Surface Pro 7 Freezing and Restarting

This issue seems to be tied to the display powersaving tech that Intel has called Panel Self Refresh, which may cause the display panel to not update in certain situations (though it's not good at figuring out what those situations are) to reduce power.

I've fixed it on my SP7 i5/8G/256G by installing the Intel Graphics Command Center from the Microsoft Store, opening it, going to System>Power>Panel Self Refresh and turning it off for both "On Battery" and "Plugged In".

I turned off the Panel Self Refresh for both "on battery" and "plugged".  So far so good.  1 day without a single freeze. My SP7 seems to work as it should.  I will report back again in a few days just to make sure.

EDIT: 2 days later, the issue is completely gone. Fixed. Millions of thanks to aeturnus to pinpoint the exact problem!

This issue seems to be tied to the display powersaving tech that Intel has called Panel Self Refresh, which may cause the display panel to not update in certain situations (though it's not good at figuring out what those situations are) to reduce power.

I've fixed it on my SP7 i5/8G/256G by installing the Intel Graphics Command Center from the Microsoft Store, opening it, going to System>Power>Panel Self Refresh and turning it off for both "On Battery" and "Plugged In".

I did the same on my SP7 i5/8/128 two days ago and haven't seen a restart since. So far so good. Thanks for the great tip.

I just purchased the Microsoft Surface Pro 7 and have only been using it for one day. In that time it has frozen and completely restarted itself 4 times. It is brand new and I probably only have an hour or two or screen time. There is no specific thing that causes it, the screen just randomly freezes until the surface restarts on it's own. Any solutions or help would be greatly appreciated. 

Same issue here. Bought Surface Pro 7 about 1 months ago for daughter school use. Started class this week, and it freezes every few minutes. It can freeze when watching video, or after saving a file... I need to get it solved it quickly. Quite disappointed.

Hi TuckerRobertson,

Thank you for reaching out to Microsoft Community. We are sorry to hear about what happen to your Surface Pro 7. Definitely this is not the experience that we want you to have.

May we ask if you already installed some applications on the device?

On the moment that the device freezes then restarts, were there multiple applications opened on the device?

You may try these steps to troubleshoot the issue and then observe if issue persist after these steps:

1: Run Surface Diagnostic Toolkit and check Windows Update

2: Update drivers and firmware

                               Check what is the current OS Build of your Windows version by going to Settings > System > About.

                               Go to Download driver and firmware for Surface, choose Surface Pro 7 then click Download on the next page.

                               Choose the .msi file that matches your current OS Build and click Next.

                               After downloading, run and install the .msi then Restart.

If this answer your question, we highly encourage you to inform our Community by clicking on Yes or marking my post as an answer. This will help other members who may have the same issue as you. Otherwise, don't hesitate to update us so we can further assist you.

Kind Regards,

Marrion Y.

This issue seems to be tied to the display powersaving tech that Intel has called Panel Self Refresh, which may cause the display panel to not update in certain situations (though it's not good at figuring out what those situations are) to reduce power.

I've fixed it on my SP7 i5/8G/256G by installing the Intel Graphics Command Center from the Microsoft Store, opening it, going to System>Power>Panel Self Refresh and turning it off for both "On Battery" and "Plugged In".

I have an SP7 i5/8G/128G, bought 4 weeks ago. It had this problem out of the box. Eventually I tried Microsoft helpline. They revamped drivers and stuff for an hour or two. But no fix. Then I followed this suggestion. That was 5 days ago: no recurrence of the problem. Seems to me that this solution should be widely publicised...including to Microsoft staff.