User reports of Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 problems proliferate
One of the most commonly reported problems is a wildly flickering screen. Poster Jarem on the Microsoft Answers forum puts it this way:
As you can see in the video, the flickering makes the machine essentially useless. Several customers on that Answers thread ultimately diagnosed the problem as being a Hyper-V apparition. (You have to manually turn on Hyper-V in any Windows 10 Pro system; it's not turned on by default -- although if you install Visual Studio, the installer turns on Hyper-V.)
Poster plost99 nailed it, saying that disabling Hyper-V fixed the flicker. To do so:
Step 1. Right-click Start and choose Command Prompt (Admin)
Step 2. Copy this line into the command prompt and press Enter:
dism.exe /Online /Disable-Feature:Microsoft-Hyper-V
(note the spaces)
Reader mattdlloyd chimed in:
Apparently the Surface Pro 4 tablet has the same problem.
Microsoft is aware of the issue and (we're told) is working on a fix.
In the same thread, poster SeanDP reported a problem that I've seen posted in many places:
I haven't seen any solution to that problem.
There are reports of Surface Book freezes all over the Web.
Tweetium Windows author, former developer at Microsoft and all-around guru Brandon Paddock @BrandonLive had a series of freezes and hangs with the laptop, at least some of which were apparently caused by the Intel graphics card. In a lengthy thread about freezes on the Answers forum, he says:
Paddock took his Surface Book to a nearby Microsoft Store and exchanged it. As of last night, it's still working. Unfortunately, many people report that the Microsoft Stores near them are completely out of the Surface Book.
A poster who identifies himself as "Lance from Surface Support" gives the following advice for curing freezes by wiping out the hard drive and installing a new Win10 image:
He goes on to emphasize:
Several people on the thread blame the freezes on the just-released firmware update for the Surface Book. Paddock says it isn't a software problem, and that the only fix he found was to turn in the laptop for a new one -- a process that's easy (but frustrating) if you're near a Microsoft Store and they still have Surface Books in stock, but problematic in any other universe.
Not what you would expect from a $3,000 laptop, eh
Theo Priestley at Forbes points to a tirade on the Microsoft Surface forums. The link in that article doesn't work, but ericspt's post on the Microsoft Surface forum goes to great lengths "after using it for 4 hours: Dell's 34-inch ultrawide monitor doesn't work with the dock; can't boot while attached to the dock; playing MPEGs while connected to the dock throws an unable to decode error; multiple animations on a web page trigger a black screen that won't come back until you dock or redock; can't detach dock; and more."
Lest you think the problems are confined to the Surface Book, permit me to dispel that notion. The wild screen flicker and the color changes, in particular, have also been observed with new Surface Pro 4 tablets.
Right now, there are many more questions than answers. Yes, it's risky buying a "version 1.0" computer like the Surface Book -- but Microsoft should've ironed out the problems in the Surface Pro line long ago. The fact that both SB and SP4 share the same oddities is little comfort.
Microsoft has released 20 -- count 'em -- firmware patches for the Surface Pro 3 since it shipped 16 months ago. Let's hope we don't see a repeat.