Bringing back an old thread here... For background my first SP was an SP1 purchased at release time. To use Rowenaldo's term it was OK for the first year, then MS got most of the bugs ironed out after a year making it OK+. Even with Win8 on it I thought it was nice enough that I purchased an SP2 thinking MS had gotten all the bugs out. They NEVER got all the bugs out of it (mostly wifi and BT). The first was total garbage stability-wise, swapped for a 2nd one. I vowed never to get another SP. To this day the SP2 is a POS, thus I run Insider builds on it just to play around and offer feedback - I won't care less if it gets bricked. Just last week I broke down and got an SP4 i7. I decided that MS had finally flushed out all of the firmware and driver bugs that have plagued it not to mention Connected Standby (CS) and Hello and thought Win10 AU would be really nice on it. So far I am pleased; it has been better than OK, but not super fabulous. So... here are the impressions of someone who is not new to SPs (or RS builds) but is new to an SP that actually mostly works (not to mention a phone user since 6.5):
Out of box experience was nice. It set up like you expect a Win10 device to set up. Getting the pen connected and setting up Hello were fast & straightforward. I knew I would have to pull an all-nighter though - there would be tons of driver, firmware, and Windows updates, followed by a forced install of AU
First problem - unbeknownst to me AU kills CS on many SP4s causing them to get stuck in a high, constant CPU state - and mine was one of them. Searched the web, found a solution, did some regedits, rebooted, changed advanced power options, back to regedit, more changes, reboot. But did it work? To know for sure I spent more time on the web, ran some tests, and finally decided yes. But this one incident consumed several hours. Why MS can't get the out of box experience nailed EVER (except for mice & keyboards) is beyond me. Being an Insider since its inception I am not even sure how such an issue went unnoticed.
With everything installed and configured I am VERY happy with the overall speed of this thing. I do engineering tasks that are CPU intensive and this thing flies. I still can't believe it. It IS a dual core after all, but you would never know it. Pen works great. Display is wonderful. Fully adjustable kickstand is marvelous (my old SPs were only 2 position). Type keyboard is surprising useful, much better than in the past. And it works every time. CS is better than I thought it would be in terms of usefulness and battery consumption
Nagging issues:
1. Hello, which in the first days worked flawlessly every time (without training!) is now spotty. I have now trained it several times. Better, but not great. Not sure why it isn't as good as before.
2. Hello does not always work after coming out of hibernation. It gets stuck in a "getting ready" state, requiring an alternate logon. After that it is fine coming out of sleep, but again can fail after hibernation. I have given up using Hello on my 950XL, but I REALLY want this to work on my SP4 - it is much more useful on a PC IMHO
3. Today for the first time it totally froze. There is a known AU freezing bug - but this is not my issue since I do not have a second drive. This pisses me off. I have endured way too many freezing issues on my SP1 and SP2 over the years. If it happens a couple more times I'll send it back. Period.
4. Wireless SUCKS! Why MS has stuck with Marvell since Day One is beyond me. Is Marvell a major stockholder or something?
a. WiFi just randomly pukes once or twice a day. The only good thing I can say is that it does recover (unlike my SP2 which requires a reboot)
b. WiFi link rates are horrible. I never see better than 130Mb/s on ANY network. It frequently drops from 130 - a lot
c. Pair a BT device and you pay the price - link rate drops to 30mb/s, sometimes even less. I've stopped using a BT mouse and turned off BT as a result
d. It sucks equally in the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands
e. They say it is AC, but it isn't really capable of AC speed, even under ideal conditions. It isn't even capable of N speeds. They should be truthful and call it "G+" or something
This thing is SO close to being excellent. Maybe they'll get it there before freezes force my hand
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