Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 patch breaks webcam, says goodbye to Hello

A new firmware patch for Microsoft's Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 is causing problems for device owners, according to various complaints from forum users.

As InfoWorld reports, complaints are already starting to roll in from Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 owners who have applied the update and found it has messed up other elements of their machine.

The most common moan seems to be related to the webcam, with failures to function with Windows Hello when logging in being reported, and indeed failures to function full-stop. There are also complaints about touchpad glitches.

This is the third post-release firmware update Microsoft has implemented, and it makes tweaks which are supposed to improve system stability, and also a raft of touch optimisations and a driver update.

In terms of problems that still remain after the patch, other users have reported that they are still getting display driver crashes, and having trouble waking their device from sleep.

Frequent follies

Microsoft's last firmware update, which was issued just over a fortnight ago, was aimed at tackling the screen flicker issue that had plagued some users, and also introduced a number of general stability fixes.

But the wisdom of this approach of firing out frequent firmware updates is quite rightly being questioned by Surface owners.

Firmware updates are critical releases and should be well-tested to ensure they don't cause any extra problems, and released over a longer timescale as such – a flurry of firmware tweaks right after the launch of a product is obviously not a good sign, and not a good strategy.

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