Surface Sleep of Death: How to Wake up Microsoft Surface

Surface Pro 4 is part of Microsoft’s versatile Surface Pro family. With all Microsoft’s huge efforts in making the device as stable as possible, the Surface Pro 4 has its share of issues. One that bugged users for a long is the Surface sleep of death.

Several users constantly report this issue while also mentioning that they are faced with a black screen of death or that their device won’t boot. So, let’s find out how you can fix Microsoft Surface’s Sleep of Death.

What can I do if Surface Pro 4 doesn’t wake up from sleep?

Before we start with the slightly tricky solutions, try these quick ones:

• If your Surface Pro 4 can’t wake up, you might be able to fix this problem by connecting the charger. This is usually the case when the device doesn’t have any charge.
• To check if other peripherals are the problem, disconnect all the non-critical ones and try waking up your device again.
• Perform a force restart. To do that, press the Power button and hold it for 30 seconds or more until the display lights up.

If none work, head to the fixes listed next.

1. Install the necessary drivers

If you’re having issues with Sleep Mode and Surface Pro 4, the problem might be your drivers. To fix this problem, you must ensure that all your drivers are updated.

Users suggest installing the latest drivers from Intel and checking if that solves your issue.

Alternatively, to save some time looking for the right driver, we suggest using a third-party application such as PC HelpSoft Driver Updater.

This is the quickest and most efficient way to update drivers correctly.

PC HelpSoft Driver Updater quickly scans your system to find not all the outdated components. Then, it suggests several alternatives.

If you’re unsure about the right components and less tech-savvy, PC HelpSoft Driver Updater will do the job for you.

⇒ Get PC HelpSoft Driver Updater

2. Use the keyboard shortcut

A single keyboard shortcut seems to do the trick if your Surface Pro device won’t wake up from sleep. But based on our research, we found several hotkeys that help wake up a Surface device from the Sleep of Death. Try all of the following:

• Windows + Ctrl + Shift + B
• Ctrl + Alt + Delete
• Ctrl + Shift + Esc
• Some users mentioned that pressing the Volume up and Volume down keys three times quickly fixed the problem.
• Press Windows + P about three times, wait for a moment, and your screen should appear.

3. Disable the hibernate mode

1. Right-click the Start button and choose Command Prompt (Admin).
   
2. Paste the following command, and hit Enter:powercfg /h off
3. Restart your device.

Once you turn off the hibernation, put your Surface device to sleep again and try to wake it up.

This solution helps because when the hibernation mode is disabled, your Surface Pro 4 can either go to sleep or shut down completely without being caught in hibernation.

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4. Set everything to Hibernate

1. Go to Search, type power options, and open Power & sleep settings.
   
2. Choose Additional power settings under Related settings.
   
3. Go to the Choose what the power button does option from the left pane.
   
4. Now set everything to Hibernate.
5. Click on Save changes.

This solution was confirmed by one Reddit user, so we can say it helped at least someone. Hopefully, it will also help you, but if it doesn’t, try the other solutions from this article.

Although it looks strange that we listed two consecutive solutions that negate each other, it makes sense because the cause of the problem is different on different Surface Pro 4 devices.

5. Change the network card settings

1. Press Windows + X and choose Device Manager from the list.
   
2. Find the Surface Pro 4’s wireless network card, right-click on it, and select Properties.
3. Now, go to the Power Management tab. tick the checkbox for Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power, and click OK to save the changes.
   

This solution also solved the problem for a few users who believed the Surface book was dead.

If it does, it means that maybe you’ve altered your wireless network card so as not to allow the Surface Pro 4 to fall asleep to save power.

6. Change the Sign in options

1. Open the Settings app.
2. Now, go to Accounts.
   
3. In the left pane, select Sign-in options. Under Require Sign-in, choose Never.
   
4. Restart your Surface device.

Again, this proved helpful for a few users.

Anyway, if your Surface Pro 4 requires sign-in when it wakes up from sleep, errors might eventually appear. So, the solution is to turn off this option in Settings.

That’s about it for our article; one of these solutions should have helped fix Sleep of Death in Microsoft Surface.

Before you leave, find out how to speed up the Internet on a Surface device.

If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, just let us know in the comment section below.