Surface Pro 3 Real Life Experience

Started to use Echo Buds on a windows desktop computer. The freedom of no wires is great. Battery life so far has been sufficient for most conference calls and music listening.

Music

had to change the equalization. The buds are just too bass heavy making it very tiring to wear them for a longer time. Found some useful links to help with this.

Equalizer:
First needed to get an equalizer for windows 10. This blog describes it very well: https://helgeklein.com/blog/2019/01/free-equalizer-for-windows-10/

Frequency response:
Started to adjust the equalizer to make the sound more pleasing. Then wanted to have some kind of confirmation that I was not fooling myself. This following side has a good review of the echo buds and shows the frequency response: https://www.soundguys.com/amazon-echo-buds-review-27692/

Conference calls

Works very well for conference calls.
Microphone is sufficient. Don’t expect any high end quality.
No wires is just great.

Glossy screens might be useful for color rendering, but for normal work related tasks they are horrible. So I needed a non glare screen “protector” for my surface.

I ended up buying a tech armor anti glare screen protector:
http://www.amazon.com/Tech-Armor-Anti-Glare-Anti-Fingerprint-Protectors/dp/B00KMC5RIG?ie=UTF8&psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o06_s00

Good fit. Takes away all the glare and makes the surface very useful in normal office environments.
Is the sharpness slightly reduced: yes. Do I care: NO. It is that much more pleasant on the eyes not having the glare!

For touch screen, I use Edge as my browser. As I also noticed efficient CPU use when looking at video’s (compare cpu usage when looking at any youtube video in edge versus chrome for example).
But I wanted to get rid of all these ads. Solution:
http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

What it does: replace the hosts file in windows. This file is a first lookup from web-address to IP address. It is used before a DNS server is queried.
By putting entries in this hosts file for most known advertising sites (like doubleclick.net) and redirecting these to “nothing”, the ads are effectively filtered. Making for a much cleaner browsing experience.

Check out the link. It is free and very easy to install.

Installed bing desktop. But not for the search. Still noticed that google gives me better hits (keep trying Bing though…..).

Bing desktop gives beautiful desktop background pictures and login pictures. That makes it worth it. Combined with the nice screen and resolution of the surface, these look gorgeous.

The search bar -> you can minimize it out of the way….

So still using my surface pro 3. Seems less blue screens or crashed drivers these days. Still early to tell if it is stable.
Got another weird microsoft one, high CPU usage, out of the blue, from “Windows Shell Experience Host”. Killed the process. It restarted and behaved after that.

One possible link suggestion a way to fix the surface issue:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/forum/surfbook-surfdrivers/i-am-having-a-display-driver-stopped-responding/99bf51a0-669d-4f35-abdd-07135ff07768?page=47&auth=1

I realize this is mostly for the surface book. But applied it this morning. Let’s see how the surface pro 3 works after this.

If still not stable, I might have to do a full re-install from a downloaded file that you put on a USB stick, and reset the surface pro from that. So much trouble…… 🙁

So my surface got updated to windows 10.
All seemed well at first, until I realized that the video kept crashing, causing blue screens.
Now, several months and windows updates later, including a complete factory reset, I can no longer advice someone to purchase the surface pro 3. It is just not a stable, reliable platform. I typically get about 3 blue screen per week. At random situations.

A remote support session with Microsoft had them install an old (june 2015) video driver. At first that seemed to work, only to cause issues with that driver a few weeks later. It seemed to not work with the windows 10 updates.

Using computers as a tool for work and pleasure, I do not want to keep troubleshooting a system over and over. The surface pro 3 seems to require this level of attention and maintenance. Making it a useless device overall. VERY DISAPPOINTING.

So for now, I’d suggest to make sure you read up on many people having issues with the Surface pro and the surface book. You pay a premium, Apple like prices. But you don’t get a premium, apple like experience.

So the Surface by itself is just a tablet. It needs: the keyboard cover, docking station.

Keyboard cover: Keeps amazing me that microsoft just doesn’t bundle that. Without it, the surface looses a lot of its functionality. Make sure to get it!

Docking station: Yes, the surface supports a docking station. PERFECT. No other tablet can convert between:
– Tablet
– Super small and light laptop
– Full fledged work computer (external keyboard, mouse and display).

What do I use these devices for:

• Internet browsing
• e-mail (gmail for private, Lotus Notes for work)
• Programming with
  • Visual Studio
  • LabVIEW
  • Embedded devices (using MicroChip MPLAB, Eclipse)
  • Verilog (Quartus)
• Office suite (Word, Excel, Project, Visio)
• Photo capture and viewing
• Watching movies

So how can I do all this on the Surface versus the 2 devices before.

Before I purchased the Surface pro 3, I was using the following devices:

• Dell Precision M4600 laptop (workstation, mostly used for work)
• Apple iPad (first generation, mostly used for occasional browsing)

So the challenge: will the surface replace both of these. For that, I would have to buy a fairly powerful surface. It came down to the following version:

• i5 processor
• 8GB ram
• 256 GB SSD

The i5 is for most of my use as powerful as the i7 in the M4600. I would rarely use the quad core capabilities. The 8GB ram is sufficient for most tasks (except Virtual machine use). The 256 GB SSD was the biggest issue. But the 512GB version was just too expensive, and would still not suffice. So to compensate, I’m carrying a 2TB USB 3.0 hard drive.