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Surface Pro 4 ownership experience survey:

Surface Pro 4 owners, how has your SP4 experience been?

  • m3 Owner: I have had no issues, things are great!

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • m3 Owner: I have had some issues, but nothing significant that impacts my use of the device.

    Votes: 1 1.9%
  • m3 Owner: I have had significant issues that have impacted my use of the device.

    Votes: 2 3.7%
  • m3 Owner: This thing is unusable. I bought a fancy paperweight.

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • i5 Owner: I have had no issues, things are great!

    Votes: 4 7.4%
  • i5 Owner: I have had some issues, but nothing significant that impacts my use of the devic

    Votes: 23 42.6%
  • i5 Owner: I have had significant issues that have impacted my use of the device.

    Votes: 15 27.8%
  • i5 Owner: This thing is unusable. I bought a fancy paperweight.

    Votes: 2 3.7%
  • i7 Owner: I have had no issues, things are great!

    Votes: 4 7.4%
  • i7 Owner: I have had some issues, but nothing significant that impacts my use of the devic

    Votes: 2 3.7%
  • i7 Owner: I have had significant issues that have impacted my use of the device.

    Votes: 1 1.9%
  • i7 Owner: This thing is unusable. I bought a fancy paperweight.

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    54

robertcan

Member
My experience with the i5 has slowly improved since launch day. Down to just a few annoyances. Intel DD issue, occasional disconnect of pen and the dreaded battery drain. When the deadline arrived for returning my SP4, it didn't take me long to decide to keep it. I have faith these last few issues will be resolved by future updates.
 
My device wakes up 90% of the time by pressing the windows + P multiple times. Then other than that, the device RUNS very well. Sleep drain is a nightmare to be honest. I used to get 5% drain in 10 minutes. Now I'm getting about 4% an hour, which is unacceptable in opinion. I had my Android tablet on in my bag for the last 4 days, without touching it, and it went down 5%. I know it's not the same thing, but I KNOW that this drain isn't normal. I have a SP2 and my partner a SP3, and I know what sleep battery life should be... This isn't it!

Mine's pretty consistently been 1%/hr since day one.
 

Sylvainp

New Member
i5 256/8 user here.

I've got the thing for 6 days now and really like it but in the same time I have many problem with it.

Really bad screen bleed on the button center
uneven color temperature of the screen on the right portion (little bit pink for the last 2" at the right of the screen
lock up, don't want to wake up from sleep
battery depleting and unit heating in sleep mode because of a calendar notification twice
kickstand starting to get loose
so so battery life
MANY display driver crashes !!!

If I paid 1000$ for this I would accept some delay in fixing this and have some tolerance but I paid 2200$ can for the device and it's not acceptable. Tomorrow I'll send the unit back to bestbuy and return to my 7 years old macbook waiting for the to either fix it or apple to release a touchscreen macbook.
 

leeshor

Well-Known Member
i5 256/8 user here.

I've got the thing for 6 days now and really like it but in the same time I have many problem with it.

Really bad screen bleed on the button center
uneven color temperature of the screen on the right portion (little bit pink for the last 2" at the right of the screen
lock up, don't want to wake up from sleep
battery depleting and unit heating in sleep mode because of a calendar notification twice
kickstand starting to get loose
so so battery life
MANY display driver crashes !!!

If I paid 1000$ for this I would accept some delay in fixing this and have some tolerance but I paid 2200$ can for the device and it's not acceptable. Tomorrow I'll send the unit back to bestbuy and return to my 7 years old macbook waiting for the to either fix it or apple to release a touchscreen macbook.
Welcome to the forum

The only "real" unsolvable issue I see in your post is the screen. Definitely needs to be returned. Most of the other items are a matter of choice in browsers and notifications but even the Edge issues appear to be correctable using a host file to skirt mostly Flash ads.
 

EMINENT

Active Member
After the most recent updates, i'm getting 1% hour drain that's acceptable. No more display driver crashes although I have the modified hosts file.

The only issue bugging me is sometimes upon wake from sleep, I get a black screen instead of my shuffling wallpaper background, but Hello still recognizes me and works no problem. Could be due to me having wifi off on battery while sleep so it can't connect to my Onedrive for those photos. Gonna try turning wifi on while sleep to see if it still does it.
 

Sylvainp

New Member
The display driver restarting issue is also happening on my desktop tower at home since I've upgraded from 8.1 to 10 on my radeon 280x, I can't get it to work perfectly and i'm not using edge at all on my desktop. Could it be a windows 10 problem more than a surface one ?

The kick stand getting more and more loose after a single week of use is quite annoying and doesn't give a good feel about the quality of the device.
 

Seneleron

Active Member
The display driver restarting issue is also happening on my desktop tower at home since I've upgraded from 8.1 to 10 on my radeon 280x,
I have this problem on occasion with one of my machines with Nvidia drivers. The key is to uninstall the old drivers completely before installing new ones [make sure you download the new ones first.]

FWIW: Third time was the charm for my SP4. I'm sure the latest round of updates had something to do with it, but little nitpicks like action center popping out every time I'm journaling in onenote have (mostly) gone away. Originally I was thinking about Exchanging up when the i7 came out, but I managed to get $100 off the i5 8GB (long story) and at this point it's so solid/stable I don't want to put it down.

The only "regret" I have is that that wasn't the experience I had when I bought the FIRST one. Par for the course with MS, but once the wrinkles are sorted out it's a remarkably competent machine.
 

seth0987654321

New Member
After sleep the pen button never re connects. I have to disconnect and re connect blue tooth to the pen. EVERY TIME
Some Apps are really tiny. You cant zoom in enough.
 
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