Outdated new user advice online

[hertsjoatmon]

Had my Surface Pro 2 a few days now and have been looking online for general tips to improve it but some of what I read I cant seem to enable. [edit] I've run all the available updates.

DPI settings. I only seem to have 2 options. normal or small. guides i've read talk about setting it at 125% but I cant see how to do that from the menus.

Sound. There are complaints about the volume of the system and one tip is to go to control panel, sound, speakers, properties, enhancements and then select loudness equalization. I cant find this option though.

I've found these shortcuts. (useful)

• Fn + Caps: Locks the F1-F12 keys as function keys. For example, the F1 and F2 keys normally toggle the keyboard backlight on or off. To actually press F1, you’d have to press Fn + F1. After pressing Fn + Caps, they’ll function as F1 and F2 with a single key press. You’d have to press Fn + F1 or F2 to control the backlight.
• Fn + Spacebar: Print Screen. This saves an image of your current screen to your clipboard, so you can paste it into any application.
• Fn + Alt + Spacebar: Print Screen for the current window only. This saves an image of the current window to the clipboard.
• Fn + Del: Increases screen brightness.
• Fn + Backspace: Decreases screen brightness.
• Fn + Left arrow: Home
• Fn + Right arrow: End
• Fn + Up arrow: Page Up
• Fn + Down arrow: Page Down

Pen shortcuts

• Hover pen above screen: Moves the mouse cursor around, allowing you to perform mouse hover actions.
• Tap pen on screen: Performs a left-click.
• Press on screen and hold down: Performs a right-click after a moment’s wait.
• Hold button on pen and tap pen on screen: Performs a right-click immediately. (The button is located near the bottom of the pen — it’s the part of the pen that attaches magnetically to the Surface Pro’s charging port.)

I'm seeing mixed messages as to whether its best to get driver updates from manufacturers or use the window verified ones.

The other tip i've found useful was to run games at 720p rather than 1080 as the screen is small enough that you dont notice the bluriness much and can bump the quality settings a bit / run at higer frames per second.

Thoughts? Additional tips?

 

[Matt]

Depending on your storage configuration yiu can free up more space by altering the page file and hibernation file sizes. I saved about 5 gb doing this. Also moving the recovery partition to a usb flash drive then removing he partition and extending the c: partition can give you another 7gb.

This has allowed me to install some games on the c: SSD for faster boot times than installing them on a micro sd card.

 

[leeshor]

This thread,. post #8, has a fairly complete list of the various shortcut keys. http://www.surfaceforums.net/threads/surface-shortcuts.1926/#post-8273

 

[jollywombat]

Welcome to the forums!

The DPI adjustment is in the display options of the control panel, you will see the sliding scale to adjust between smaller/larger, and if you look just below that you will see a checkbox option that states "Let me choose one scaling level for all my displays", if you check that, it will give you the percentages.

The sound tweak that you mentioned I had not actually heard of. I see there is a tab with enhancements in the speaker properties, and one checkbox without any labeling, perhaps this is it. Never had an issue with the speakers myself however.

The main driver that is contested for the surface is the display driver, between Microsoft implementation of it and the official Intel driver. There are not really any performance increases over one or the other (I have done extensive testing with this), just the intel one unlocks a couple extra options that are rarely needed. I would say stick with the MS ones and use Goodbytes surface tweak tool to enable the intel control panel and fix a couple of the settings.

Playing games in a lower resolution will definitely help make them playable on the surface as the iGPU is not designed around gaming prowess. Some games require you to disable DPI scaling for compatibility, keep this in mind if you are having issues just FYI.

 

[Sanjay]

Sound. There are complaints about the volume of the system and one tip is to go to control panel, sound, speakers, properties, enhancements and then select loudness equalization. I cant find this option though.

I too couldn't find this option. It would be nice to get a solution for the low volume level on the SP3. Don't get me wrong, it's not entirely unusable. But it most certainly won't cut it in an even slightly noisy surrounding.