Complete failure of the Surface Pen 4

[todkapuz]

So I've had problems from the beginning with my surface pro 4.... my first surface product... but .. you know.. growing pains...... right..... anyhow.... most of them I figured they'd fix over time... but now I've come to the most failed thing I can..

today I applied the 11/2 firmware update, in hopes of solving many of the issues..

so far so good
but then 30 minutes after, I was playing around in my drawing program, having fun.. then it started acting weird.... I couldnt get what was happening (was in a vector mode) .... then finally i was like "are the settings off" ... pull up the setting deal in the program, and then I realize, its "clicking" as soon as it gets within hover almost... its like no cursor, hover for like 2 mm, then anything closer to the screen (still ages off) it acted like it was clicking 50% or something....

this of course made anything difficult.... and drove me into a complete annoying loop trying to use the surface to search for anything to fix the problem... then I got in a war with cortana... I'd write Tablet PC (for table pc settings) and it would show in the list i'd go to touch it, and she'd remove it and put other things in the list..... over .. and over... and over....

and while I will admit it was my fault.. i threw the pen across the room....... apparently the pens are really fragile... it now doesnt work at all.... changed the battery and everything, the light on the pen wont even light.

I want to love this product, it fits a lot of my wants..... but its so buggy I dont understand how it is even released....

 

[John M Beauchemin]

I gotta ask... when you were searching for a solution to the problem, why were you not just touching the screen? It is a touch screen, you don't need to use the pen for general navigation.

 

[todkapuz]

many factors.. writing is so much faster than typing on the type keyboard.... I dont have it scaled up much so all the menus are really too small to reliably "touch" with a finger, but quite fine with a pen.... (I've always used tablets with pen interfaces, I rarely touch the screen other than to manipulate "digital paper" in art.. I know I'm a fringe case there... I still don't use "tablet" mode on win10).. and of course pure frustration... I had actually gotten the bug to try drawing something more serious than some sketch work... and it failing in the middle of that.... and then I had already gone through hibernate-restore, and 2 reboot cycles... trying to get it to fix itself... as that typically fixed the whole touch interface dieing ..... could either hibernate and wake or just reboot...

Anyhow.... fixed by placing a washer inside the battery compartment (at least to get the pen functional) ... seems either there is a spring that i lost, or something moved inside .. i could hear the battery rattling. After doing that.. bat to expected input of only writing when touching the screen... instead of writing almost anywhere near the screen.. Although don't know what changed there. I would think it was stuck pressure sensor, but I did pull on and reset the nib during the "wtf is happening" phase....

I guess I've grown accustom to using wacom digitizers.... and never having any issues. I can't even remember a computer I've bought that has had such basic problems. Granted I typically build my own computers... I think the worst I've had was apple iphone's antenna-gate... but even that was mild compared to a system that crashes, drivers completely fail, and the primary interface fails regularly. I wouldn't really care much if this was a $250 tablet....