A Tale of Two Surface Books

[ytrewq]

A buddy and I bought Surface Books on pre-order.

For the last three months, I have been very happy with mine. I've had the same driver issues that SB owners have almost universally experienced (eg., Facebook wouldn't scroll with the two-finger-touchpad for weeks, crashing when waking from sleep, etc.). But these unfortunate-but-temporary glitches didn't detract from my overall positive experiences.

For the last three months, my buddy has been at wit's end with his. Endless crashes and problems. We had lunch a couple weeks ago, and he said he was trying one last thing, and if that didn't fix it, he was returning it for a refund.

Well, the "one last thing" he tried was to take it back to a clean factory install and, this time, *not* let his work install a bunch of software that they had installed last time to make his device work within the company firewall. (Instead, he now accesses his work network through a VPN.) Otherwise, he put all the same software back on. Surprise, surprise: The Surface Book has worked perfectly for the last two weeks. He's completely thrilled with it, and insists that he will never let his company's IT guy touch one of his computers again.

Now, one could certainly make the argument that the company's IT guy has gotten plenty of other devices to play nicely with the company's software, and clearly the Surface Book had some kind of conflict with it that other people's laptops didn't have. Shame on the Surface Book! I suppose that's a fair argument.

But fair or not, my buddy is now thrilled with his Surface Book. And I'm thrilled with mine.

For those who are not yet thrilled with theirs, I hope you find a solution soon.

 

[Lethal_NFS]

I don't think it was anything the IT guy put on the Surface. And if it is, that is a big problem that needs to be fixed still. You should not have issues like that because you are trying to use the laptop for work.

However, I have heard that a fresh install has fixed a lot of users issues with their Surface Book. But removing things required for work to fix an issue is not fixing an issue at all.

 

[worwig]

Maybe IT was installing something that blocked the updates that were needed to make it stable.

 

[photios]

I had terrible problems with my Surface Book, and I can trace everything, I know this sounds crazy, to the fact that I initially setup my laptop with my Microsoft ID instead of a local account.

I wiped my machine and reinstalled windows, but set it up with a local account first (adding in my MS account once everything was set up) and since then, I have had no problems, other than my battery draining during sleep.

 

[zerospace-net]

I had terrible problems with my Surface Book, and I can trace everything, I know this sounds crazy, to the fact that I initially setup my laptop with my Microsoft ID instead of a local account.

I wiped my machine and reinstalled windows, but set it up with a local account first (adding in my MS account once everything was set up) and since then, I have had no problems, other than my battery draining during sleep.

That's interesting, because I always have to do it this way. I use mac address filtering on my wireless router, so I always need the wireless adapter's mac address on every new device before I can connect to my router. This means I'm forced to set up a local account first, so I can get in and grab the mac address and then after connecting to the internet, finally switch to an MS account.

 

[photios]

I went to a Microsoft Store for support because I could not download from the Microsoft App Store. After an hour and a half of trouble shooting, I was told to wipe the machine and setup with a local account first. Later that same day, I then discovered online someone who had the same problem, and he was given the same advice by a a MS support tech over the phone to wipe his device and startup also with a local account first..