Surface Pro Hibernates or keeps Turning off randomly

Surface Pro is a refinement over previous models, but even the new avatar of the touchscreen laptop continues to suffer from hibernation problems. Complaints regarding the device turning off randomly continue to flood forum pages every now and then. Luckily, this issue’s fix has been tested and is now available to users. Here’s what you can do!

Surface Pro Hibernates or keeps turning off randomly

Upon first look, it appears the problem is not a hardware issue and so, exchanging the device would not be considered as necessary. Nevertheless, if you have a new Surface Pro that keeps hibernating or shutting down unexpectedly, you can try any of the following four methods to check if it works for you.

1. Update the Display Drivers to the latest version
2. Change the Display Drivers to the Microsoft Basic Display Adapter
3. Disable the ‘Panel Self Refresh’ option in the Intel Graphics Command Center
4. Remove ‘Modern Standby”‘ features and create a new (non-balanced) power plan.

The underlying issue is most likely related to firmware/drivers rather than the hardware itself. As such, it is advisable to try and update the display drivers from Intel, to the latest version.

1] Update the display drivers to the latest version

Visit this web page to download the latest display drivers from Intel as a ZIP file and extract the files from the ZIP file to a local folder.

Then, open the ‘Device Manager’ via Control Panel or through the ‘Run’ dialog box.

Expand ‘Display Adapters’ category. Right-click on ‘Intel(R) Iris(R) Plus Graphics’ and select ‘Update driver’ option.

Next, choose ‘Browse my computer for driver software’ > ‘Let me pick from a list of available drivers on my computer’.

Select the ‘Have Disk’ button and browse to the folder containing the extracted files.

Thereafter, in the ‘Graphics’ subfolder, select the file ‘iigd_dch.inf’ and click OK.

Hit the ‘Next’ button to install the latest Iris Plus drivers. This also installs the Intel Graphics Command Center application by default.

Read: Download latest Surface Pro, Laptop, Book drivers, firmware, software from Microsoft

2] Remove Modern Standby features & change Power Plan

Please note that this method requires you to change the Registry Editor. Serious issues can occur if the Registry Editor changes are made incorrectly. Create a system restore point before proceeding further.

Press Win+R key in combination to open the ‘Run’ dialog box.

In the box that appears, type ‘regedit.exe’ and hit ‘Enter’.

Thereafter, in the Registry window that opens, navigate to the following path address –

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power

Change the ‘CsEnabled’ value from ‘1’ to ‘0’. Click OK and restart the Surface Pro.

Next, choose the High performance Power Plan and see if that helps.

3] Change the display drivers to the Microsoft Basic Display Adapter

Open the Device Manager, again if you’ve closed it.

Locate ‘Display Adapters’ category. When found, expand it.

Right-click on ‘Intel(R) Iris(R) Plus Graphics’ and select ‘Update driver’.

Later, choose ‘Browse my computer for driver software’ > ‘Let me pick from a list of available drivers on my computer’.

Finally, select ‘Microsoft Basic Display Adapter’ and hit the ‘Next’ button to install the drivers.

4] Disable Panel Self Refresh option in Intel Graphics Command Center

Please note that the Intel Graphics Command Center is no longer available in the driver installer package with Windows Declarative Componentized Hardware (DCH) Graphics Drivers. So, if you wish to install a DCH driver, you can visit Microsoft Store. If the Intel® Graphics Command Center fails to install automatically, you can choose to install it, manually!

The above methods are some of the easiest and fastest ways to stop Surface Pro from hibernating or turning off randomly. The downside is that some remove color profile switching and possible GPU benefits. Also, a few of these, such as the Registry hack, go against official Microsoft recommendations.

If you are aware of any other methods besides the ones listed above, please share them with us in the comments section below.

Related read: Microsoft Surface won’t turn on, start-up or wake from Sleep.