The Gamer, Creative, and the Developer walk into a Surface Book

The Discussion

• 

  I absolutely love my Surface Book I use it for projects agreement work, SharePoint development, photo editing, studying, and gaming FFXIV

• 

  How can these guys say this stuff with a straight face? I mean, I was sold just like everyone else after watching the launch presentation, but the reality is this thing was (and still is) not ready for professional use. It's just too unreliable.

  My Surface Book has been a buggy, unreliable, expensive nightmare. SOOOOO BUGGY! I appreciate the updates they've released so far (fixed the screen flickering and the CONSTANT GPU crashes), but I seriously can't believe you guys launched it in the broken state it's (STILL) in.

  Just listening to this video has me yelling at the screen... Where to start...

  Your Windows Imaging Dev team you mentioned did a piss poor job (and from the sound of it... they had ONE JOB!?!). Half the Surface Books that shipped booted up to an "Other User" login prompt instead of the normal set up wizard leading many of us to wonder if we were shipped a used unit. NEVER seen that happen on ANY new laptop. Except this one (which Microsoft made themselves). The image also included a broken NVIDIA 3D shortcut icon on the desktop for no discernable reason.

  Then you have this "Gaming Guy" at Surface who hasn't updated the NVIDIA drivers to ones that can play Star Wars Battlefront yet. The drivers you shipped were already months old when the device launched, and still haven't been updated 2 months later... AND YOU'VE BLOCKED US FROM INSTALLING REGULAR NVIDIA DRIVER UPDATES.... WHY?!?!

  Open Surface Book Bugs that STILL need to be fixed as of 12/17/2015:

  1. Sucks battery down like it's crack
  2. Wakes up randomly when it's supposed to be asleep
  3. Doesn't ever transition from sleep to hybernate
  4. Doesn't always wake up from hybernate
  5. More bizzar sleep related issues around Windows Hello / Cortana
  6. Closing lid without first shutting down makes the screen turn off, but instead of sleeping, CPU usage goes through the roof and it kills your battery as fast as it can.
  7. If your battery gets low, be prepared for power related BSODs until you get the battery back up.
  8. If you ever disconnect / reconnect the display, be prepared for gremlins that randomly make your track pad and keyboard not work, even though the GPU and base battery work.
  9. More random BSODs about power, timing, scheduling, and kernels
  10. Dock won't power the SB even though the charging light is on if you disconnect and reconnect the screen.
  11. Dock won't power your cell phone if you plug it in
  12. Dock USB hub will randomly cut in and out
  13. Dock DisplayPorts will only work after an unplug / re-plug song and dance...
  14. Dock won't ever work with some 4k monitors
  15. Dock won't work with dual 4k monitors
  16. Dock may or may not work with some display port to hdmi or dvi adaptors
  17. SB randomly thinks it should go into tablet mode and displays the "rotation lock on" message, even though the keyboard/trackpad still work
  18. SB randomly decides to leave tablet mode when the display is disconnected
  19. Putting SB to sleep and waking it up is apparently grounds for forgetting all your external monitor settings, leaving them disabled, undetectable, or in the wrong resolution.
  20. After waking from sleep, the lock screen only covers the center part of the screen, leaving any open apps visible and interactive underneath
  21. Still no new NVIDIA drivers even though the ones that shipped were months old to begin with
  22. After detaching the display, sometimes the "ready to detach" message gets stuck and won't go away.
  23. Every other device ships with an OS image that boots to an "Other User" login prompt instead of the new device setup wizard
  24. Some devices shipped with dirty connection pins, leading to even more gremlins
  25. Some devices speakers crackle or record cracking noises instead of (or on top of) any audio

   

   

• 

  @BTCrow: hey BTCrow, sorry to hear about your experience with Surface Book. This is not what we want people to experience. I would like to investigate it. How about you send me a direct email and we can take a deeper look on what's going on? milada@microsoft.com.

• 

  @BTCrow: Unfortunately I can only report on what I experienced while there (hence the straight face). In the scenarios we tested everything was great. Thanks for the feedback!

• 

  Good episode, thanks.