Surface Book 2 Task View Lag (and other high-resolution laptops included)

I have the exact same issues with my Surface Book 2. Upgrading to 1803, 1809 and now 1903 have not solved any of them.

Task View is extremely laggy. Excel is extremely laggy. I am so sick and tired of this, it cost me so much money to buy this Surface Book 2 and I had wrongly assumed that since Microsoft built both the hardware and software that there'd be no issues.

How can Microsoft not even acknowledge this issue? Literally everyone with a Surface Book or other Surface product has this issue. Absolutely unacceptable and looks like sheer incompetence.

Huge heads up!

I've got the laggy UI (Surface Book 2, I7, GTX 1050) like everyone else but always wonder even I add a high resolution external display the lag disappears completely.

And it appears I've found the culprit, but you can check for youself.

It's all about UI scaling.

Trying adjusting UI scaling from whatever it is now (200% on Surface Book 2) to 100% and boom = Fluent UI even in taskview! - Now try to go back, major difference right?..

Turning off the transparency effect def helps a lot. I got a ThinkPad so I have the option to switch to dGPU only. Still, it would be nice if MS can downscale the animation resolution. Apple does well on this matter cuz it uses Iris Pro for the majority of its laptop lineups. Sadly that's not the case for Windows laptops. UHD 620 is just too weak to handle 4k.

I had a problem similar to this for a long time. I had these really weird Intel GPU processor spikes like every minute or so even when the Surface Book 2 wasn't doing anything. If it happened in the middle of a video or typing code in Visual Studio, there would be a second or two of lag before everything "caught up." Then it would work just fine for another minute or so, then I'd get a lag spike again. It was the Intel GPU that would spike, the discrete Nvidia GPU would just sit there idle. Anyway, I've updated drivers, reinstalled Windows, etc. After I reinstalled Windows, the problem seemed to go away for a few days but then came back. I couldn't think of what was happening every minute when I wasn't doing anything. Task View and Start Menu would take several seconds to pop-up, and then they'd be snappy for a bit. But then a minute or so later, they would take several seconds to pop-up again.

As I was staring at my 4k external screen and the beautiful 4k nebula desktop background, the background changed to another 4k space picture and I saw the GPU spike in task manager. I had an aha moment. I had set up the desktop background to be "slide show" and pointed it at a bunch of cool 4k space images. It was configured to change.....every one minute.

Not only that, but my "Colors" in Personalization was set to "Automatically pick an accent color from my background." So now every minute, not only does the GPU have to load up a 4k image, it also has to change the entire Windows color scheme (including all open windows, Start menu, Task View, etc).

I set the background to "Black" and i've had no stutters or spikes sense. I remember resetting the desktop background to slideshow after my reinstall, which is what caused the problem to "come back" after the reinstall, but I didn't connect the two at the time.

Long story short:

1. Right click on desktop, go to Personalize.
2. If background is slide show, set it to a solid color instead.
3. See if your stuttering and lag issues go away.

After doing this I haven't had any lag all day and I didn't even reboot after changing the background from slide show.

This might not be the answer for everybody but hopefully it will help somebody else!

Same problem here.  So annoying. Task View lag and freeze.

Fix it or I will return this laptop and recommandto  everoyne to not purchase MS products.