Microsoft's Surface Pro X Cameras Have Suddenly Stopped Working (theverge.com) 45
Microsoft's ARM-based Surface Pro X tablet is not having a good time, and neither are its owners. From a report: According to multiple reports, the tablet's cameras stopped working out of the blue, showing a cryptic error when trying to launch the Windows Camera app or other software: "Something went wrong. If you need it, here's the error code: 0xA00F4271 (0x80004005)."
The first thing that comes to the user's mind when experiencing issues like this is reinstalling the corresponding driver. However, this is not true with Surface Pro X's botched cameras. Affected customers say removing and installing camera drivers on the Surface Pro X has no effect and leaves them stranded, unable to join video calls, take pictures, and perform other camera-related tasks. More importantly, the bug also breaks facial recognition, forcing customers to use their PIN codes instead.
The first thing that comes to the user's mind when experiencing issues like this is reinstalling the corresponding driver. However, this is not true with Surface Pro X's botched cameras. Affected customers say removing and installing camera drivers on the Surface Pro X has no effect and leaves them stranded, unable to join video calls, take pictures, and perform other camera-related tasks. More importantly, the bug also breaks facial recognition, forcing customers to use their PIN codes instead.
Microsoft & cameras (Score:4, Interesting)
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That bad? One would think that even Microsoft would find that level of demonstrated incompetency unacceptable. Apparently not.
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Not really. The OP is just talking out of his arse. Aside from Surface Pro 4 quality issues, you shouldn't ever expect to see a blue screen ever on a surface. In the mean time Edge (for what shitty browser it is) has the best PDF editor with not taking support on the market (and I count paid apps among that), and Teams ... well that is just the worlds biggest bucket of shit on any hardware platform.
Even this article points to a simple firmware bug. Surface Pro X owners have spotted that they can roll their
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Ok, thanks. I was a bit surprised. To my knowledge, the only thing that MS makes with reasonable or good quality is hardware.
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I have been using a Microsoft brand 720p camera for many years. It got me through the pandemic like a champ. I have never had a problem with it.
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It's probably a rebadged Logitech (or whatever) camera with custom plastics from before Microsoft thought they could do hardware and found out that it's kinda hard.
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You'd think with Microsoft in charge of the whole experience it would work but it sucks all the time
The fact that Microsoft is in charge of the whole experience is a sign that everything will sucks.
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Your anecdotal evidence is pretty shoddy. In FIRST Robotics, the HD3000 cameras were the go to for mounting on robots, and I use a couple of them on my 3D Printers through OctoPrint running on Raspberry Pis. The cameras are great, they just work. Microsoft has created some great hardware over the years, and honestly, I can't think of much hardware they've done that has even been slightly buggy, though Surface PCs certainly have a pretty big potential for issues.
Most of the replies to this question are prett
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Microsoft has made a lot of pretty reliable hardware over the years, true.
But it seems like every Surface device has had some terrible problem.
Perhaps Microsoft is competent enough for peripherals, but not whole systems? That would jibe with other things we know about them.
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From what I've seen personally from the Surface models and from what's out there on the Internet, they're pretty shoddily constructed, prone to all kinds of malfunctions. I had to work on a previous model of Surface that the camera kept disappearing, and yeah, the old trick of deleting via the Device Manager and forcing a hardware reload would work for a while, and whether it was updates or something else, it would happen again. In the end my coworker dumped it because the keyboard started sporadically malf
win2k (Score:2)
Win2k bug finally strikes by delayed action.
What, not even a blue screen? (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft is really cheapening out these days...
Haha (Score:3)
Microsoft is full of these. Anyone remember the infamous Zune (Microsoft's attempt to copy the iPod) bug? Every Zune bricked itself Dec. 31st 2008. Was funny as hell. https://it.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]
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Fast, OLED screen, SSD storage, played videos, music, and even FM radio in a small form factor. I've never had it blue screen or crash, which is startling considering it's a microsoft product.
However, too late to be of any use, as phone media was already taking off when it was released.
I still have mine at home, and use it at the gym when I don't feel like lugging my phone around.
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It even had HD Radio on it and an app store!! Zune HD was an amazing device.
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What about the interface software when you connect it to a PC? Was that the same as for other Zunes? I know someone who bought one. The hardware might have been decent, but the interface on the software was an abomination that should have been killed with fire, buried at a crossroads and staked to the ground with a leaded steel spike through its charred heart,
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But was it as awful as the iTunes interface?
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The iTunes interface was always pretty bad, I'll grant you, but it didn't really qualify as an abomination. The Zune software. That was an abomination. Style over substance and usability seemed to be the mantra of whoever developed it.
Camera as a Service (CaaS) (Score:3)
MS is probably going to start charging subscriptions for use of the cameras on these devices and this code "enhancement" slipped out early.
I'm halfway joking but after seeing what others are doing with making hardware features available via subscription, I won't be surprised when MS/Apple/Google start doing this.
It's a Microsoft hardware device (Score:2)
Why even mention ARM?
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Incidentally the 9 was released 3 years after the X so X does not mean "10".
When X is otherwise used in place of a number it’s usually a variable, so it’s shorthand for “Surface Uncertain Value”.
Fair warning, I say.
Sorry If This Is Considered Offtopic (Score:5, Insightful)
This is one of many reasons I despise Microsoft software. When I develop software, I make sure that my error message contains as much data as possible about what went wrong. Even if the user can't figure out the issue on their own, the info will be extremely useful to someone who can. And yet, somehow a multi-billion dollar company insists on spewing out these absolutely useless error codes with no other valuable info. It would be a different story if these error codes were reserved for extremely specific scenarios which you could identify via a web search. However, the last time I tried to troubleshoot an issue using the code, the list of possible issues provided by Microsoft's documentation was a whole mess of entirely vague and unrelated issues. It's bad enough that their shit fails so often for seemingly no reason, but I have no confidence in the competency of a company when they can't even give me a vague description of the problem. Would you feel comfortable having your car fixed by a dealership that can't properly describe the problem and can only regurgitate a code?
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>>> When I develop software, I make sure that my error message contains as much data as possible about what went wrong
So, when you get to 50,000,000 lines of code, which likely contain 1,000,000 error conditions, how much will your program be bloated by those 1,000,000 detailed error messages? And how much will it cost you to localize those error messages into 100 different languages? And how often will the best you can do be "The credential is invalid", because the error is coming from a mid la
Re: Sorry If This Is Considered Offtopic (Score:2)
1 million errors times 1000 characters. Oh boy, it's a whole gigabyte.
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Less than that when compressed for delivery over the internet, since that's how we do software now. Turns out plaintext compresses really well, especially as you add more plaintext since there is inherent repetition of words.
I'm pretty sure when it comes to the balancing act of "do we use slightly more disk and bandwidth to not have thousands of negative customer service interactions" the math is pretty easy. But this is Microsoft we're talking about, and evidence shows that my guess may be incorrect for
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Right, because it's so much better to have your customer support switchboard blown up by having millions of people calling about something that could potentially be resolved by having a remotely useful error message.
I think I'd rather have the "bloated" code that has compressable text in it, than paying hundreds of people to answer the same stupid questions that could be resolved through a useful error message + self help every hour of every single day.
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how often will the best you can do be "The credential is invalid", because the error is coming from a mid layer that doesn't know what the app layer is doing, or why the lower layer is unhappy?
I hate Microsoft error numbers with a passion, but I'm not sure that there's a better answer at their scale.
Microsoft is in control of all the layers. If they can't get a meaningful error out of the software, they are just straight fuckups.
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If you wanna get fancy, dump a few registers, give me a list of DLLs mapped into the process space, just basics. It can be behind a "more info" button.
Re:Sorry If This Is Considered Offtopic (Score:4, Interesting)
It's great when an error code is useful, but if it's unique you can at least look it up. ...in theory, because lately I've been getting 404s on a lot of Microsoft documentation links. Keeping web pages up has historically (if ironically) been something Microsoft has been good at. Apple was deleting documents that made them look bad, while Microsoft was keeping resolutions for bugs back to DOS 5.0 on their site. Suddenly, they are removing them by the score.
So while Microsoft's terrible errors are irritating, the fact that they're removing the documentation for them is the real problem. They simply cannot be trusted.
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Remark statements are not visible to the end users.
SMH.
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It's in no way limited to just Microsoft, the "something went wrong" brain rot is pervasive throughout the entire industry. When something goes wrong, the system tells you "Something went wrong" so you know that something went wrong. Little to no other information, just the one thing you already know has happened, that something went wrong.
To think that numerous people across a range of companies actually think this idiocy is a good idea...
0x80004005 (Score:2)
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#define E_FAIL 0x80004005
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Surface camera trouble nothing new (on tablets) (Score:3)
I used to own a Surface Pro 6 at work. I tried putting Linux on it using the work of the linux-surface project at GitHub. They have had a heck of a time getting camera support working under Linux on many of the models. And they've spent years trying. I'm not sure what's so special about the cameras in surface devices -- I suspect it has something to do with them being capable of handling the facial recognition Windows Hello uses. You can go to this page [github.com] to see what I mean. Only the first three generations of surface tablets have cameras working under Linux.
What a horrible world! (Score:2)
Cert Expired? (Score:5, Informative)
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Wouldn't simply changing the date of the device off network, and reboot off network be a simple test?
Re:Cert Expired? (Score:4, Informative)
And look at this from Verge:
"Surface Pro X owners have spotted that they can roll their date back to May 22nd, and the camera works again. The workaround might be effective, but rolling the system date back can cause issues with authentication to certain websites and services, so this is only a temporary fix until Microsoft addresses the root cause."
Spot on, laughingskeptic.
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Wait, STOP, _don't_ fly it over the International Date Li.... too late.