Comment by chihuahua

2 hours ago

When I worked at Microsoft (years ago), some employees had Surface laptops. They frequently had issues where the laptop just wasn't working right and required rebooting, at the start of a meeting where they wanted to connect the Surface laptop to a projector. Always the Surfaces, never the Lenovos. One of the Surface things split into two parts, the screen (containing the actual computer) and the keyboard. There was something weird about connecting and disconnecting those parts, some motorized docking/undocking mechanism, that caused problems.

Then Microsoft had the episode where some of their Surface hardware would not reliably stay in sleep mode and cooked itself while being transported in a bag. At the time, Microsoft tried to excuse this by claiming that "a fundamental Computer Science problem" needed to be solved to fix this issue. Strange how other manufacturers could do this without overcoming unsolvable problems in frontier CS research.

While I'm usually a die-hard Microsoft fanboi, I have concluded that their Surface line is terrible.

This is even more of a knock to Microsoft but the overheating during sleep issue can affect any windows laptop made in the last 5 or so years. The cause is nothing surface specific, it’s Microsoft enforcing “Modern standby” and blocking S3/S4 sleep states in windows. My best understanding is that some bug causes the system to stay awake after one of the periodic wake ups to check for updates/notifications that happen in modern standby.

  • My work laptop just started doing this 3 weeks ago! It's insane. Rather new machine too.

    It gets so hot in my bag I actually worry about it starting a fire one day. I now take it out every night.

    Obviously I tried googling but no dice. Nothing changed, settings seem in order, no idea what to do.

the split thing got updates that juat made it unable to be removed except while the device is restarting

but also, it was really easy to accidentally lock the screen while removing it, at which point youd put it back on to get the password filled in again

that and if the battery got low, youd be stuck with it in the wrong configuration, so the screen would get scratched