I bought my Surface Book on day-of-release and admittedly expected some ragged bleeding edge bugs. I have to admit though this one has set an entirely new bar:
- detach mechanism outright failed, necessitating replacement
--> by the way, if you see the detach button light occasionally flash red when detaching, or notice the detach process takes more and more time (initially a second, then gets longer) this could be a sign of physical failure of the latching mechanism
- replacement had a dead pixel cluster (store employee estimated ~20-30 pixels
- both of those were of course plagued with GPU driver crashes, terrible battery life, failure to sleep / random wake-up, etc.
- my current one is now exhibiting some grinding noise of what I presume is a fan in the tablet section. It's on-and-off so I'm not sure whether to take it to a store only for it to not exhibit there, or wait until it gets so bad it fails (which is what I ended up having to do when the detach mechanism was flaking out.) This issue occurs of course under load, which unfortunately seems to be anytime Edge is running.
- I also am seeing fairly poor battery life (largely due to Edge running this i5 to 30-40% CPU on even simple sites) and in my current model I've had it wake-up in bag a few times. Windows Hello also is not turning on the camera for me; I tried the tricks on the separate thread.
- I'm writing this post while on Surface Chat trying to get my Complete Care warranty associated with the product. Thrice I was told at the store this was a done deal (and once by phone) but here I am again. I have high hopes it will happen this time since the person on chat had to "walk across the floor" to facilitate the fix which makes me think somewhere, there is some group that actually knows how to associate extended warranties with serial #s. I've had to get the warranty re-attached to a replacement twice; each time it costs about an hour of time, although this is not so bad compared to the store experience which typically has been 2 hours of re-imaging and troubleshooting to confirm an obvious HW issue.
There are things I love: the form factor and especially the screen which has utterly superb contrast ratio.
Most of the really serious issues cropped up past the 30 days warranty hence the last 3-4 months of monthly trips to the Microsoft store. I'd be interested in whether it's possible to argue a refund... at this point I'd be happy getting my money back and maybe getting an XPS until Microsoft matures its service and hardware/software. I'm very disappointed because I bought the Book on the strength of our experience with a Surface Pro 2 which really has been a wonderfully reliable, enjoyable, dependable device.
I am hoping to find an active DP-to-HDMI adapter to see if I can enable 4k display; I have a Samsung JU7500 and miniDP-to-HDMI-to-TV and the laptop only sees a 1920x1080p compliant display so far. Same adapter shows me 4K with my MBP but I know this is not a mature space and an active adapter may help.
- detach mechanism outright failed, necessitating replacement
--> by the way, if you see the detach button light occasionally flash red when detaching, or notice the detach process takes more and more time (initially a second, then gets longer) this could be a sign of physical failure of the latching mechanism
- replacement had a dead pixel cluster (store employee estimated ~20-30 pixels
- both of those were of course plagued with GPU driver crashes, terrible battery life, failure to sleep / random wake-up, etc.
- my current one is now exhibiting some grinding noise of what I presume is a fan in the tablet section. It's on-and-off so I'm not sure whether to take it to a store only for it to not exhibit there, or wait until it gets so bad it fails (which is what I ended up having to do when the detach mechanism was flaking out.) This issue occurs of course under load, which unfortunately seems to be anytime Edge is running.
- I also am seeing fairly poor battery life (largely due to Edge running this i5 to 30-40% CPU on even simple sites) and in my current model I've had it wake-up in bag a few times. Windows Hello also is not turning on the camera for me; I tried the tricks on the separate thread.
- I'm writing this post while on Surface Chat trying to get my Complete Care warranty associated with the product. Thrice I was told at the store this was a done deal (and once by phone) but here I am again. I have high hopes it will happen this time since the person on chat had to "walk across the floor" to facilitate the fix which makes me think somewhere, there is some group that actually knows how to associate extended warranties with serial #s. I've had to get the warranty re-attached to a replacement twice; each time it costs about an hour of time, although this is not so bad compared to the store experience which typically has been 2 hours of re-imaging and troubleshooting to confirm an obvious HW issue.
There are things I love: the form factor and especially the screen which has utterly superb contrast ratio.
Most of the really serious issues cropped up past the 30 days warranty hence the last 3-4 months of monthly trips to the Microsoft store. I'd be interested in whether it's possible to argue a refund... at this point I'd be happy getting my money back and maybe getting an XPS until Microsoft matures its service and hardware/software. I'm very disappointed because I bought the Book on the strength of our experience with a Surface Pro 2 which really has been a wonderfully reliable, enjoyable, dependable device.
I am hoping to find an active DP-to-HDMI adapter to see if I can enable 4k display; I have a Samsung JU7500 and miniDP-to-HDMI-to-TV and the laptop only sees a 1920x1080p compliant display so far. Same adapter shows me 4K with my MBP but I know this is not a mature space and an active adapter may help.
