Over the last year, we have bought a number of Microsoft Surface Pro 7 that have proven to be problematic. We identified that the CPU clock speed does not go over 1Ghz and the machine becomes extremely slow as users work on them.
After researching and testing all solutions, none of them seem to resolve the issue. Found this posting on Microsoft forum that has most of the common fixes (Surface Pro 7 CPU stuck at low clock speed [Possible Fixes & – Microsoft Community) however none of them worked for us.
Few days ago, I came across this article (Best practice power settings for Surface devices – Surface | Microsoft Docs) that talks about the how the “Surface dynamically fine tunes how power flows to individual hardware components“.
In the same article, it talked also about “Surface is imaged with a custom power profile that replaces legacy sleep and energy consumption functionality with modern standby features and dynamic fine tuning. This custom power profile is implemented via the Surface Serial Hub Driver“.
By disabling the Surface Serial Hub Driver, we are now getting speeds over 3 Ghz on the same device. To disable this service:
- Go into the registry of the machine by using Regedit.msc
- Go to HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SurfaceSerialHubDriver and locate the START attribute
- Change its value to 4 and restart the device
- Check Task Manager to confirm CPU clock speed
IMPORTANT NOTE!
After restarting, the machine will function faster HOWEVER note that the power\battery icon will be gone! you will not be able to determine battery life on the device. Also if you run powercfg.exe /batteryreport it will state that no battery is installed!
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