Black bars on surface pro 7

Question

I recently upgraded my Surface Pro 7 to Windows 11 and now my surface screen has black bars all around it. My external displays work fine when connected. I have tried to change screen resolution on the Surface and the results do not change.

Answer 1

Is this for all your applications, or just your background image? If the latter, then perhaps your background image has an aspect ratio of 4:3 and that its fit is not set to 'Fill', which could make it show black borders on the Surface display, which has a 3:2 aspect ratio. If you hook it up to a monitor that does has 4:3 aspect ratio, it would be displayed properly.

In Windows 11, you can check this by going to Settings > Personalization > Background > Choose a fit for you background image.

--Ron

Answer 2

Ron ... It is for all applications but tried making changes and it had no impact.

Answer 3

Can you confirm if the background image is set to "Fit" ? If not after making changes on the settings, the device sometimes needs a restart to affect the changes.

Answer 4

Hi David Troutman1,

Thank you for reaching Microsoft Community. We're sorry for the trouble this has caused you. 

What build version of Windows 11 are you on?

a photo of your Surface device screen would be helpful so we can have a better view of what is happening.

For the meantime. Try the following steps below.

Run Surface Diagnostic Toolkit

See: Fix common Surface problems using the Surface Diagnostic Toolkit (microsoft.com)

Run the system file checker to check if there are corrupted system files that are just looping around causing this kind of issue to exist.   To run the system file checker, kindly type Command Prompt on the search box next to the Windows icon and run it as administrator. Once done, type and enter sfc /scannow.

Let it load, detect and repair those corrupted files. Whether it detects a corrupted file or not, kindly restart your Surface device afterwards.

Manually download Drivers and firmware

Go to Download driver and firmware for Surface, choose Surface Pro. Then click the link next to 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. 

Let me know how it goes.

Kind regards,

Lavenia

Answer 5

Lavenia:

Thanks for your help. Attached below are my current version and a picture of my desktop. You can see the screen is not full size and in essence has a black bar on the top and both sides. The screen resolution is 2736x1824 (Recommended.) I have two external monitors plugged in that work fine. I also did download and run the latest Firmware and Drivers file per below.

Thanks for your help!

DT