* The Win10 "Night light" feature became unavailable about half a year after I bought the device. Had to go back to using f.lux. (Meanwhile, on my 2012 ThinkPad with an old NVS5400M graphics card, Night light works just fine.)
* The front camera would regularly get stuck in a bad state, with the light and IR illuminator turned on but camera unavailable, until a reboot. A recent driver update seems to have mitigated the bug; now the camera just reports an error until I reboot, but at least the lights don't stay on.
* There's no S3 Standby state. Either the computer stays on in "Connected S0", with sounds playing, radios on, snagging my Bluetooth headphones' connection, or I can put it into Hibernate, burning through 16 GB of the SSD's TBW every time.
Interesting, the only Surface Book issue that has yet to be resolved for me is the failing to sleep issue. I've had a couple of occasions when I closed it the display went off but it kept churning. I picked it up once when it was supposed to be asleep and it was warm to the touch, and the battery was depleted. No idea what it thought it was doing.
That said, the first couple of firmware updates really dramatically improved things (sped up WiFi, fixed a bunch of sleep/wake issues, etc)
SP3 was their first experiment with "Connected Standby" and it showed. I had the same experience with sleep, as well as other problems like the wifi being unable to hold a connection. I wonder if newer models have gotten any better.
I doubt MS is honestly trying to fix it, since it was MS who introduced Connected Standby as a replacement for S3
And I don't think it's just a software bug - many laptops now don't offer S3 at all, some only after toggling a BIOS option. Even then, it's often buggy on Linux as well.
They fixed most of those issues on later iterations. I have the SP4, and while it still has occasional issues with recovery from sleep, the other issues you listed aren't present.
I stopped using my Microsoft Surface Pro because it had the same issues. It's a clusterfuck of bad design decisions at Microsoft, the most offensive one being that they prioritize the execution of their scheduled spyware upload (telemetry) over honoring the agreement with the user that a sleeping PC will remain asleep unless the user takes action. It'll even install updates at night and then make reboot sounds to wake you up. And the next day, your unsaved open documents are all gone. Plus as described here, many Windows 10 laptops will either burn themselves, or the battery will be empty whenever you need em.
Sleep mode is really bad. I had a Surface Pro 3 which was the first iteration of "connected standby" and it would run the battery down while sleeping in less than a day.
I was borrowing a newer Surface Pro from work more recently and hoped with the additional years of development they would have managed to fix it. Sadly not.
> Wake from (S3) sleep would not work well, e.g. the trackpad/point would often not come back up. Sometimes the GPU wouldn't wake properly. The fingerprint reader rarely worked. Bluetooth was very flaky.
except the fingerprint one because I don't have a fingerprint reader, I had all these issues on my windows laptop
Should add it was newer but not current, maybe they've got sleep figured out by now.
But it was really surprising to me with the Surface Pro 3 because for years you'd been hearing "Microsoft can't make sleep work as well as Apple because they're stuck dealing with hardware and drivers from 3rd parties" and it turns out 3 generations into their own hardware venture it still sucked just as much. Connected Standby was probably a large step back even.
I have a Surface, easily the most popular x86 tablet.
Running Linux on it had been a nightmare, I tried surface-linux and that just broke sleep.
To this day I cannot reliably get Wi-Fi to work out of sleep despite trying every fix in the book.
Sound breaks out of sleep.
Hi-DPI support is still a joke, which is a problem when most (all?) high end x86 tablets have hi resolution screens since they're meant to be used up close.
At one point I started to get logged out every 60 seconds if I tried to put the cover on it. Turns out hibernation was improperly configured, so instead of warning me, it'd log me out, try to hibernate, then try again 60 seconds later.
Even on freshly imaged Microsoft Surface hardware, I have problems with Windows going to "sleep" (since it's connected standby, not sleep). About 25% of the time the IR webcam will get stuck always on, preventing the Windows Hello face-based unlocking to work and resulting in the IR blaster heating significantly. Reproducible even on an image with all the latest MS updates.
Worth mentioning the real reason is because the mobos concerned don't support S3, and Microsoft doesn't want to deal with problems that aren't their concern (Windows crashing trying to S3 on hardware that can't S3).
This being said, whether it's S3 or S0 or S4 (aka hibernate) I have practically never had any form of sleep function well. They're simply too unreliable and jank, I've had to reboot the machine anyway too many times because Windows just wasn't running right after coming back.
I've always just shut down and haven't had any problems. We're in the age of PCIE5 NVME SSDs, to speak nothing of PCIE4 let alone SATA3 SSDs. Booting up Windows through a proper boot sequence doesn't take time anymore. It's just not worth the time lost dealing with S3 or S0 or hibernate.
Microsoft has fixed a number of Surface Pro 4 bugs in Win10 but the 'not sleeping' one still persists. And it is, as the author writes, a battery killer. It reminds me of a similar bug in iOS with its "smart cover" where the cover would move around in your bag and the iPad would wake up.
It took a long time for the bugs to get worked out, but I have not had any sleep/wake issues on my Surface Pro 4 in awhile now. At least since the 1809 update.
Maybe they've fixed it since I tried it, but enabling Hyper-V on my Surface Pro 3 messed up sleep. It would only Hibernate and not reliably. Took me a couple weeks to figure out what happened.
Even Microsoft's own hardware can't get it right. I have a Surface Pro 3, and it will not stay in sleep mode. The screen frequently turns on for no reason at all, even if the keyboard cover is closed. I've taken to putting it in hibernate mode whenever I know I won't be using it for more than a few minutes, otherwise I'll come back to a dead battery.
But even hibernation doesn't always work. My custom-built desktop PC frequently wakes itself out of hibernation in the middle of the night. I don't even know how that's possible, because I thought hibernation was "off, with RAM saved to storage". Which is just wonderful when I'm sleeping in the same room.
Just my experience, but a relatively recent (late summer?) OS update must have fixed it. Since then, I haven't had any problems with my SP4 not waking from sleep.
* The Win10 "Night light" feature became unavailable about half a year after I bought the device. Had to go back to using f.lux. (Meanwhile, on my 2012 ThinkPad with an old NVS5400M graphics card, Night light works just fine.)
* The front camera would regularly get stuck in a bad state, with the light and IR illuminator turned on but camera unavailable, until a reboot. A recent driver update seems to have mitigated the bug; now the camera just reports an error until I reboot, but at least the lights don't stay on.
* There's no S3 Standby state. Either the computer stays on in "Connected S0", with sounds playing, radios on, snagging my Bluetooth headphones' connection, or I can put it into Hibernate, burning through 16 GB of the SSD's TBW every time.
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