Well we discussed the Wifi issue and other minor issues with our review Surface Pro 3 unit a week ago here. There is still one major issue that has reared its ugly head again. When I say again, it’s because this issue was present in our Surface Pro 2, and would you believe its made its unfortunate comeback in the Surface Pro 3. High CPU load when coming out of sleep. It was or still is an issue that plagued the Surface Pro 2 for a good 6 months or more (Microsoft claim its fixed now)
Some of you might have experienced this. Sluggish system, rapid battery loss, sudden fan noise and heat just after coming out of sleep. But you’re doing nothing to tax the CPU? Sound familiar? You’re not alone. We have two units in our office and both suffer this issue. System and System Interrupts in the task manager are both sucking up CPU resources for no apparent reason when the system is idle even.
We assumed it was a configuration issue or drive issue with our unit. Firmware updates (two now) in as little as two weeks haven’t fixed this issue. Three full system restores and resets haven’t fixed the issue either. Microsoft support suggested this. So in our frustration we are trying to get to the bottom of this issue that saps battery life and power from our otherwise productive Surface Pro 3’s.
The issue lies within the Surface 3 Pro’s sleep. If you restart or shutdown, this issue is not present. But if you push the power button or sleep. Come out of the sleep within seconds, system and system interrupts start to take up of 25-35% of our Surface Pro 3’s CPU resources. Within a minute or two the fan is on and around 80% mark making a loud noise as if we were encoding a 4k video. All while making us want to record a Surface Pro 3 drop test video…
System and System Interrupts causing high CPU load on an otherwise idle system.
Now the odd thing is like the Surface Pro 2’s issue. If we play music, the system and system interrupt stop taxing the system. Suggesting its an Audio driver issue? A Realtek driver update doesn’t seem to have made a difference.
Running Latencymon we can see there is a huge amount of interrupts on the ACPI.sys within a few minutes. Definitely indicating there is a major issue present. We thought it might have been related to our MircoSD being present. Removing the drive it’s still happening. (This was an issue on the Surface 2 Pro at one point) Or a bad Bluetooth drivers. No such luck. Not even disabling devices has fixed the issue.
Overall this issue is a MAJOR problem and issue with the SP3 we feel and the crazy part is Microsoft knew about this issue and had this issue on the Surface Pro 2, yet let it slip into the development and testing of the Surface Pro 3. How can they have even allowed this to happen? Just push the product out for release knowing only too well it has major issues that will kill battery life and slow the system. It’s completely unacceptable and we can’t help but feel like we are beta testers for Microsoft. People that are the first adopters of the unit.
Microsoft, if you are reading, please get onto this ASAP. And feel free to contact us in regards to the matter. Customers are looking for a solution to this now, not 6 months down the line like the Surface Pro 2.
The temporary fix is to play music. Not a real fix, But if we find a real solution in the meantime MS get around to looking at this we will keep you posted. If you’re experiencing the same issues or have a fix, please add a comment below. I’m sure the Surface Pro 3 community can come up with a fix maybe faster than MS.