Fixes for my Surface Pro 4 bugs: power, fan, heat, display driver, sound, on screen keyboard?

[anon(8555314)]

My wife has an i5 128 SP4. It was running super hot all the time after 30 min of usage. We tried deleting all of the non-essential apps that she had--a lot of games, news, weather apps, travel apps. Rebooted and now the overheating problem appears to be gone.

 

[ttsoldier]

There are ad blockers for Edge already??

There is adfender.

Or you can use the hosts files.

 

[LimaEcho]

I have the i5 version as well and after I disabled Windows Hello and stopped using Edge, most of my problems with the fan, heat, and power disappeared. My device received the firmware push from Microsoft meant to correct these issues, but my display driver is still crashing. Firefox is now my primary browser. Microsoft should work to correct this issue quickly. It makes using the device a bit of a chore if you spend a lot of time in the browser.

 

[onysi]

There is adfender.

Or you can use the hosts files.

Thank You. the flickering stopped when I visit porn sites w/ edge. It basically made browsing stable for me.The only issue remaining is the Display DriverError. Which has always been a problem since SP3 with windows10

 

[ttsoldier]

Thank You. the flickering stopped when I visit porn sites w/ edge. It basically made browsing stable for me.The only issue remaining is the Display DriverError. Which has always been a problem since SP3 with windows10

Welcome

 

[sflxn]

I have "fixed" most of my heat and fan issues as well as battery use during live use by doing similar things as others. I turned off Hello Windows, switched from Edge, used ad blocker, block most background apps. It runs pretty much cool and quiet now. It sometimes heats up and spins the fan during charge, but it hasn't stayed hot or loud during the entire charge cycle in the last few days.

However, I've decided to return the SP4. The battery drain during sleep is too much for me. I'm still getting 2-4% battery drain during sleep. This makes the device unacceptable as a travel laptop. In a 12hr period, I can lose up to 50% of my battery while it sits in my bag. Unfortunately, I believe it's the OS. Windows isn't aggressive enough about power management. I think I will return this machine and get a Skylake Macbook Air or Macbook Retina in the Spring. Those machines have 30 days standby. That's not just marketing. It's real. I don't like to keep a laptop always plugged in. It's not good for the battery life. I had the XPS 13 for awhile after seeing claims of 7-9 hrs, and I experienced the same battery drain. Lenovos tend to do pretty well for Windows machines. Their standby can last a few days, not 30 days, but still decent. They have their own power management software. Microsoft needs to get aggressive about background tasks, web browsers scripts, and flash or they'll never be as good at power management.

I found another bug. The USB 3.0 port is slower than it should be. I have an external hard drive with a Samsung SSD. On my Mac, I get about 430-450MB/s transfer. On the SP4, it gets about 270MB/s. Could I dig in and find registry keys to make it up to par? Maybe, but I'm quite tired of having to find workarounds. I paid $1750 for the i5, 256G, 8G model. I really should not have to try to make it work. It should just work out of the box.

In the mean time, I'll just continue to use my work MBP and personal Dell Precision laptop with Ubuntu for software dev work. That leaves me with no personal laptop for photo and video editing. I wish you guys who remain with the SP4 the best. It's a really, really nice device but doesn't fit my usage pattern. Too many bugs, too many compromises.

 

[ttsoldier]

I have "fixed" most of my heat and fan issues as well as battery use during live use by doing similar things as others. I turned off Hello Windows, switched from Edge, used ad blocker, block most background apps. It runs pretty much cool and quiet now. It sometimes heats up and spins the fan during charge, but it hasn't stayed hot or loud during the entire charge cycle in the last few days.

However, I've decided to return the SP4. The battery drain during sleep is too much for me. I'm still getting 2-4% battery drain during sleep. This makes the device unacceptable as a travel laptop. In a 12hr period, I can lose up to 50% of my battery while it sits in my bag. Unfortunately, I believe it's the OS. Windows isn't aggressive enough about power management. I think I will return this machine and get a Skylake Macbook Air or Macbook Retina in the Spring. Those machines have 30 days standby. That's not just marketing. It's real. I don't like to keep a laptop always plugged in. It's not good for the battery life. I had the XPS 13 for awhile after seeing claims of 7-9 hrs, and I experienced the same battery drain. Lenovos tend to do pretty well for Windows machines. Their standby can last a few days, not 30 days, but still decent. They have their own power management software. Microsoft needs to get aggressive about background tasks, web browsers scripts, and flash or they'll never be as good at power management.

I found another bug. The USB 3.0 port is slower than it should be. I have an external hard drive with a Samsung SSD. On my Mac, I get about 430-450MB/s transfer. On the SP4, it gets about 270MB/s. Could I dig in and find registry keys to make it up to par? Maybe, but I'm quite tired of having to find workarounds. I paid $1750 for the i5, 256G, 8G model. I really should not have to try to make it work. It should just work out of the box.

In the mean time, I'll just continue to use my work MBP and personal Dell Precision laptop with Ubuntu for software dev work. That leaves me with no personal laptop for photo and video editing. I wish you guys who remain with the SP4 the best. It's a really, really nice device but doesn't fit my usage pattern. Too many bugs, too many compromises.

My fan in my Sp4 does not come on. It came on once during the firmware update. That was it.

I don't know why you people just don't disable connected standby and use hibernate.. it takes like 5 seconds for the device to power on from hibernate

 

[ioaniro]

I have "fixed" most of my heat and fan issues as well as battery use during live use by doing similar things as others. I turned off Hello Windows, switched from Edge, used ad blocker, block most background apps. It runs pretty much cool and quiet now. It sometimes heats up and spins the fan during charge, but it hasn't stayed hot or loud during the entire charge cycle in the last few days.

However, I've decided to return the SP4. The battery drain during sleep is too much for me. I'm still getting 2-4% battery drain during sleep. This makes the device unacceptable as a travel laptop. In a 12hr period, I can lose up to 50% of my battery while it sits in my bag. Unfortunately, I believe it's the OS. Windows isn't aggressive enough about power management. I think I will return this machine and get a Skylake Macbook Air or Macbook Retina in the Spring. Those machines have 30 days standby. That's not just marketing. It's real. I don't like to keep a laptop always plugged in. It's not good for the battery life. I had the XPS 13 for awhile after seeing claims of 7-9 hrs, and I experienced the same battery drain. Lenovos tend to do pretty well for Windows machines. Their standby can last a few days, not 30 days, but still decent. They have their own power management software. Microsoft needs to get aggressive about background tasks, web browsers scripts, and flash or they'll never be as good at power management.

I found another bug. The USB 3.0 port is slower than it should be. I have an external hard drive with a Samsung SSD. On my Mac, I get about 430-450MB/s transfer. On the SP4, it gets about 270MB/s. Could I dig in and find registry keys to make it up to par? Maybe, but I'm quite tired of having to find workarounds. I paid $1750 for the i5, 256G, 8G model. I really should not have to try to make it work. It should just work out of the box.

In the mean time, I'll just continue to use my work MBP and personal Dell Precision laptop with Ubuntu for software dev work. That leaves me with no personal laptop for photo and video editing. I wish you guys who remain with the SP4 the best. It's a really, really nice device but doesn't fit my usage pattern. Too many bugs, too many compromises.

I only have the SP2 for the moment so I am unfamiliar with this issue but isn't connected standby a kind of an "active" sleep where the tablet still receives emails/messages and such? In which case you should expect it to lose a little charge over time because it regularly connects to different services? If what I understood is correct it will probably be the first thing I turn off on the SP4, I have the phone for that I want my computer to sleep properly :smile:. I never tried but I am pretty sure my SP2 "sleeping" can last quite a long time on a charge. I think when you compare to a mac you should indeed compare to the hibernation mode since that is a non connected sleep. I still fail to see why people would need connected standby when we all have connected phones, again, if I understood the feature correctly. Does a mac even have an equivalent for connected standby or were they smart enough to know is not worth the trouble to implement and screw up the battery life for their customers?

Edit - PS since you mention your other laptop with Ubuntu and since you are returning it anyway... would you be interested in a small experiment and install Ubuntu on the SP4? I'm curious how that goes as Ubuntu is also my main distro for work.

 

[sflxn]

I only have the SP2 for the moment so I am unfamiliar with this issue but isn't connected standby a kind of an "active" sleep where the tablet still receives emails/messages and such? In which case you should expect it to lose a little charge over time because it regularly connects to different services? If what I understood is correct it will probably be the first thing I turn off on the SP4, I have the phone for that I want my computer to sleep properly :smile:. I never tried but I am pretty sure my SP2 "sleeping" can last quite a long time on a charge. I think when you compare to a mac you should indeed compare to the hibernation mode since that is a non connected sleep. I still fail to see why people would need connected standby when we all have connected phones, again, if I understood the feature correctly. Does a mac even have an equivalent for connected standby or were they smart enough to know is not worth the trouble to implement and screw up the battery life for their customers?

Edit - PS since you mention your other laptop with Ubuntu and since you are returning it anyway... would you be interested in a small experiment and install Ubuntu on the SP4? I'm curious how that goes as Ubuntu is also my main distro for work.

Who's using connected standby? It was the very first thing I turned off. The SP4 still lost 2-4% battery with nothing serious running while asleep. That's too severe for me. The SP4 is really designed to be used plugged in all day long. I really need a truly mobile device. Resorting to hibernation is just lame. Back in 2004, Thinkpads did not resort to hibernation to last several days. Macs laptop do not resort to hibernation to keep a charge for a week or two. It's only in the extreme case of like 1 month that Macs kicks into hibernation. The main problem I have with this SP4 is that I had to do so much to try to make it work.

Unfortunately, I already returned it. However I can predict that it won't work well. My Dell has a 4k 15" screen, and Ubuntu can be tough at HDPI. Even Windows is a trajedy with HDPI. A lot of apps have not updated. Many development tools are unusable on the SP4. Java apps all fail. Eclipse and LiteIDE are fails. IntelliJ, Atom, Sublime all works well on Windows and Ubuntu in HDPI. Unfortunately, if you want to develop with open source, you really need a Mac or use Linux at 1080p. HDPI has been on Macs for so long, there's aren't any apps that don't work well on a retina screen. Another problem you will find is touch is almost useless on Ubuntu. My Dell has a touch screen, and I hardly ever use the touch because Ubuntu doesn't handle it well.

 

[badMojo69]

Well if it's going to sit in a bag for 12 hours...shut it down and problem solved.

 

[James Kirk2]

I got the big Windows 10 Update and other updates last night, hopefully it will still be running good. Battery life seems to be about 4.5 - 6 hours, less if you are playing games like StarCraft2 that will kick on the fan. I still use Chrome as the default and avoid using Edge until I hear it works with out issues.

 

[JimandLynne]

I have seen the BSOD on Video_Scheduler_Internal_Error 3 times up through today. Went to Win Updates and downloaded a big batch earlier tonight. Updated to 10.0.10586

The BSOD had been happening in IE 11. I use IE 11 v. Edge for Lastpass compatability. Will let you know if this continues or if the updates helped/cured this problem.

 

[TheCudder]

I've requested to return my Surface Pro 4. The device is more of a hassle than anything right now. I spend more time doing hard shut downs than using the device.

• Frequent display driver crashes --- screen either goes blank or displays half black, half white noise.
• Touch screen occasion fails.
• Fails to wake from sleep.
• Every so often the fan speed increases and heats up when I'm only browsing the web in Edge.

I've done a soft reset, full system reset, deferring upgrades, allowing upgrades and using Firefox --- still buggy, plus Edge provides a much better touch experience.

I'm a huge Microsoft fan, even a share owner, but I can't settle for this. Going back to my RT and I'll consider the SP4 again in a few months.

 

[badMojo69]

Sent mine back too and I'm back to my S3.

 

[James Kirk2]

New updates are available, both firmware and Windows 10. I applied them today.

 

[bradleyj]

I've had the following issues with my SP4s (i5, 8GB, 256GB):

• First one had distorted rear camera, plus dead pixel, plus ALL the other problems everyone reported
• Second one had one dead pixel, one stuck pixel and ALL the other problems reported
• My Third one has pretty bad light-bleed but no dead pixels so I kept it; however, I have display crashes, sleep drain w/ heat (even w/ connected standby turned off, even with latest update 11/18), I've had it freeze several times, touchscreen stop working, I was in the middle of a public presentation and went to pick up my SP4 to show some slide and it wouldn't turn on at all!!! The red light flashed but the screen remained black. I held the power button, tapped it over and over again and nothing. That's the second time it has done that to me recently. This is by far the MOST buggy and frustrated device I have ever owned. No one around me can understand why I haven't returned it for good...I love the form-factor etc, but I think I will return it and wait a few months to see if these problems are ever fixed. If so I'll rebuy it. If not, so be it

 

[Lawrence Lou]

What is model you have ?

 

[mmoran27]

I have all updates including the 12/17/15 update and first thing the display driver crashes twice. It seems like the surface team really does not know anything. They are just using Intel Beta drivers as shipping drivers.

They really should not have released with this many issues. The wake from sleep seems more reliable now but the battery drain during sleep is ridiculous.

 

[mmoran27]

I still have issues with the display driver crashing after all updates.

 

[Grimmric]

I still have issues with the display driver crashing after all updates.

Im still using the 09/24/15 as it seems like thats the most stable one.
I can be totally wrong but it feels more stable for me anyway.