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Today is my wife's birthday (yay)!

Right now, our plan is to head out this weekend and pick up a Microsoft Surface Book to replace her 6-year old laptop.


So...first question: Any real compelling reason she shouldn't get a Surface Book if has decided she wants one?

Bear in mind the following:

• She's ok with the expense
• She's tested one out and likes the keyboard, the key travel and the monitor
• She likes the included pen and wants to experiment with it
• She is pretty sure she wants a touch screen
• She kind of wants a tablet around the house, but only about 20% of the time. The laptop about 80% of the time
• She loves the lightness
• If she games, it will mostly be web based
• Laptop will live mostly in the house. Travel occasionally.
• She was really tired of her old laptop having to stay plugged in (piss poor battery life), the loud fan kicking in for absolutely nothing, and slowdowns when hitting web content (especially unplugged)

She also considered the Surface Pro 4, but I think the better battery life, the 80/20 laptop/tablet time (as opposed to 20/80), and the better screen were compelling reasons for her to switch over. Also pricing out a Surface Pro configuration I think would still be comfortable in 4+ years brought it within striking distance of the lowest Surface Book config.

In fact, my biggest concern there is the paltry 128GB of storage space on the entry Surface Book config. I feel that is somewhat mitigated by the:

• availability of a full sized SD card slot
• NAS which holds all of our music, movies and 99.5% of our pictures
• Music around the house is played through the Sonos or HTPC anyways

She'll want office, but the limited number of documents she will have is easily stored on that space, not to mention OneDrive and the NAS

Thoughts?

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Let's also talk about Win10. This will be her first Win10 machine. We've both skipped any form of Win8. I''m currently running two Win10 boxes I've configured to be semi-old school (no linked microsoft account / everything local user etc). ....and consequently, am now playing with some dummy user/microsoft accounts to get a better idea of what we've been missing.

So....second question: What are the benefits/drawbacks of her using a "linked account" for her surface pro, and what would you choose?

...also, along those lines (b), would it be wise to have a linked admin account that's barely used and a linked user account for her daily driver? Some mix? Doesn't matter?

For me, the linked account meant shoving much more down my throat than just synced bookmarks, and having the same wallpaper on each desktop got confusing in a hurry. So after experimenting, no more linked accounts, and just log into Chrome to retrieve/sync bookmarks etc.

There are (at least) 3 options for logging in to a SB - facial recognition through always-on camera, PIN, or password. The digital eraser on the pen was for some reason particularly cool.

MOSFET wrote:

For me, the linked account meant shoving much more down my throat than just synced bookmarks, and having the same wallpaper on each desktop got confusing in a hurry. So after experimenting, no more linked accounts, and just log into Chrome to retrieve/sync bookmarks etc.

There are (at least) 3 options for logging in to a SB - facial recognition through always-on camera, PIN, or password. The digital eraser on the pen was for some reason particularly cool.

Ha. So in my experimenting, I created a new outlook account...a new user account on my secondary PC...then downloaded a ton of pictures, set one as a wallpaper and the other as a lock screen.

And then I added the account to my primary PC, and the files saved to onedrive were there (or rather, on one drive), but the wallpaper and the lockscreen didnt sync over?

...so really, what's the point of the linked accounts? I could just setup dropbox or google drive to have monitored/shared folders and documents too, couldnt I?

Also...what the heck am I doing wrong here?

Wow. Would have thought more people tried playing with the Surface Book (and definitely a few more about linked Microsoft accounts).

I might throw up my impressions in a bit, if I can get some time with it.

Really not sure why your pics aren't synching. Both my Win8 and Win10 installations have done it within minutes provided I was logging into the machine with the Microsoft account, and not a local user account.

I think the SB is a great piece of hardware to use, but I decided not to grab any for the company based on the hinge/dock.

I have my reservations of how well that will hold up over the course of a couple of years, and our users are not kind to hardware (another reason we don't have any of the gorgeous XPS13 laptops in the company)

If anyone here has owned a Surface Book for a year now, perhaps they can comment on how well it's holding up....

I don't own a Surface Book but I with with a lot of Microsfties who do, so I'll parrot their opinions. The general gist is that if you can afford it and find value in the hybrid design, they're a great choice. There were a ton of crippling issues when they were first launched, but most of those have been settled by subsequent firmware/OS/driver updates. The tablet portion of the SB is useful - especially if you want to lay it down flat to draw on - and Windows Hello is one of the most useful technologies MS has released in years.

I'm looking at a laptop refresh this summer, and if Apple drops the ball on the next update of the MacBook Pro, I might pick up a Surface Book instead.

Beelzebubba9 wrote:

There were a ton of crippling issues when they were first launched, but most of those have been settled by subsequent firmware/OS/driver updates.

Still though... I see this over and over and over again with new computer stuff (ex. the 7260AC for the first year or two, although Apple seems to be better at this). Heck, the early reviews of the t440s were filled with "the touchpad is absolutely unusable", up until Lenovo rushed out a driver update to fix it. Is the whole concept of 'if you don't have the software/drivers working well, don't release the product yet' that hard to understand? The one time I saw a Surface Book (in a store), I saw the known undocking glitch (not a good way to get a sale).