I picked up my Core i7 Surface Book with 8Gb of RAM and 256Gb of PCI-e storage the day they opened the new shop in Sydney. It was an awful experience, queuing up for hours in the hot sun, even in the VIP line, but I was completely sure it would be worth it. And initially it was pretty good, until I actually started using it as my daily driver. Once I started using it to browse the internet, huge holes opened up to swallow my user experience whole. The display driver crashed and recovered three or four times an hour and if I was stupid enough to try and watch a few videos back-to-back, then I was guaranteed of a crash in Edge or a BSOD if I was using IE.
OK, teething trouble, I thought, all will be fixed in a few weeks. So I dutifully installed all the updates and, for a time, it did improve slightly. Once I realised that Microsoft's own browsers were causing most of the problems, installing Firefox made the most significant difference yet.
Sadly, that just meant I could use it enough for all the other problems to become more obvious. It loses the keyboard/trackpad several times a day now, requiring me to detach and re-attach the Clipboard. Unfortunately, all that extra attaching and detaching has taken it's toll and I can now no longer detach the Clipboard at all, as the left clamp is stuck. So now I have to take it back to be fixed and be without a laptop for who knows how long. I've never had to take a computer back to be fixed in the 21 years I have owned PCs. Worse, though, is that I know when I get it back, only one of the several problems I have will be fixed and I'll still have to put up with the others until Microsoft gets around to fixing them properly.
In the past, I'd have cut Microsoft some slack because their OS has to work with millions of different configurations but this is their OS running on their hardware. If they can't make this work, what hope does anyone else have of a half-decent experience. I am now seriously considering selling the Surface Book when it gets fixed and buying a new laptop that I can run with Windows 8 and no problems. I'll probably lose a grand or more on my folly but I suppose that's a lesson learned.
OK, teething trouble, I thought, all will be fixed in a few weeks. So I dutifully installed all the updates and, for a time, it did improve slightly. Once I realised that Microsoft's own browsers were causing most of the problems, installing Firefox made the most significant difference yet.
Sadly, that just meant I could use it enough for all the other problems to become more obvious. It loses the keyboard/trackpad several times a day now, requiring me to detach and re-attach the Clipboard. Unfortunately, all that extra attaching and detaching has taken it's toll and I can now no longer detach the Clipboard at all, as the left clamp is stuck. So now I have to take it back to be fixed and be without a laptop for who knows how long. I've never had to take a computer back to be fixed in the 21 years I have owned PCs. Worse, though, is that I know when I get it back, only one of the several problems I have will be fixed and I'll still have to put up with the others until Microsoft gets around to fixing them properly.
In the past, I'd have cut Microsoft some slack because their OS has to work with millions of different configurations but this is their OS running on their hardware. If they can't make this work, what hope does anyone else have of a half-decent experience. I am now seriously considering selling the Surface Book when it gets fixed and buying a new laptop that I can run with Windows 8 and no problems. I'll probably lose a grand or more on my folly but I suppose that's a lesson learned.