My Surface Book 2 is old, well out of any warranty, but still performs really well for my own needs. It's a home machine but can still run CAD, Revit, even (just) Microsoft Flight Sim, well enough to not consider a replacement. It was a little tight for storage (only 500GB on board) but a card in the SD slot doubled that for storing Flight Sim (about 450GB on its own)!
The then phantom touch arrived...
I didn't get a screen shot (below is my reproduction) but the other day on start-up it looked like a phantom finger was permanently pressing on the top left corner of the screen. It took over the cursor so you could not use mouse or touchpad. I could still keyboard tab around to get to the Start menu, restart etc, and occasionally screen touch did respond but the machine was unusable.
Fixes I tried
A cold start sometimes worked. If the touch is present Shut down, remove power (if on adaptor), restart, will work fine maybe one-third of the time. Turning off sleep meant it was it ok until next shut down, but still a pain.
You can disable touch, but it is a large part of why I like, have, the Surface Book!
Fixes Microsoft recommend
Then went through this sequence recommended in a Microsoft Support forum response:
- Before you begin
- Solution 1: Clean the screen
- Solution 2: Restart your Surface
- Solution 3: Reset touchscreen calibration
- Solution 4: Install the latest updates
- Solution 5: Check for electromagnetic interference
- Solution 7: Restore or reset your Surface
Here's the further recommended steps I tried:
| Microsoft Recommendations | Result |
|
Windows > Power > Restart. |
Passes OK when the problem is not apparent, detects error when is but cannot fix |
|
Boot to UEFI (hold down the Power on/off and Volume +, when windows logo appears keep holding volume +) and see if the issue is present. |
It was not |
|
Uninstall Device Manager > Human Interface >HID-Compliant Touch Screen driver(s) (right click and remove in Device Manager) and restart. |
Solves problem until next restart and the drivers are reloaded. These drivers are ancient (dated 2006) but still flagged 'current' |
|
Reinstall Windows |
Reluctant to do that so went in search of other ideas |
Because it was intermittent, I didn't think the hardware fault replace move was necessary.
The one that worked? *
The driver thing had me wondering if something was going on with them even though both Windows Update and the Surface Tool had checked them. On the Surface Support page there is a "Manually Update Your Drivers", choose your Model, and for Surface Book 2 there were links to msi full driver packages for Windows 10 and 11.
The one I installed was SurfaceBook2_Win11_22000_23.092.25731.0.msi.
It does not re-install Windows, just refreshes all the drivers leaving Windows, installed software and documents intact. After that normal startup resumed and I haven't had a problem. *
- SO FAR, I wrote this yesterday (2023-11-11)...
Updated 2023-11-13
So, today the problem came back. I suspect a driver updated or something similar. You cannot reinstall the MSI without going through add/remove but trying something else first. Seems odd to have two drivers for the same component and both are back. Disabling both removes touch fully, disabling the second one leaves touch intact and (so far...) not have the phantom touch on reboot.
Is it really a case of duelling drivers, time will tell...
Updated 2023-11-18
Nope, that didn't work either. Back to disabling touch till think of something else. That it's intermittent still leads me to think it is a software, rather than hardware, problem.
