Time to RMA SP2 due to the mSD-battery drain bug?

[Zkyevolved]

I must say that I had never had this issue, but then one day last week my device went crazy. Not saying it was due to that. Now that I have reset it to default and installed everything again (and still with the Micro SD) I am not having any issues with it. 7 months going strong on my lovely lovely MS device .

 

[javispedro]

From what I can see from this forum and other Surface forum, is that some people have the problem others don't.
Now it is inconclusive to come to an answer, but it looks like that it depends on the memory card (to me that is) (maybe the controller inside or the firmware of the microSD card?).
I am not saying that the issue is not with the Surface Pro 2, as it should, like other devices, work properly and have no issues, no mater the card.
But if someone knows that they can buy and return a card of different make and willing to try 2-3 times, it might be worth a shot.

It's a problem with power saving and firmware, so it depends on many things, but not on the type of the SD card. The SD card reader "abstracts" memory cards after all. Also note that one can trigger it by pluggin random USB pendrives on the USB port (and that makes sense, because the SD card reader is basically that from the point of view of the USB bus: a pendrive).

 

[SteveBorough]

The mSD card bug is a problem with their implementation of USB 3.0 such that the mSD reader erroneously interacts with the audio driver. The high CPU usage by the "System" process, often around 24-30%, occurs irregularly when you wake your device from sleep or hibernate with an mSD card inserted into the device. I myself have this problem as well.

A bypass for this problem is to, when you detect high CPU usage, reboot your Surface which will clear the issue. Of course, this means closing all your programs that you might be working with at the time. If you need to finish something prior to rebooting, you can make the high CPU usage go away by loading a song into your music player of choice, eg. XBox Music, iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc. By that, I mean start playing a song but you can pause it (leave the player open, however). You will find that, as long as the audio driver is engaged, the high CPU usage disappears.

An easier workaround is to always try to use the capacitive windows button to wake the device from sleep. However, if your device has hibernated, use the power button to resume, launch task manager, wait to see if you are having high-idle CPU utilization (System and System Interrupts processes) if so, click the power button again and then use the capacitive windows key to resume, CPU utilization should return to normal.

I've gone through 3 SP2s and all have had the problem. Its a mindboggling shame MS hasn't fixed this and just launching Task Manager to wait and check for the error many times a day adds up to a more than trivial loss of productivity!

 

[yeewiz]

So just to be clear, if you have this bug and start up from hibernation, and you have high idle CPU utilization,

1). does CPU utilization clear or go down by itself?
2). If you didn't have Task Manager open, you would just have slow response times?

 

[Philtastic]

So just to be clear, if you have this bug and start up from hibernation, and you have high idle CPU utilization,

1). does CPU utilization clear or go down by itself?
2). If you didn't have Task Manager open, you would just have slow response times?

1) As far as my testing, no, it doesn't go away by itself over the course of an hour which is a reasonably long enough time for most background processes to finish in.
2) It might affect performance but I tended to notice due to how hot the tablet got when just reading web pages.

 

[yeewiz]

Thanks.

1) I agree, an hour is long enough to wait
2). Good to know that.

So, I have a 64GB microSD always inserted, and always startup with the physical power button, so I'm doing everything "right" to launch this bug. So far, I've not seen the bug, and I hope I haven't jinxed myself.

 

[SteveBorough]

You experience high CPU activity on a Surface Pro 2 device when a MicroSD card is inserted during boot

 

[javispedro]

You experience high CPU activity on a Surface Pro 2 device when a MicroSD card is inserted during boot

Finally, only took an entire product cycle to fix this.

However, I ponder why they're not shipping this via the normal channels. Are monthly updates to SFPro 1/2 dead already?

 

[Zkyevolved]

Exactly my thoughts. It looks a little strange.

 

[javispedro]

How did you manage to get Microsoft to post a patch so promptly, specially when we've bene complaining for months?

It works great so far.

 

[TwiggyShip]

Can we delete the files after installing the update?

 

[javispedro]

Can we delete the files after installing the update?

Definitely yes.