Stability question

[John Semberger]

Absolutely love the Surface Book and settled on this as my production device after using several different laptops and tablets over the last few months. I have the i5 no GPU version as that is plenty for me and I need the extra battery life. I am a technology consultant so daily use consists of running the Office suite (2016), remote access to customer servers, and running Powershell for Office 365 customers. I heavily use Outlook and Word during the day and also do a lot of web research using edge and do not have any Google products installed. No video or picture editing and no movie watching.

Since the last round of updates the system seems pretty stable and I don't have any issues running what I mentioned above with one exception. I am still getting random times when the screen will freeze, then go black, then return and I will see the video driver stopped and restarted. When this happens I can continue running as normal so it is not the end of the world but it is still a pain, especially when I am in the middle of something important. There does not seem to be any rhyme or reason to apps as it does it when running only Word and Outlook, or could be in just Outlook, or could be just using Edge. This happens sporadically and could be once a day, or sometimes not for several days. With average weekly business use I get this around three times a week.

I ran a full clean install when I purchased this several months ago and not opposed to doing that again if anyone thinks that would help. I don't see any comments here where others are running in to this issue as of late so I was wondering if this is still a problem others are having? Also what would you suggest to try and address this? All updates have been done as I am religious about that part and I am not sure I want to set this for Insider Preview since this is my production machine.

Any comments are appreciated.

 

[John Semberger]

By the way I am running the Intel graphics driver 20.19.15.4409. Date is 03/20/2016. This should be the one Microsoft gives me and I have never used or installed an alternate driver.

 

[Bandito]

It sounds like everything should be okay with your system, but clearly something isn't quite right. Have you gone into Event Manager to get more detailed information regarding the error. I have had this error occur on my SB exactly once since I bought it in March.

I'd look at trying to reinstall your video drivers to see if that makes any difference. You can download all the drivers for the SB from Microsoft in .zip format, expand them, and then drill down to find just the one that you want. The drivers are available here:

Download Surface Book Drivers and Firmware from Official Microsoft Download Center

Their publish date has been updated to 6/21, so it may now include all of the very latest drivers, but after reinstalling the video drivers, I'd still run an Update check just to be sure.

I would expand the drivers, locate and note where the Intel Video drivers are now located, then go into Device Manager and uninstall the driver from there, selecting the option to delete the driver files. Then you should be able to install the drivers again from where you unzipped them or point the driver installer manually to where they are located.

I hope that this will take care of the problem for you. You certainly don't need to see that happening on such a regular basis.

 

[John Semberger]

Thanks Bandito that was as I expected. While waiting on a reply here today I tried exactly what you suggested so will see what happens.

 

[ncameron]

...I ran a full clean install when I purchased this several months ago...

Can I ask you what you mean by 'a full clean install'? Did you run a:

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth /source:WIM:X:\Path to Install.wim:1 /LimitAccess