[Article] Unresponsive display after waking up Dell Latitude 10 Essentials tablet

Since the A03 firmware update, a new problem seems to have come up with the tablet. When you wake up the tablet from sleep, the screen becomes completely unresponsive to the touch. The only way to get it back to work is to press and hold the power button to power down the tablet and press it again to power up the tablet. It is the same thing as pressing the reset button on a PC.

Now, I don't think the firmware is the culprit here. It most likely are the drivers that were released alongside the firmware. The issue is, we have to install these new drivers with the new firmware. That is specifically mentioned in the release notes. (This also applies to A04 update which I mentioned here.)

 

At first I thought it was an issue with Windows 8.1 Preview that I have been running for a couple of weeks. But when I refreshed the tablet and went back to the fresh Windows installation, the situation didn't change. It would randomly lose the touch support when it wakes up from sleep.

 

 

I talked with Dell Support personnel via Twitter. They told me to calibrate the display first but it didn't make the situation any better because it wasn't a calibration problem. Then they told me to refresh the tablet and see. When I told them that I had already done that, they told me to do a full recovery from the backup. I told them that I don't feel like going through with it.

[Article] Dell Latitude 10 Essentials new firmware A04

Today in the morning I got feeling that there could be a new firmware for my tablet because they never released a new firmware after Windows 8.1 Preview came out. Sure enough, there was a new firmware and its status was set to critical. I was only hoping for some performance increasing fixes. Doesn't seem that there is any with this update though. The firmware version is A04. The Latitude 10 tablet already had A05 a while back. Sad!  I hope that they are not updating the firmware less often because this is the cheaper version.

 

Anyways, they also had released new chipset drivers and they were required to be installed with this firmware update. 

The following are the release notes.

Level of Importance:Urgent
Dell highly recommends applying this update as soon as possible. The update contains changes to improve the reliability and availability of your Dell system.

Important Information
This BIOS must be used with version A04 or later Intel chipset driver posted on Support.Dell.com. Bitlocker must be suspended before flashing this BIOS. It can be changed via the "Bitlocker Drive Encryption" icon in control panel.

Fixes & Enhancements
1. Update Intel the latest code and need to use with version A06 or later Intel chipset driver posted on Support.Dell.com.
2. Fix BIOS flash utility display error when an admin password is set greater than 8 characters in BIOS SETUP.
3. Update the warning message in BIOS flash utility.
4. BIOS flash utility support password option.
5. Enhance Multiple Boot manager entries.
6. To improve system time shift.

I downloaded both the firmware and the drivers and updated the firmware first. Nothing out of ordinary happened. When it rebooted back to the desktop, I installed the drivers. Then it rebooted as well. Again, I didn't notice anything
out of the ordinary.