14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft's Surface Book hit the shelves only a few days ago, but what seems to be a widespread issue has already been found by those who received the device on day one.
According to posts on Microsoft's support forums, a number of Surface Book laptops are suffering from screen flickering issues that occur all of a sudden when using the laptop.
Right now, there doesn't seem to be a pattern that could help replicate the issue, and most users explain that the screen flickering problem appears randomly either on the desktop or when running a third-party app. Here's how one of the users whose laptop got impacted by the issue describes the bug:
“Exact same thing here. (i7, 8gb, 256gb, Nvidia). It doesn't seem to do it when the screen is attached in laptop mode, but flipping the screen around makes the flicker like crazy. Spent about 2 hours with tech support on the phone. All we did was a complete factory reset and reinstall the latest firmware and drivers. One hour later, the flicker started right back up.”
Possible workaround
Microsoft has already confirmed that it's looking into the issue and explained that a fix is on its way. In the meantime, users seem to have found a possible workaround that appears to bring things back to normal temporarily.
Disabling Hyper-V is believed to be the only solution for the moment, so if your Surface Book is impacted by the very same problem, here's what you need to do.
Open a command prompt window with administrator privileges and type the following command:
Microsoft hasn't provided any specifics on the release date of this patch, but the company is probably working at full speed to ship it as soon as possible, so expect it sometime next week.