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Op-Ed: Microsoft Surface Book ‘Sleep of Death’ — No fix and no refunds?

The story isn’t one to inspire confidence. Surface Books are no featherweights. They’re high value, high grunt machines. The Surface Books are crashing into permanent sleeps, and not waking up. A guy called Addison Snell, writing for The Register, wrote a blow-by-blow tale of his battles with sleep problem and the Microsoft refunds policy, after buying a $4,000 Surface Book.
The Sleep of Death starts when the machine goes in to sleep mode and apparently gets worse until it dies. Surface Books uses Windows 10, which may or may not be a problem, depending on your point of view and love or loathing of Win 10.
The irony, as the Register article points out, is that Surface Book is a leading Microsoft product in their More Personal Computing range. Given that the usual story with these “permanent shutdowns” is that they happen after the Microsoft 30-day refund period, and Surface Books cost thousands of dollars, it’s not a good look.
Arguably more alarming, Snell liked the Surface Book. It died, and he couldn’t get a refund, and that, effectively, was that. It’s real fodder for Microsoft-haters. Even on the Register article, one commenter said “Microsoft must go bankrupt!”
(Great thinking, mate — what are those hundreds of millions/billions of us using Microsoft systems supposed to do with that idea, applaud? Get real.)
The “deaths” are suspicious. Why, after all these years, would a Microsoft system suddenly figure out an expensive way of dying? Power system flaw? OS flaw? Window 10 not designed to do something?
This isn’t the Blue Screen of Death. That’s fixable. If I’m understanding the Sleep of Death scenario correctly, the Surface Book simply drops dead and that’s the end. Seems a bit weird in a system using a 1TB memory, too, as in Snell’s case. No shutdown fix? Even the most basic Microsoft early products were pretty well equipped to manage shutdowns and outages.
Also hardly reassuring, given the lack of results for Surface Book users, Surface Book 2 has been delayed until 2017 for a range of design issues, none of which seem to involve the Sleep of Death problem. Does this mean the next laptop will come out with this issue unresolved?
Less impressive, by far, is the lack of hard information about fixes for the problem. There are plenty of things online about Surface Book deaths, but no clear commentary from Microsoft about what’s happening, or what they’re doing about it.
This is really appalling PR. Major product, major problem, total silence? Why? Is Microsoft determined to turn itself in to a target for its critics? If so, it’s working well.
This problem cannot possibly be unfixable. The system is dying and not doing what every single Microsoft product before it, even the much-despised Vista and Windows 8, could do — simply restart and fix issues with onboard capabilities. (Surface Book comes with a download for restore options, a new feature, but what use is that, if the machine won’t even power up?
The “kill system by power outage” problem isn’t exactly new, either; it was a problem for early systems, and was fixed to the point everyone thought it was extinct. Now, here it is, reborn in an advanced bit of hardware? Not plausible at all. Come on, Microsoft – Just fix it.
For the record – I just don’t buy this. I’ve had fantastic, effective, patient tech and sales service from Microsoft Australia and Microsoft Asia so often. I simply do not believe that the company could have got so lost in meetings and minutiae as to not recognize and respond to an issue as grim as this. What’s wrong? Whatever it is, fix that, too.

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Editor-at-Large based in Sydney, Australia.

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