Troubleshooting Tales: Rebooting Microsoft Surface Takes Several Hours
30 January 2026 • by Bob • Windows, Troubleshooting, Microsoft
I ran into an interesting troubleshooting situation that I felt was worth sharing, because it serves as another example of why original assumptions when troubleshooting a misbehaving computer might not be accurate.
Here's the problem description: I had a Microsoft Surface laptop from my employer that worked fine for a while, but over time it began to take anywhere between 3 to 12 hours to cold boot or reboot, which made powering off the computer or installing Windows Updates an extremely painful experience. (Note that the boot times were approximate as I never tried to time a reboot or shutdown/restart.) Whenever the Surface started, the screen would be black, but if I touched the touchpad or pressed a key on the keyboard, the keyboard would light up to show that the computer was running, but nothing would happen for several hours. Then without warning the machine suddenly would wake up and everything would be fine.
Of course, trying to troubleshoot what might be wrong was an extremely unproductive experience, because anything I tried would always take several hours to check. I'll spare everyone the sordid details, but in my efforts to troubleshoot the issue, I tried all sorts of things like configuring several Windows services for delayed start and various performance-related settings, and all with no success. To workaround the slow startup behavior, I never rebooted this laptop for anything other than Windows Updates - I would always hibernate the computer instead of shutting it down. In the meantime, I had an HP desktop computer that worked great - it always rebooted with no problems.
I eventually decided that my Microsoft Surface was unreliable (and often unusable), so I requested a replacement from my employer, and I was sent another Microsoft Surface laptop. However, shortly after I received the new computer, the same behavior started happening. I spent a lot of time searching for users who had experienced similar behaviors with a Microsoft Surface, and I compared dozens of settings between my HP desktop and Microsoft Surface, and lots of other things that I won't bother boring you with. And all the while my HP desktop computer continued to reboot as expected.
Though I should mention that as a troubleshooting step, I reinstalled Windows from scratch on one of the Microsoft Surface laptops. My employer uses Microsoft Entra ID for federated user authentication and group policy, but I didn't initially rejoin this computer to Entra ID after reinstalling Windows, and the reboot problem went away - until I rejoined it to Entra ID. The problem returned after I rejoined the Microsoft Surface laptop to Entra ID, although I wasn't having any problems with my HP desktop computer that was also joined to Entra ID, so I theorized that the underlying issue might be something in Group Policy that was causing problems only with Microsoft Surface laptops, and this theory became yet another avenue for troubleshooting.
However, one day I had an epiphany: what if the issue that I was experiencing didn't have anything to do Microsoft Surface laptops? With that thought in mind, I abandoned the train of thought that I had been pursuing and - to make a long story short - I soon discovered the article Microsoft Entra joined computers experience a three hours delay during boot, which contained the fix that resolved the problem, and I'll explain the details:
What was going on was that even though all my computers were joined to the Entra ID domain, the network settings on my Microsoft Surface laptops were configured to use the NETBIOS name for the Entra ID domain as the "WORKGROUP" name instead of something else. When this happens, Windows will enter a wait state for 10,000 seconds, which is 2 hours and 47 minutes, and in my observation I witnessed Windows re-entering that wait state for two, three or four times, which would respectively be 5.5 hours, 8.3 hours, or 11.1 hours, which explained the "anywhere between 3 to 12 hours" symptom that I described earlier.
As soon as I updated the workgroup name to something else, my Microsoft Surface laptop rebooted in a matter of seconds like it was supposed to.
I'd like to say that I managed to resolve this issue over the short span of a few weeks, but... no. Since this only happened with my Microsoft Surface computers and not my HP desktop computer, I spent over a year thinking that this was some sort of problem that was specific to Microsoft Surface computers and attempting to troubleshoot the issue from that perspective, when that was never the case.
Darn.
Tags: Windows, Troubleshooting, Microsoft