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[XiaNaphryz]

The eraser on the pen only works on applications that support it right?

Is there anything other than OneNote that supports it right now?

 

[Futureman]

it worked when I tried with Photoshop yesterday.

 

[XiaNaphryz]

it worked when I tried with Photoshop yesterday.

Didn't work in Paint, Paint.NET, or Gimp when I checked. Don't have Photoshop setup yet.

 

[Vinsanity.]

Just a few issues I've experienced since yesterday with my new SP4 (i5/128g)...

- blue screen (BAD_HEADER_POOL)
- Intel video driver crashed and recovered several times
- complete freeze, had to hard reboot it
- random speaker crackles while browsing or doing other small things
- while scrolling through webpages, the brightness or hue of the screen seems to change

Still not sure about this...

 

[WillyFive]

Just a few issues I've experienced since yesterday with my new SP4 (i5/128g)...

- blue screen (BAD_HEADER_POOL)
- Intel video driver crashed and recovered several times
- complete freeze, had to hard reboot it
- random speaker crackles while browsing or doing other small things
- while scrolling through webpages, the brightness or hue of the screen seems to change

Still not sure about this...

Those are the kinda things that make me question if Windows is even appropriate for a tablet. Tablet OS have far higher standards than Windows....

 

[Luigi87]

Best Buy in Canada I work at finally got the SP4s in, but no type covers.

 

[PaRappa]

yikes these reports are scary. my Surface Pro ONE was my post iPad 3 fling. I do love it but these issues i read about its bugs and performance really make me question my pre order. Help me gaf

 

[Phoenix Fang]

$2,699 for 1TB, 16GB RAM, i7

Thinking of taking the bite. Is it worth it GAF?

 

[Kermy]

I'm still on the fence as to keeping or returning my Surface Pro 4 i5. I like the idea of a tablet that's a full blown computer and the hardware portion of the Surface Pro 4 is nice but the software leaves a lot to be desired.

Problems I've experienced:
-When scrolling down pages with videos the temperature/color of the screen changes.
-The back camera does not work. It focuses but clicking the take picture button doesn't work. The front camera works however.
-Sometimes while the battery is charging Windows shows it as not charging even though the battery isn't fully charged.
-Screen distortion when I use the pen is annoying.

Will give it a little more time to see but right now I'm leaning towards returning it.

 

[Vault Dweller 111]

I don't have any issues with Windows 10 so far (that aren't in 8) besides this battery drain thing. Though hopefully disabling "Keep connected to WIFI while in sleep" stops that. I didn't bring my Surface to work today though, so we'll see I guess.

Just to follow up from yesterday from me:

Turned of wifi while in sleep mode.

Turned of all the background apps.

Manually put it in sleep mode when I stopped using it (I doubt this mattered)

No overheating and no battery drain (except from the little bit that you can always expect.)

So for now I'd say i've solved my issues.

 

[Yaari]

$2,699 for 1TB, 16GB RAM, i7

Thinking of taking the bite. Is it worth it GAF?

I think it depends on your expectations and what you plan on doing with it.

 

[Shogmaster]

Is the CPU basically a core i3/i5? I'm actually curious and can't easily find info on that. The base clock is a lot lower, but it turbos very high and can it still do that in a 4.5w TDP? or is that TDP only sustainable with occasional boost? Obviously there will be cuts elsewhere like the integrated graphics and I think no HEVC decode in hardware? But the gap between 4.5w and 15w is still huge.

The way I understand it, it will try to sustain the max clock if the cooling allows for it. So when it is going along the max clock, it is practically a Core U CPU. But often the cooling ceiling is reached after only few minutes and it throttles way down. That's where the performance difference comes from.

Intel took 15W processors (Core U), made tweaks to run at 4.5W (Core Y a.k.a Core M). Most of those tweaks require it to clock way down under load to maintain the 4.5W.

 

[szaromir]

I've decided to wait with my SP4 purchase until MS fixes Windows 10 - I don't want my contact with the new shiny hardware to be soured by its buggy and unstable OS. This Threshold 2 update is supposed to come in November, isn't it? Hopefully it fixes most pertinent issues with Win10.

 

[bobbytkc]

The Surface 3 is very different from a SP4, two very different markets.

?? The surface 3 is a smaller surface pro, with a corresponding reduction in processing power. It is exactly a surface pro mini. That is not to say they won't release an even smaller version in the future.

If you insist that the surface 3 is very different from a pro 4, you have to point out those differences to me. I don't know of any other than the smaller size and a corresponding reduction in capability.

 

[Steelyuhas]

Really liking the device so far, but as others have reported I'm also not getting the battery life that I should. There's definitely a Windows 10 with Intel's laptop processors issue. Not sure if it's a larger Windows fix that hopefully comes in TH2 next month or just a Skylake driver update that's needed. Hopefully it's delivered soon either way.

 

[Got the Shakes]

Really liking the device so far, but as others have reported I'm also not getting the battery life that I should. There's definitely a Windows 10 with Intel's laptop processors issue. Not sure if it's a larger Windows fix that hopefully comes in TH2 next month or just a Skylake driver update that's needed. Hopefully it's delivered soon either way.

How bad is it right now? I'm curious because I'm thinking about trying to grab one by the end of the weekend and I want to know what I might be getting into in terms of battery life.

 

[Maximo]

I've decided to wait with my SP4 purchase until MS fixes Windows 10 - I don't want my contact with the new shiny hardware to be soured by its buggy and unstable OS. This Threshold 2 update is supposed to come in November, isn't it? Hopefully it fixes most pertinent issues with Win10.

The Surface Pro line from what I have noticed is best bought a few short months after due to Software bugs, even then they still don't fix all the issues.

 

[Steelyuhas]

How bad is it right now? I'm curious because I'm thinking about trying to grab one by the end of the weekend and I want to know what I might be getting into in terms of battery life.

I'm getting 4-5 hours of battery life instead of the 9 that they estimate. Same thing happened when I updated my SP2 to Win10.

 

[Kyzer]

Didn't work in Paint, Paint.NET, or Gimp when I checked. Don't have Photoshop setup yet.

you probably have to mess with the pen settings for those programs

 

[Luigi87]

Got my SP4 i5 256 / 8 set up. Just need my programs now.

There's a bit of light bleed on the bottom, but I don't mind too much for what I will be working with, and I only see it on pure black screen.

 

[Divvy]

Dealing with MS phone support is just the worst. Definitely sticking to chat support from now on.

Goddamn

 

[Weevilone]

Got my i5/16GB/256GB config today..

I'm not sure what's normal for fan and battery. I fully charged it, then from battery I started to sync Dropbox. Battery estimate while doing this was like 3.5 hours.

I plugged it into the power adapter so it could charge while syncing. It's toggling between a white LED and blinking, and the fan is going nuts. All it's doing is downloading files from Dropbox.

 

[Lucius86]

Based on these reports I feel pretty happy my i7 isn't due until December....

 

[LukasTaves]

Got my i5/16GB/256GB config today..

I'm not sure what's normal for fan and battery. I fully charged it, then from battery I started to sync Dropbox. Battery estimate while doing this was like 3.5 hours.

I plugged it into the power adapter so it could charge while syncing. It's toggling between a white LED and blinking, and the fan is going nuts. All it's doing is downloading files from Dropbox.

It's probably indexing files and whatnot. CPU usage does come down after a few hours after initial setup.

 

[brotkasten]

Yeah, the first two months of Surface always seem very rough. The first pre-release firmware update (Oct 23, 3 days before launch) had to enable the Windows Hello feature on the camera. That's supposed to be a shipping feature and not a day-1 patch kind of thing.

The guy from the Surface Pro Artist blog tweeted that he had to stop using/reviewing the Book, because of constant lock ups. Brad Sams also mentioned how he was about to show off the undocking feature on the Book and it locked up.

Beta tested in the future and all.

 

[Grazzt]

Got my i5/16GB/256GB config today..

I'm not sure what's normal for fan and battery. I fully charged it, then from battery I started to sync Dropbox. Battery estimate while doing this was like 3.5 hours.

I plugged it into the power adapter so it could charge while syncing. It's toggling between a white LED and blinking, and the fan is going nuts. All it's doing is downloading files from Dropbox.

Pretty sure it's installing updates in the background. I noticed the same thing after updating to win10. Check task manager.

 

[Future]

Pretty sure it's installing updates in the background. I noticed the same thing after updating to win10. Check task manager.

Windows needs to make this transparent. Remember the same the thing on the pro 3.... First few days had horrid battery life due to updates and indexing

 

[darkinstinct]

Just a few issues I've experienced since yesterday with my new SP4 (i5/128g)...

- blue screen (BAD_HEADER_POOL)
- Intel video driver crashed and recovered several times
- complete freeze, had to hard reboot it
- random speaker crackles while browsing or doing other small things
- while scrolling through webpages, the brightness or hue of the screen seems to change

Still not sure about this...

The Pro 3 has a lot of random issues if updates are installed but the system didn't reboot or if there are updates waiting.

The calendar will pop up even if you touch nowhere even close to the lower right, apps can freeze, pen stops working in random spots, ...

I'd suggest doing a full system repair from Updates and then install all the current updates before actually using the device.

 

[WillyFive]

?? The surface 3 is a smaller surface pro, with a corresponding reduction in processing power. It is exactly a surface pro mini. That is not to say they won't release an even smaller version in the future.

If you insist that the surface 3 is very different from a pro 4, you have to point out those differences to me. I don't know of any other than the smaller size and a corresponding reduction in capability.

The Surface Pro is a very expensive and high end device intended for professionals, people who use it for work (such as businesses or media). But the regular Surface has far slower hardware (an Atom) and does not come with an included pen; it's pretty much simply a tablet that runs on Windows. I wouldn't expect people will be paying upwards of $1k for simply a tablet like the regular Surface 3 like they would with the Surface Pro line.

 

[PaRappa]

I have a Surface Pro 1 (which was always i5 and 4gb ram, I think) and I am pretty happy with the power it offers. I feel that it is on its last legs and I want to upgrade soon. Now I wonder: As I don't need much more power (I use it as a Facebook machine and some basic photoshop/premiere, I occasionally play some indiegames on it. Even the "Tomb Raider" reboot ran on it),
So I wonder how the m3 compares to the old i5 from back then.
I can't afford to spend too much money, so I'm not gonna drop 100 bucks more, if m3 would be enough for my needs. What do you guys think?

Im the same. Im going from a Pro 1, i5 4GB ram. I feel your pain on how un-portable the original was. My usage pattern is identical to yours too.

That's why the M3 seems like a dream. Has anyone seen any benchmarks on this unit?

 

[Jeels]

Just to follow up from yesterday from me:

Turned of wifi while in sleep mode.

Turned of all the background apps.

Manually put it in sleep mode when I stopped using it (I doubt this mattered)

No overheating and no battery drain (except from the little bit that you can always expect.)

So for now I'd say i've solved my issues.

So I assume for turning off wifi in sleep mode you just go into the battery settings. What about turning off background apps?

 

[Luigi87]

Ugh, I hate not having a type cover yet, lol

Had to update my wintab drivers though, as much like when I had SP3, ZBrush wasn't recognizing pressure sensitivity of the pen until I updated.

Anywho, aside from the minor light bleed on the bottom (which really I only see on black screens, like when booting up), it's been running really well thus far. ZBrush also seems to be running much better for me on this SP4 i5 256 / 8, compared to the SP3 i7 128 / 8, but I can't really determine that until I get a type cover, as ZBrush is basically unusable without a keyboard.

 

[Elitist1945]

Ordered the i5 8GB version from Best Buy. Store was out so they have to ship it in for me. I'm pretty excited.

 

[Purexed]

Anyone else get the new Surface Dock? Are you also having issues with the displays not always showing up when docking in from the SP4? Seems really random, and I'm hoping it's just a software issue. This accessory costs too much to wait around and hope it gets fixed.

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV5V_xQO9Jg

:lol

 

[Divvy]

The Surface Dock is 260 dollars in Canada.

What the fuck

 

[Purexed]

The Surface Dock is 260 dollars in Canada.

What the fuck

Yikes! 179.99 here with the Student Discount. Slick little device in theory, but I'm having some trouble getting it to work as advertised though...

 

[BeforeU]

So my gf bought the i5/128gb version. She is complaining about lagging. She told me over the phone that its slow. And all she does is IE/Chrome and MS Word.

wtf? My Pro 1 and Pro 3 with same spec worked flawlessly. i told her that sounds impossible and I will check it out in the weekend

 

[Weevilone]

So my gf bought the i5/128gb version. She is complaining about lagging. She told me over the phone that its slow. And all she does is IE/Chrome and MS Word.

wtf? My Pro 1 and Pro 3 with same spec worked flawlessly. i told her that sounds impossible and I will check it out in the weekend

Young and still updating/indexing maybe? I can't imagine it's actually slow.

 

[bobbytkc]

Young and still updating/indexing maybe? I can't imagine it's actually slow.

I would imagine that is indeed the case. When I first installed windows 10, I had the same issue of sluggish performance.

 

[Google]

The Surface Dock is 260 dollars in Canada.

What the fuck

I picked one up yesterday and yes it's super expensive. But it's essentially an additional power cable and the docking station in one device. So if you're in need of another charger (which you probably will be if you're looking to dock the thing at work or something) then it's a more reasonable ask when you look at the prices for an additional charging cable.

 

[Nitsuj23]

I would say avoid this thing the like the plague for now. The battery is abhorrent. It doesn't sleep correctly. That's the problem. There's no solution. It overheats in sleep mode. It dies faster sleeping than when it's on. I took it to work after lunch. It had 44% battery when I left, figured that should be good as there was only a few hours left in the day. After a 25 minute drive I took it out of my backpack and it was extremely hot (just like it was when I woke up after falling asleep with it in my bed) with the battery at 19%. It was dead within a half hour later. That's 44% to dead in less than an hour. It charges VERY slow. It sucks, because I like everything else but this is frustrating to no end. It's fucking terrible.

I'm coming from 11 years of Mac usage. I built a gaming PC last year. When WIndows 10 came out this year I was kind of pleased with it. I'm not doing iOS dev, so there's really no reason I NEED a Mac. This looked like the perfect mix of laptop and tablet. And it could be, but right now it. It's terrible as both. I'm undoubtedly returning it at the end of the return window. If the battery issues are fixed, I'll get another one. If not, a rMBP is in my near future. I say I'll get another one if battery is fixed because the battery on this device is already fucked from the constant cycling. I've charged and drained the battery like 7-8 times in 48 hours. This is killing the maximum capacity of the battery even when a fix does come out. I RARELY went through a full cycle on my previous MacBook Air in just one day. And I noticed the battery life on that was worse after 13 months. Not much worse, it's still great... but you notice 8 hours opposed to 9-10 for example. Now think about how less than one cycle per day over 13 months can take a hit on the maximum capacity and apply that to this scenario. The mamimum capacity is already lower and it's going through a ~week worth of cycles in a day. At this rate every four days is equivalent to a month of usage on the battery. So pissed. I learned my lesson about shit hardware and poor Windows experience when I tried a Dell XPS 15 the first few months of college in 2008. I'm not going to make this mistake again. Fully charged I get a battery estimated from W10 of around 4 hours.

Stay away from this piece of shit!

 

[Jeels]

I would say avoid this thing the like the plague for now. The battery is abhorrent. It doesn't sleep correctly. That's the problem. There's no solution. It overheats in sleep mode. It dies faster sleeping than when it's on. I took it to work after lunch. It had 44% battery when I left, figured that should be good as there was only a few hours left in the day. After a 25 minute drive I took it out of my backpack and it was extremely hot (just like it was when I woke up after falling asleep with it in my bed) with the battery at 19%. It was dead within a half hour later. That's 44% to dead in less than an hour. It charges VERY slow. It sucks, because I like everything else but this is frustrating to no end. It's fucking terrible.

I'm coming from 11 years of Mac usage. I built a gaming PC last year. When WIndows 10 came out this year I was kind of pleased with it. I'm not doing iOS dev, so there's really no reason I NEED a Mac. This looked like the perfect mix of laptop and tablet. And it could be, but right now it. It's terrible as both. I'm undoubtedly returning it at the end of the return window. If the battery issues are fixed, I'll get another one. If not, a rMBP is in my near future. I say I'll get another one if battery is fixed because the battery on this device is already fucked from the constant cycling. I've charged and drained the battery like 7-8 times in 48 hours. This is killing the maximum capacity of the battery even when a fix does come out. I RARELY went through a full cycle on my previous MacBook Air in just one day. And I noticed the battery life on that was worse after 13 months. Not much worse, it's still great... but you notice 8 hours opposed to 9-10 for example. Now think about how less than one cycle per day over 13 months can take a hit on the maximum capacity and apply that to this scenario. The mamimum capacity is already lower and it's going through a ~week worth of cycles in a day. At this rate every four days is equivalent to a month of usage on the battery. So pissed. I learned my lesson about shit hardware and poor Windows experience when I tried a Dell XPS 15 the first few months of college in 2008. I'm not going to make this mistake again. Fully charged I get a battery estimated from W10 of around 4 hours.

Stay away from this piece of shit!

Why don't you just shut it down instead of put it to sleep...?

 

[Nitsuj23]

Why don't you just shut it down instead of put it to sleep...?

Well MS advertises this as a tablet, correct? They also advertise it gets 9 hours of battery life (they tested using my exact model according to their store page). They state this is with default settings. I've altered the settings so it sleeps much sooner than default. I'm keeping battery saver mode on. And I have the brightness between 50-75%. I don't turn ANY other tablet off after using it. EVER.

I'm not going to compromise how I use a $1400 device when other products it competes against never have to be turned off. I can leave an iPad on for a week and come back and notice a less than double digit percent change in battery. Android 6.0 devices with doze are amazing as well. These are the products MS says it should be compared to. And this product is double or triple the cost of the those devices. What if everytime I wanted to check my (sold) iPad I had to wait a minute or two to turn on? Think people would be fine with that?

It's not working as intended and it's too expensive for that. It's like when Steve Jobs said hold the iPhone 4 different because the antenna was faulty with a certain grip. The shit is not okay for something that a) costs this much money and b) is advertised to have 9 hours of battery life with default settings.

I'm not the only one with this issue. It's near the top of the reddit.com/r/surface. I really have a hard time wrapping my head around statements like yours. The multi-billion dollar company makes faulty shit and the users should alter how a product is intended to be used so it can get marginally better results but still not in line with what was advertised. The battery still sucks when it's on. Like I said, the system estimates 4-5 hours fully charged.

Edit: Here are a few snapshots from the last 24 hours. Keep in mind the first screenshot is about 36 hours after starting it for the first time. It had and still has all updates. http://imgur.com/nlyjgj7

 

[Maximo]

Well MS advertises this as a tablet, correct? They also advertise it gets 9 hours of battery life (they tested using my exact model according to their store page). They state this is with default settings. I've altered the settings so it sleeps much sooner than default. I'm keeping battery saver mode on. And I have the brightness between 50-75%. I don't turn ANY other tablet off after using it. EVER.

I'm not going to compromise how I use a $1400 device when other products it competes against never have to be turned off. I can leave an iPad on for a week and come back and notice a less than double digit percent change in battery. Android 6.0 devices with doze are amazing as well. These are the products MS says it should be compared to. And this product is double or triple the cost of the those devices. What if everytime I wanted to check my (sold) iPad I had to wait a minute or two to turn on? Think people would be fine with that?

It's not working as intended and it's too expensive for that. It's like when Steve Jobs said hold the iPhone 4 different because the antenna was faulty with a certain grip. The shit is not okay for something that a) costs this much money and b) is advertised to have 9 hours of battery life with default settings.

I'm not the only one with this issue. It's near the top of the reddit.com/r/surface. I really have a hard time wrapping my head around statements like yours. The multi-billion dollar company makes faulty shit and the users should alter how a product is intended to be used so it can get marginally better results but still not in line with what was advertised. The battery still sucks when it's on. Like I said, the system estimates 4-5 hours fully charged.

Nothing wrong with what you said these issues such as waking up from sleep have been a problem since the SP1. Microsoft wants this to compete with other premium devices (Apple) but still doesn't offer the same level of quality in software and customer service, these issues shouldn't be so widely a problem with a device that costs this much.

 

[Nitsuj23]

So my gf bought the i5/128gb version. She is complaining about lagging. She told me over the phone that its slow. And all she does is IE/Chrome and MS Word.

wtf? My Pro 1 and Pro 3 with same spec worked flawlessly. i told her that sounds impossible and I will check it out in the weekend

Chrome scrolling is bad. Edge is much better. Turning on smooth scrolling helps a bit, but there's like a .5-1 second delay (maybe a tad longer) every time you initiate scrolling. Makes it feel very awkward even though once it starts scrolling it's smooth. To enable smooth scrolling in Chrome, type chrome://flags in the URL bar, and then choose Enable for Smooth Scrolling (near the bottom, you can 'ctrl+F' to find it quickly).

I've been trying to use Edge. But that has its own problems. No ad block is one. Sites with a decent amount of ads seem to CHUG. I know it's a terrible example, but mediatakeout.com on Edge compared to Chrome is night and day. Edge cannot handle that site due to ads. Chrome is fine with it.

This thing just kinda blows the more I think about it. Last time I trust reviewers.

 

[mrklaw]

Young and still updating/indexing maybe? I can't imagine it's actually slow.

I would imagine that is indeed the case. When I first installed windows 10, I had the same issue of sluggish performance.

Dear MS,

Please only do your indexing when the device is idle.

Signed,

Anyone with half a brain.

 

[mrklaw]

I would say avoid this thing the like the plague for now. The battery is abhorrent. It doesn't sleep correctly.

Stay away from this piece of shit!

Have you tried turning off wake on LAN or other wifi related settings? Even my bloody desktop won't stay sleeping since I updated to Windows 10. For now it wouldn't be the end of the world to shut down as it will start up pretty quickly. But I thought the waking up was mainly wifi/network related so you might be able to stop it from doing that?

 

[Futureman]

hmm... even after turning off the "Wifi while sleep" setting, I lost 7% battery coming in on the bus this morning (I didn't use it at all on the bus, it was just off in my bag). Took off charger at about 7:25 AM @ 100% and just checked at 8:46 AM and it's at 93%.

Basically I'm only using this thing as a digital illustration tablet. I'm so, so, so glad I didn't sell my MBP and go all in on using a Surface. The battery shouldn't be too big of a deal for my use, but I would be mad if this were my primary machine.

We'll see how the battery behaves throughout the day. This is only my 2nd day bringing it to work, the first time it was dead by 3 PM or so after 1 hour or so of screen time.

 

[EnVy_CaLiBeR]

Damn some these issues are making me a bit nervous. Glad I hesitated before choosing to pick one up at launch.