backup file, can put on desktop...
In the image below, it shows you where the registry entry is. You need to find this, locate the "FeatureTestControl" entry where the image shows you to find it. The value for FeatureTestControl should show: 0x00009240. Right-Click on this entry and modify binary, change the 40 to 50. Then exit registry.

Note, as indicated on left side, I had to select 0001. If for some reason you don't see FeatureTraceControl there, you could check 0000 just above 0001. Again, I saw it at entry 0000.

Once you have exited registry, Reboot system

Again, this worked for me and hopefully for you.

Let me know if this works for you.

Thanks,

DM51

P.S. Great work by Microsoft getting this resolved!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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116 additional answers

Anonymous

2017-12-21T07:35:40+00:00

Just confirming that this regedit fix worked for me too. Also, looking through the steps, this is almost the exact same as a registry fix I found in a forum post from a couple of years ago to fix this on the SP4, except it was looking for the "0000" subfolder instead of "0001", which is why I couldn't get it to work. Glad that now I can see what the problem was :)

I've also put this it into a little script people can use to automatically make the registry key change (again though, you will need a restart, and it's recommended to backup your registry before hand, since it still is changing the registry). This should make it easier to reapply if there are any firmware updates that reset it, and i've also made a version that will let you re-enable it if you for some reason you needed to.

What you want to do is copy the few lines of code I'll give below into a notepad file, and save the file with the extension ".reg". So I have two scripts;

adaptiveContrast_disable.reg

adaptiveContrast_enable.reg

With the ".reg" extension, the icon should change to the little cube breaking apart. You can then double click it to execute it and make the change.

I've formatted the parts of the script that you want to copy to notepad in the "Code Block" format so that it is clear which part is needed for the script. Ignore the blank lines above and below.

Disable Adaptive Contrast:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Class{4d36e968-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}\0001]

; Disable Intel Adaptive Contrast for SB2

"FeatureTestControl"=dword:00009250

Enable Adaptive Contrast:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Class{4d36e968-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}\0001]

; Enable Intel Adaptive Contrast for SB2

"FeatureTestControl"=dword:00009240

If you want more information on how a registry script works, here's a page explaining it, but google will show you much more information too:

https://www.askvg.com/guide-how-to-create-registry-script-reg-files-in-windows/

And the page where I found the original script to fix this issue on the SP4 (with some nice explanations for what it's doing on there):

https://mikebattistablog.wordpress.com/2016/05/27/disable-intel-dpst-on-sp4/
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Anonymous

2017-12-22T00:54:06+00:00

Hi Mark,

Excellent, glad to hear this worked for you as well.

Thanks very much for the scripts and additional information, very useful.

Hopefully i can get a permanent fix and we can forget about all of this. I am working on this with support. I will keep this thread posted if I get any additional information.

Thanks,

-DM51
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Anonymous

2017-12-28T04:12:15+00:00

Hi,

Just wanted to send a final note on this thread:

I was told by Microsoft that due to the widespread nature of this issue, there will be a permanent fix implemented.

They couldn't commit to when but some future update will have the fix so that we don't have to periodically update the registry as reported.

The fix will be in the form of a .dll update which will be automatically implemented when doing the update that contains the fix.

Hopefully soon but again, I couldn't get a date when.

Thanks,

-DM51
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Anonymous

2018-01-01T20:47:36+00:00

Dear Dave,

I have SB2 with 1060 gtx.

I am facing exactly the same issue and also while watching movies with low brightness scenes Brigjtness is flickering in very annoying way. To simulate

Please everyone watch first episode of mindhunter on netflix on 75 percent brightness. This flickering gets clearly visible. In perticular it is happening with every netflix movie nd series.

Are you getting same problem can you please check this. And also contact with microsoft for the same. As I tried but all they suggest is change my SB. And I really feel as CS student that your presented solution is the optimal one. Can you please help me with the same. And does this improvement patch mentioned will help me?
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