Surface Pro 3: Connected Standby is Disabled When Hyper-V is Active

 

Microsoft has released a “bleeding edge” Surface Pro 3 designed to replace both a laptop and a tablet. Early reviews are mostly positive. A few negatives are emerging, including an incompatibility between Connected Standby and Hyper-V.

While Connected Standby has been a feature of phones and devices like the Nokia Lumia 2520 RT tablet, this is the first time this technology has appeared in an Intel non Atom x86 device. The Surface Pro 3 is the only Surface “Pro” device that supports Connected Standby. Surface Pro (original) and Surface Pro 2 do not support this power management protocol. For Windows Phone developers who wish to use Visual Studio 2013 with the phone emulator, this might be problematic as the emulator uses the Hyper-V functionality. If you install Visual Studio 2013, Connected Standby is no longer operational. Developers who install Visual Studio 2013 may notice that after installing VS 2013 that their Surface Pro is no longer performing in the same manner with respect to power management and resume from sleep and that Connected Standby no longer works.

Bottom line: this occurs because Connected Standby is not supported on a system running Hyper-V virtualization.

A current work-around to restore Connected Standby functionality is to use BCDEDIT to turn Hyper-V off when not needed and on again when you need to use the VS 2013 emulator to test Windows Phone Applications. If you are not developing phone apps, you can turn Hyper-V off and leave it off.

 

Steps to Turn Off Hyper-V:

1.If you have installed Visual Studio 2013, verify that Connected Standby is on or off by opening an administrative command prompt and typing

powercfg /a

 

As you can see in the screen capture below, Standby (Connected) is NOT supported. (The entry" The  hypervisor does not support this standby state" indicates that Hyper-V is active and the Connected Standby is not available).

 

 

2. Turn Hyper-V off by typing the following into the command window:

bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off

 

3. Restart your Surface Pro 3 (You must restart for the new configuration to become active)

After the Surface Pro 3 has been restarted, Connected Standby should be active again. You can check this by opening an administrative command prompt and typing

powercfg /a

 

As you can see, Standby (Connected) is now available which is the default configuration for Surface Pro 3.

 

 

When you need to enable Hyper-V, you can easily make it active again.

 

Steps to turn on Hyper-V:

1. Open an administrative command prompt and type:

bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype auto 

2.  Restart your Surface Pro 3

After restarting, Hyper-V will again be active (and Connected Standby will no longer function). You will be able to use the Phone Emulator in Visual Studio 2013.