Surface Pro 4 freaked out WHEA_Uncon (now only shows 4gb ram)

[Roveer]

My brother brought me his Microsoft Surface Pro 4 this week. It's been running fine (win 10). Then all of a sudden it started crashing with WHEA_Uncorrectable error. It would boot for a few seconds after login and then finally fail.

I tried everything I could, checked HD, Memory, booted into safe mode. Seemed more stable in safe mode but still would crash.

I have reloaded win 10 and it seems stable, but after a day or so when it takes all the updates, it goes right back to crashing.

So tonight I reloaded windows again and noticed in the Control Panel System settings it was only reporting 4gb of memory. On the back of this device it says 12GB. Yet only 4GB is showing up in windows. Not the 4gb available, but the first number. It says: Installed memory (RAM): 4.00 GB and that's it.

Is this device suffering from a hardware failure? I did some googling and didn't find anything.

Roveer

 

[hughlle]

Are you sure it says 12gb on the back?.. Might be worth checking again.

 

[Roveer]

Are you sure it says 12gb on the back?.. Might be worth checking again.

Your are correct. I looked again and it said 128GB. So this unit probably does only have 4GB of memory. Seems like such a low number these days.

So back to my problems.

Since he brought me the surface I have seen lots of WHEA_uncorrectable_error with nothing after. I have seen something about process died, I have seen memory referenced errors. Most of these occur shortly after sign-in, but it's totally erratic as to when they happen. I have rebooted into safe mode and that appears more stable, but most of the time it would error there as well.

I re-loaded windows 10 fresh (total wipe) and it appeared stable, I left it for the afternoon and it eventually took a bunch of updates, and went right back to the error condition.

I would think if I got a bad update I'd see many others with similar problems.

I've run the memory diagnostic as well as the surface diagnostic and neither produce any errors. This thing has been pretty stable for the past 1.5+ years so I'm at a loss to figure out what happened.

I'm going to re-load windows fresh again and keep it off the internet to see if it stays stable, then I'll let it take updates and see if it freaks out again.

Any other suggestions would be appreciated.

Roveer

 

[hughlle]

Hey Rover. Yeah, that would be the 4gb model. I was actually asking that because there is no 12gb surface, so was wondering on the slimmest off chance that he might ha e somehow ended up with something fake and Chinese.

Out of interest, if you just boot up, and then keep the device awake at the login screen by moving the mouse etc, does it also then crash after a few minutes? It would also be an idea to see if you can create a bootable Ubuntu flash drive to see if it is at all stable running that. That would help pin down if it is software/firmware/hardware etc

 

[Roveer]

Hey Rover. Yeah, that would be the 4gb model. I was actually asking that because there is no 12gb surface, so was wondering on the slimmest off chance that he might ha e somehow ended up with something fake and Chinese.

So I'm getting a little more information. I let the surface take some updates and it was working without issue. On the last round it installed KB4056892 and failed all the other updates, so on that cycle the one update is what was installed.

Right after the reboot for that update the failures started right away.

So I look at KB4056892 and what do you think it is... Meltdown and Spectre.

Is this all being caused by this F'ng update? I'm not seeing any other surface users complaining.

I'm going to see if I can block the update somehow and see if the system is stable without it, but for now, I have to reload windows to get back to a stable position.