Surface Pro 3 – No Sleep Option

Just bought a new Surface Pro 3 and have been having some weird behaviour. Seems to start after i had finished installing Visual Studio 2013.

Was bugging me that the sp3 didn’t power up quickly or resume nicely. Turns out it was effectively powering off all the time as sleep mode was not available. Was also having some weird behaviour where touching the keyboard the keys would light up but the screen would stay blank for ages until I pressed a few more keys. Plus closing the cover would effectively hibernate my machine.

Further investigation highlighted that when I install windows phone emulators it enabled hyper-v which runs on the metal with win 8.1 above it. This disabled sleep mode as an available option!! (would be a problem on any win 8.1 machine, not just surfaces)

So best way around this is to use an admin command to disable hyper-v (http://winsupersite.com/mobile-devices/surface-pro-3-tip-hyper-v-vs-connected-standby)

Better still, is to create a new boot entry with hyper-v disabled and then select which you need at boot up. (http://www.hanselman.com/blog/SwitchEasilyBetweenVirtualBoxAndHyperVWithABCDEditBootEntryInWindows81.aspx)

I’ve actually done the opposite of what Scott Hanselman said as I want my default win 8.1 boot to be hypervisor disabled and for my ‘other os’ option to be enabled. Either way.. now works as advertised and resumes from sleep sub-second and closing the cover sends it to sleep.

So I did this..

C:\> bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off
The operation completed successfully.

Then (note that the GUIDs will be different on your machine)

C:\>bcdedit /copy {current} /d "Hyper-V Enabled"
The entry was successfully copied to {ff-23-113-824e-5c5144ea}.
C:\>bcdedit /set {ff-23-113-824e-5c5144ea} hypervisorlaunchtype auto
The operation completed successfully.

Also then went into advanced settings and changed default start-up delay from 30 seconds to 5.

Anyhow.. interesting!