Thursday, August 27, 2015

Using a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 full time MS Surface Pro 3

I have the opportunity to get the MS Surface Pro 3. I thought that I would try to see what I can do with it. Here are my first "5 days".

Background

I am an IT project manager in the Healthcare space. I spend much of my days in the following programs

Email
MS Office applications
Web applications
scripting and command-line
SSH to servers

Equipment

MS Surface Pro 3 (i5 8Gigs)

Surface Keyboard Cover
Surface bluetooth mouse
Note -- The "Days" bellow represent times that I did an entry not necessarily sequential time.

Day 1

Putting everything everything together.

First impressions...

The surface is an i5 so, it is fast, just like any other fully function laptop. Using the keyboard cover is easy to use. It is not quite like a stand alone keyboard, but the portability more than makes up for that.

One odd thing about the keyboard, it smells a little.... I hope that it goes away soon.

Day 2

The good thing is that the smell of the keyboard cover was short lived.

Day 3

So, decided to use the surface to watch a little Netflix... It worked well with both the internal speaker and external headphones. While others have said that the internal speakers were good, I would say that they are just okay. Not bad, but not as good as I thought they would be from the reviews that I read online. This might be personal preference. Either way, it is very usable. I tend to use headphones most of the time so I may not be the best judge in internal speakers.

Day 4

An interesting thing has happened a couple of times. The screen/surface seemed to have locked up on my. Usually this has happened when I am in transition. Closing the keyboard cover. It seems that the Surface did not "go to sleep." The only that as seemed fix this was to do a hard restart of the surface. Which is harder than I thought. I had to hold down the power button for greater than 10 seconds. This could be a software problem that is running on this Surface that is not disconnecting allowing to "sleep." I will keep an eye on this and see if this is a deeper issue.

Day 5

Went ahead and added a second monitor using the display port from the docking station. This allowed me to have a bigger screen in addition to the surface.

The more and more I use the surface, the more and more this is becoming my main workstation for work.