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SB Screen Black After Timeout but Other Monitors Come Back

rlrcstr

New Member
I have a 1TB i7 Surface Book on a dock with two additional monitors. I see many posts about a black screen after sleeping, but folks still see the mouse. This behavior is a bit different.

After the monitors time out, and only occasionally, when I move the mouse, the external monitors light up, but the SB screen stays black. It's still there, in the configuration, but it's black. I do not see the mouse pointer on it, but when dragging windows, etc. you can tell the monitor is still there, you just can't see anything on it. Almost as if it's just the backlight that doesn't come back on. The touchscreen is active. (If I touch the screen, the mouse pointer disappears from the external monitor view.) If I close the surface and wait for the OS to reconfigure the displays and then re-open the SB, I get the screen back after the OS does it's re-reconfiguration.

Any thoughts on how to correct this issue?
 

Cimmerian

Member
I have a 1TB i7 Surface Book on a dock with two additional monitors. I see many posts about a black screen after sleeping, but folks still see the mouse. This behavior is a bit different.

After the monitors time out, and only occasionally, when I move the mouse, the external monitors light up, but the SB screen stays black. It's still there, in the configuration, but it's black. I do not see the mouse pointer on it, but when dragging windows, etc. you can tell the monitor is still there, you just can't see anything on it. Almost as if it's just the backlight that doesn't come back on. The touchscreen is active. (If I touch the screen, the mouse pointer disappears from the external monitor view.) If I close the surface and wait for the OS to reconfigure the displays and then re-open the SB, I get the screen back after the OS does it's re-reconfiguration.

Any thoughts on how to correct this issue?

I too have a 1tb i7 Surface Book docked to 2 monitors, I had similar issues.

Sadly Microsoft's docking solution this time around seems to be a bit finicky. I have 2 docks, one at home, one at work, both demonstrate what you are describing. I have even had multiple Surface Books through warranty and the problem has been consistent across them. Sadly my only solution has been to basically never sleep my Surface Book or anything it is attached to, luckily with the NVME SSD shutting down and booting back up takes almost no time at all. Of course this depends on what you have open, it can be a pain sometimes. But I've found that if I sleep my device the least that I can I have little to no issues with anything at all.

Probably not the solution you are looking for and maybe someone else has solved issues like this, but thought I'd share that I've had similar experiences.
 
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