According to Microsoft’s most recent quarterly earnings report, the Surface line has become increasingly popular, growing to be the leader in its More Personal Computing line of business.

But despite Surface’s quick rise to fame, its future may depend on the company’s ability to address a reliability issue that has become the nightmare of many users.

Known as “Sleep of Death,” the bug holds the power to ruin the beauty that Surface is. From a performance perspective, it’s a good laptop and one that users could be really happy with.

But the problems occur when the laptop is not in use, because whenever the system goes to sleep for a few hours or more, chances are high that it’s not going to wake up – at least, not the same way it went under.

Overnight long sleep periods seem to result in unexpected system crashes. According to reviews of users who have experienced the unfortunate bug, the start of a workday usually involves bringing the Surface Book back from an annoying full shutdown.

And the bug doesn’t occur overnight only; the laptop can die over the span of a few meetings, or a slightly longer flight. You can be sure the Surface won’t make it if you’ve let it in Sleep mode.

The problem has become so widespread that it even has a name: Sleep of Death has become a turn-off among Surface users, particularly where Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book are concerned.

For example, searching “sleep of death Surface” on Reddit, the popular social news website, will yield some 50 relevant threads. Even more worrying is the fact that typing in the same search on Microsoft’s own support forums will return more than 75,000 results.

And it’s not rocket science to understand what the Sleep of Death stands for. When you leave your laptop in sleep mode, chances are it’s going to shut down. Then, it and needs to be powered back up, leaving users sifting through auto-saved versions of files, hoping they will avoid losing or corrupting their data.

At the moment, Microsoft doesn’t have any solutions for this problem, and if this has happened to you, pray that you’re still in the 30-day warranty period. Otherwise, you’re stuck with a malfunctioning laptop that you pay a load of money to have.
Image Source: PC Magazine