I've been trying to determine if the Feb FW update is beneficial or resolving various issues, but the "verdict" is unclear.
You seem to have the idea the Feb FW update is faulty. What's your reason for not installing it?
Sorry for the double post, following up on jrapdx's questions:
Out of desperation I have restored mine back to a factory state again as I still am trying to determine if my problems are hardware or MS driver related. After the February round of updates, mine has gotten even worse with powering up/waking up. It got so bad I literally end up having to Volume Up/PWR reset more times than not to simply get the machine started after a shutdown, which before only happened after a sleep or hibernate crash.
So, this morning I performed a full clean wipe using my USB stick which contains the normal Surface Pro 2 restore image, only updated with the January (2/6/2014 Version 1.0 firmware and driver pack) driver pack. After the machine was back up and running I disabled Windows Updates, and simply used it for a while doing basic web browsing, email, and a constant barrage of sleeps and shut down cycles.... and surprisingly (and I hate to say this as I'm sure as soon as I do my next cycle will result in constant crashes!!!!
) everything has worked properly and stable for the past 6 hours. This includes sleeping the device, waking the device with power button, waking the device with keyboard, shutting down and powering back on. Previously, through several different installs, this would all have resulted in a blank black screen by now where the windows button would vibrate when touched but nothing else would happen no matter how long I waited or how many times I tapped or held the PWR button.
Every prior reinstall I have installed all the Windows Updates immediately as well as the firmware updates once available. This time I'm running only the factory image and MS's driver/firmware pack. There are 760MBs of Windows Updates plus the Feb Firmware it wants to install, but honestly, my gut says something in them is the root of my wake/startup/crash problem. Not sure how to proceed from here, as I know I should install the updates, but not being able to wake or start the device is a deal breaker.
So, for mine it seems it's either the Feb firmware or some combination of Windows Updates. Not going to lie, terrified to start installing updates!