Surface Book nightmare: Microsoft won't fix 'Sleep of Death' bug In its most recent quarterly earnings report, Microsoft highlighted its increasingly popular Surface line as the growth leader in its More Personal Computing line of business. Surface led the category with 61 per cent growth in constant currency, a rise driven by the top products in the line, the Surface Pro 4 tablet and the …
I've had the SB about 6 weeks now. As soon as I got it, I started having the Sleep of Death issues as discussed in the article. It did my head in that a $3000 laptop and this could happen.
Realising it wasn't me, but Microsoft I decided the best thing i could do was alter my habits and wait for a working update. I changed my power button setting to:
- Power Button - Sleep - With the intention of using this when i expected to be back at my machine within the 2 hour Sleep of Death time limit.
- Close the Lid - To hibernate with the intention of closing the lid if i thought i was done for the day or an extended period.
I must admit I don't have the discipline so i just use the Power Button. And you know what, for the last month the issue has practically disappeared. Instead of it being a multiple times a day, it has now only happened twice (still disappointing, but i can live with that).
Can't really add much more to the discussion other than it has been largely resolved for me and I return to feeling positive about the machine.
As for my Use Case: I largely work with 20-30 tabs of chrome, office, creative suite, visual studio, sql server, so in theory plenty of processes to fight sleep. I don't have a dock, but the machine is on/off, on power, not on power, in and out of tablet. I feel i give it a broad range of use and no problems (admittedly i still hold my breath when i hit the power button...)
You need a new drug
One that won't make you sick
One that won't make you crash your slab
Or make you feel three feet thick
.
You need a new drug
One that does what it should
One that won't make you feel too bad
One that won't make you feel too good
.
One that won't make you nervous
Wondering what to do
. . . . .
"Surface Pro's come with UEFI enabled making it impossible to install another OS on them. If you buy a Surface Pro, you are stuck with Windows."
Stop talking rot. All Apple desktops and laptops have shipped with UEFI since 2006. By definition they don't ship with Windows, and it is perfectly possible to put non-Apple OSes, including Windows and all current Linux distros, on them. In addition, I have a desktop machine with an ASUS motherboard which shipped with UEFI. It's running BSD at the moment. I am not alone in running assorted non-MS OSes on systems which shipped with UEFI. I suspect that you have a problem with Secure Boot, not UEFI. See further http://www.uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/UEFI_Secure_Boot_in_Modern_Computer_Security_Solutions_2013.pdf
In particular, note the following, quoted from the above:
"Secure Boot is an optional feature of the UEFI specification. The choice of whether to implement the feature and the details of its implementation (from an end-user standpoint) are business decisions made by Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs)."
Note also:
"Users may disable Secure Boot entirely, using a system setup screen enabled at boot time. Each manufacturer has its own interface for this option. In all cases, end user must be physically present to establish proof of possession (POP) associated with the changes. With the Secure Boot feature disabled, the system can boot legacy operating systems, as well as systems that do not support Secure Boot. However, when Secure Boot is disabled, the feature is no longer protecting the system, leaving it vulnerable to rootkit and bootkit attacks.
UEFI Secure Boot also provides an interface that allows a system owner to take control of the system’s security credentials. This interface may or may not be available, depending on the system and its manufacturer. In circumstances where it is available, system owners can clear and reinstall the Secure Boot database and register their own keys and signatures. This can either supplement or completely replace the factory set. If a particular system supports the clearing of Secure Boot databases, the option will be displayed in the firmware menus."
I don't own a Surface anything, and, given their cost and the problem noted in the article, am unlikely to buy one, so I don't know how MS implemented Secure Boot.
> The choice of whether to implement the feature and the details of its implementation (from an end-user standpoint) are business decisions made by Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs)."
> so I don't know how MS implemented Secure Boot.
You acknowledge that manufacturers can choose to enforce Secure Boot or not, you admit that you have no clue about what Microsoft have done, have provided several irrelevant and spurious examples about how others have done it (including non-Windows machines) and start by claiming the previous poster was talking rot about Surface Pro.
I suggest that offer an apology to previous poster and admit that you are completely clueless.
I suggest, again, that his problem is with Secure Boot, not with UEFI. His statement that you can't change OSes on a Surface Book because of UEFI is incorrect. Even if it's true that you can't changes OSes on a Surface Book, something which I suspect deeply to be true 'cause that's just the way that Microsoft rolls, it is because of Secure Boot. Not UEFI. I repeat that multiple vendors ship systems with UEFI which _can_ have multiple OSes installed without problems, because of the way that they did nor did not implement Secure Boot, which as I pointed out in my first post is both optional and can be set up so as to be either bypassed or outright turned off depending on vendor settings.
One more time: his problem is with Secure Boot, not UEFI.
If he had posted to the effect that Surface Books can't change OSes because of Secure Boot, I would have had only one problem: has this been experimentally verified? Given the price of the thing, and the fat that this is, after all, a Microsoft product, I suspect that I know the answer and I know that I will not be buying one to find out for certain. If I'm going to spend $3200 on a laptop, something quite unlikely, I'll spend it on a 15" Mac Book Pro (Retina). I _know_ that I can install the OS of my liking on that machine. Apple will even provide Window drivers for it, for free. Linux or BSD drivers would be somewhat harder to get, so some hardware might not work properly. It will, however, boot. And it won't crash on waking from sleep.
Yup Apple is light years ahead of getting a laptop to resume from sleep using their OS compared to Windows or even any Linux distort I know of. You just have to watch any of their WWDC video's on the subject to see how much thought and work they put into it and getting it to work with newer Intel hardware. If Microsoft is doing the same I haven't heard of it?
... is that one minute of searching the web would have revealed that the original poster was talking though his hole. Of course you can install Linux on a Surface Book, just like you can install it on previous Intel Surface models:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/comments/3qcqha/ubuntu_on_surface_book/
So, Ubuntu 14.04 seems to work well; 15.x has problems with drivers, but to get to the point of having problems with drivers means that neither UEFI nor SecureBoot are preventing installation. Can we just give up this "UEFI will kill your children" paranoia now?
More on the topic, I'm not entirely sure these Surface Book sleep issues are entirely with Microsoft; the chipset vendors have something to do with it - the updated drivers that fixed this issue for a lot of people were from Intel and nVidia, not Microsoft. Here's where Microsoft's inexperience as a system OEM is biting them, but if they're now eating the same dogfood as Asus, HP, Dell, etc, it can only be better for the customer in the end, as Windows becomes a bit less tricky to bring up on esoteric hardware. (Apple has a lead here because they've always had to deal with hardware integration of their OS)
And speaking of Apple, my own experience of dealing with Microsoft customer care on a faulty unit has been exemplary - even better than my experiences with Apple formerly (and to be clear, I think Apple are generally good at after-sales). I really find it hard to see how the owner of one of their most expensive models would be bounced around like this; by now, a unit swap should have been offered...
You should have stopped while you were ahead. The other guy is right and you are an idiot.
I deploy surfaces every single day for my work. You can load any OS that is x86-x64 compatible onto the surface you want. It is very simple. Press the power button and volume up. That loads the UEFI screen. Turn secure boot off. Restart machine. Press and hold power and volume down button. You're loading the boot menu. Select the USB or drive you want to load the OS from. Install.
PROFIT.
Yeah they are getting UEFI and Secure Boot mixed up. Anyways, makes working and wiping all these newer laptops that have it enabled since if you aren't aware of it will give some strange errors if you try to wipe the drive or reinstall the OS without disabling it first. And depending on the device there might not even be an option to disable in UEFI since it is up to company making machine!
"All HP and Compaq computers that were manufactured with Windows 10 can use Secure Boot. Secure Boot is enabled by default on these computers"
https://twitter.com/daviangel/status/666848987484307460
You are right the issue is Secure Boot not UEFI in general. However, while PCs are required to allow a method of disabling secure boot, Surface tablets are not, and I believe the original ARM-based Surface RT did not.
Looks like modern Surface tablets do allow you to disable it, though -
https://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-gb/support/warranty-service-and-recovery/how-to-use-the-bios-uefi?os=windows-10
"Surface Pro's come with UEFI enabled making it impossible to install another OS on them."
Installed W8.1 on a friend's SP4 (his employers do not support W10).
"If you buy a Surface Pro, you are stuck with Windows."
Incorrect. Others have installed Linux on their Surface Pros
http://blog.davidelner.com/dual-booting-ubuntu-14-10-on-the-surface-pro-3/
"Ahhh, that's interesting. I've completely avoided the SP4 due to Windows 10.
I could do Win 8.1, as the CAD software I use works with that. But Win 10 isn't an option."
Downgrading my mate's SP4 to W8.1 was not completely seamless. IIRC the volume buttons weren't mapped properly, the cameras wouldn't work and the power button didn't function properly (relatively minor issues for my friend).
There is more info at the following
http://forum.tabletpcreview.com/threads/surface-pro-4-discussion-thread.67857/page-195#post-461153
You will need to turn off signed drivers and find a licence key.
It is rumoured that battery life under 8.1 is better but I didn't have time to confirm that.
That's entirely false. I have a successful dual boot configuration with Win10/Linux Mint running on my surface book. One only needs to search google for a how to.. Touch screen does not work as native drivers have not hit the linux kernel as of yet... other than that, Linux runs flawless here alongside Win10 - some users have reported wiping Win10 completely and installing only Linux - no reason this wouldn't work either..
I've had the SP4 since November and have never had any power issues with it. Some have though, I'm not sure if recent driver updates have fixed it for the SP4.
Side note: Where in the article does it say that MS won't fix it, as per the headline? Did I miss or is that a click-bait headline?
I have been using Windows 10 for three days, now ... I have had to kill explorer.exe 5 times already, because that is the only way to get the "start menu" to resuscitate.
I have had this "sleep of death" bug with Windows 8.1 multiple times, with 10 it has also happened this morning ... definitely a Windows bug.
HP Elitebook 850 rev 1.
PS: Needless to say, I keep my drivers updated, especially when I experience problems.
My explorer.exe on WIndows 10 also need regular killing and restarting, though not because of the Start Menu which continues to work fine (so far)... my explorer.exe leaks memory and generally doesn't last more than 2-3 days because it's consumed all 16GB of the available RAM. (Probably it isn't the Windows exe itself, but some other add-on which is leaking, but I haven't found out which one(s) yet.) When I get a moment I'll be writing myself a little utility to automatically kill and restart explorer.exe.
After 4 versions of the Surface Pro, you would think MS would get it right.. "POS" has multiple meanings here..
I'm reminded of a movie called the Marathon Man where Dustin Hoffman is being tortured as he is being asked "is it safe to go out?". I keep asking myself "Is it safe to get involved with MS products?" After 30 years, the answer still keeps coming back to "No".
I'd love to see a wiki-leak of internal documents discussing this issue. I bet it would be a classic.
Never ever buy Microsoft hardware. Ever.... they give a flying fook about their customers,only marketshare....
Read and digest...
http://venturebeat.com/2008/09/05/xbox-360-defects-an-inside-history-of-microsofts-video-game-console-woes/
Microsoft have not changed since this fiasco.
Sorry, it is a $3000 machine. If I had to pay that for a laptop (and I would and will when I need to upgrade mine) I expect it to work not only flawlessly, but to exceed expectations and to last for several years.
Here's hoping that the original victim get a refund!
I am amazed that anyone would pay 3 grand for a laptop without a fruity logo on it. Lifespans of laptops do not seem to rise in any way with price. If you get 3 years you are lucky; by that time they will want totally a new OS, new peripherals (USB4?) new WiFi etc.
I use it at work all the time... if I've got several code windows open and documents across 3 monitors, I'll sleep the laptop, remove it from the dock, and take it home for the night... next morning just kick it off again and jump straight in.
Its even more useful when traveling, you just close the thing and pop it in the bag mid way through something... next free minute you can get it out again.
I've used an early surface pro for work, had this issue and others related to WiFi... like just claiming no networks available, despite the laptop and android phones being connected fine. Only disabling and enabling the wireless device in device manager, or a reboot will help. For the cost and pathetic support, I'm surprised they're still able to sell any.
I didn't mean to be flippant. I have a large desktop beast that cost a bit more than this laptop. It might get restarted once a month, if that. And this is in my home. It runs 24/7. I'd never trust it to sleep, especially as it's often doing things when I sleep.
Sleep and Hibernate have always been iffy and like you, from using Windows from early on, we learned.... shut it down, and just to be safe, turn off sleep and hibernate. Desktops, laptops have all had this it seems. I believe it's a software issue that's been baked in and some code somewhere that they'll never find at this point in time is the problem.
Very iffy. After serial failure since win95, win10 finally has nearly working sleep on my current desktop. It's a bit too fond of spontaneously waking, occasionally decides not to wake, frequently forgets where the network is and OpenVPN never survives. But it sort of works. Even my old laptop was picky about restarting from sleep on xp.
The retired desktop my wife uses never had working sleep till I put kubuntu on it...
The pc running as a network pvr lost sleep mode with the Win8 to 10 upgrade. Not unexpected since every windows update breaks something.
Iffy is being generous. Fusterclucked.
To everyone saying You just have to live with sleep and hibernation problems, go and try an Apple MacBook.
It just works - rushing somewhere? Close the lid and go. Boss asks you to show her something? Open the lid and show her. Don't have a power brick? Close the lid and resume later once you have power.
In around 3 years of using MacBooks I can only recall one time the MacBook hasn't resumed successfully.
THAT is what end users expect from a laptop because they can already get it from Apple - if Surfaces go on doing this, MS will lose Surface customers to Apple.
In around 3 years of using MacBooks I can only recall one time the MacBook hasn't resumed successfully.
Do MacBooks tend to sleep or hibernate on lid close?
I have to say that I have had problems with OSX devices, both losing monitor configurations (e.g. "forgetting" that there's an external monitor attached, or re-setting resolutions, commonly defaulting to 800x600) and losing WiFi. Getting WiFi back usually just involves turning WiFi "off", waiting a bit, then turning it back on again (and re-registering if it's a public network). Getting an external monitor back often requires a log-out, log-in or even a reboot.
What I have not had with a MacBook is a machine that won't wake up at all.
Perhaps it's this "it works fine for me so there can't really be a problem" attitude that is afflicting Microsoft. Perhaps with the sheer volume of complaints they will now acknowledge that something needs to be done.
MS will lose Surface customers to Apple
Maybe, when Apple catches up with the form-factor, and iPads can run Outlook and Office ;-)
M.
"Maybe, when Apple catches up with the form-factor, and iPads can run Outlook and Office ;-)"
iPads can run Outlook and Office. I have MS' free Office for iOS on my iPad Air. Every now and again it bleats a request that I cough up the cash to 'upgrade' to Office 365 so that I can have 'the complete Office Experience'. I ignore the bleating. The limited feature set of the free version is all I need on a tablet. I have Office 2013 on my laptop. That used to bleat requests that I update to Office 365, too, until I hunted down and silenced with extreme prejudice the source.
I have a Bluetooth keyboard for my iPad. It still won't replace a real laptop for serious work.
"It just works - rushing somewhere? Close the lid and go. Boss asks you to show her something? Open the lid and show her. Don't have a power brick? Close the lid and resume later once you have power."
True, OSX isn't perfect (for instance, at work we had 15 24inch iMacs that would randomly flood the Ethernet switch they were attached to, then drop the network connection until reboot), but more often than not, it does just work.
I like the way OSX handles sleep/hibernation. By default, it suspends to RAM. Latter versions of OSX can wake the computer periodically to check for emails and such. If the power starts to get low, it will write the data in RAM to the HDD or SSD (same as Windows Hibernate) and shut itself down. Obviously, at that point, OSX is not going to wake the computer to do anything.
If you want, you can force the power management system to bypass the sleep mode and go straight to hibernation.
As I said earlier, OSX is far from perfect, and far from bug free, but it does generally just work. I should know, I support a fleet of 117 iMacs, several Mac pros and 60 Mac Book pros.
"To everyone saying You just have to live with sleep and hibernation problems, go and try an Apple MacBook."
Exactly. I was doing this with an Apple iBook back in 2002, though the longevity of batteries back then was a limiting factor.
My main work nowadays is on a desktop, where I suspend and resume virtual machines under VMware Fusion on a regular basis. The guest systems (various flavours of Linux, *nix and Windows) cope extremely well with disconnecting then reconnecting their virtual networks as part of the suspend/resume process.
Once you get used to the way suspend and resume "just works" you wonder how you ever did without it.
I'm well aware that on Windows machines, it's best to avoid sleep and hibernate. The fact that they work perfectly on the Macintosh, though, will only cause Microsoft to lose customers to Apple... if people can get the applications they want, at a competitive price, for the Macintosh.
The past loss of market share from the Macintosh to Windows has, I believe, reached such a point, combined with Apple's reputation for locked-in systems, that Apple offers no real competition to Microsoft. There are people who swear by Apple, but most Windows users are extremely unlikely to consider joining their ranks.
The Amiga and the Atari ST, long since dead, are the kind of competitor that would have appealed to many Windows users - companies aimed at pleasing the customer and driving for a low price. The Macintosh is for another kind of person - even if the price differential isn't as high as the one between Timex and Rolex.
Before I start, I am not a Microsoft apologist and I only use Windows because I have to at work. I have never had a Windows machine at home, and even at work my main "work" machine dual-boots Windows and OpenSuse. However...
Sleep and Hibernate have always been iffy (also @Zoot)
While sleep really, really should work on a $3,000 laptop, and it really, really doesn't seem to be a problem on anywhere near this scale on other hardware, you are both correct. Sleep has never been 100% reliable, ever. Hibernate has been better, but I've had problems with both on scores of machines with dozens of different configurations from oodles of different vendors (including many self-built) using chipsets from Intel, AMD and others and motherboards (for this may actually be a BIOS issue?) from goodness knows how many manufacturers.
Guess what, it can also be a problem on the Linuxes I use (Mint, OpenSuse*) and on OSX and (possibly) iOS, as well as Windows (not a user of 10 or 8, but I have had problems on both 7 and XP - before XP came along, sleep and hibernate were simply not worth using at all). I have even had what I can only describe as a sleep-related problem on my Android phone where just occasionally if it has been to "sleep" for a very long time, it reboots when you try to wake it up.
Putting a device to "sleep" (whatever that really means) will often cause it to forget network connections, particularly WiFi (requiring a disable, re-enable of the adapter), sometimes cause it to forget display configurations, occasionally cause desktop or application crashes and I've recently even seen it disable Wake on LAN functions (though to be fair, this latter problem also manifests on a "proper" shutdown, and the computers in question shouldn't ever enter sleep anyway).
So, Zoot, I feel for your downvotes and I accept I'll probably get a few myself.
But to go back to the start. While this is a long-standing occasional problem almost everywhere, it should not be something that happens almost every time! Someone at Microsoft needs to find out what is happening and sort it, or if they find it's a hardware issue that can't be mitigated in software they need to give Intel a kick up the backside and issue a recall / replacement / repair notice.
M.
*Both my OpenSuse machines desktop machines will "crash" in quite significant ways if you try to put them to sleep, but both come back from hibernate pretty well. The OpenSuse laptop has issues with startup and shutdown (it can sometimes take 2 or 3 minutes to shutdown), but sleep seems to work ok.
That's interesting - my Asus EeePC 1015PX netbook upgraded to Win10 and this is exactly what I have to do when it claims there's no Wifi (even though everything else is connected to the Wifi and it was, itself, connected only moments before).
MS sent me a Powershell script that they said would fix it, but it doesn't, only 'disable' <count to ten> 'Enable' gets me back on the Wifi.
Windows 10 will also, annoyingly, spontaneously wake from Hibernate (I use Hibernate because, while a four year old netbook might boot up quite quickly under Windows 10, it's unusable for about 10 minutes while it does whatever Windows thinks it needs to do after a cold boot) at random times - it's even woken itself up in the laptop bag, only the "I'm overheating" beeping from the bag alerting to the screaming fans and a cooked netbook...
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