This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/surface by /u/KyriDoulou on 2023-10-20 23:19:31.
Hey! A bit of a (very long) story about my excitement for the Surface lineup, my journey to getting it, and my pretty awful experience with my Surface that I just thought I’d share. The tl;dr is:
Set your expectations for any product you buy, and if you think something is wrong with your device, trust your gut and get it looked at.
I wanna start by saying I’ve always loved my Surface Book, in concept. When the first Surface was announced whilst I was in school in 2012(?), I don’t know what it was about it, but I immediately starting saving up money to finally have a proper windows laptop/tablet hybrid. I remember scraping money together constantly to put it in the savings pot.
Obviously, still being in school, savings were slow, I think I was 14 at the time so it basically consisted of opting for cheaper lunches and begging for just money for birthdays etc. It took a while but eventually I got enough, but obviously by then, a few years had passed, and new Surface devices had come out that were better and faster etc, which also meant higher price tags. I don’t remember how much the goal began as, I think it was £450? But soon it became £800 for a Surface Pro, so the savings had to keep going. Eventually I became old enough in 2015 I left school and I got a job, and was desperate to just grind as much as I could, to finally get my first computer which I’d decided years prior would be a Surface.
Time passed, and I saved and I saved and I saved. New products kept getting announced with higher and higher price tags, so I had to put in another month or so of work between college to try and attain the goal of my perfect computer. I would stalk news websites with new announcements, and I was pretty set on the Surface Book when that got announced. The plan was to trick it out as much as I physically could, which also upped the price because I was not going to hype myself up for something and then cheap out on small amounts of storage or slower components. Go big, or go home. Plus, it would be the first thing I’d ever really bought myself, the first thing I bought with my multiple pay-checks at my first job, etc. I was determined to go all-out.
Then, the final objective showed it’s face. The Surface Book With Performance Base. Weird name sure, but it was everything I wanted. Literally everything I was really into about the Surface line up but it was the first one that had the option for a dedicated GPU, and so, that’s the one I went for (after, an unfortunate few more months of saving due to the once again higher price due to more expensive components). I should clarify that I’ve always been really enthusiastic about PC building, so I know the included Nvidia 965M wasn’t exactly top of the line, but I had seen loads of benchmarking done and real-life scenarios on YouTube and subreddits like SurfaceGaming that I wasn’t worried about it, I just wanted this PC I’d been chasing the dream of for, what is embarrassingly, more than a quarter of my life at this point.
It comes to the time to finally buy it from the Microsoft store, so I go online, configure it as much as I could, and have exactly enough in my savings. £3,149 I’m pretty sure, my actual life savings. I’m sure that seems quaint to a lot of people, but even today as a 25 year old, I don’t think I’ve managed to get anywhere close to that much saved again. So buy it, and the specs are:
Intel i7 / 16GB RAM / 1TB SSD / Nvidia 965M. Literally as good as I could make it, and I am ecstatic.
After about a week, it’s not yet dispatched, so I contact Microsoft support and they tell me that for some reason, the order isn’t showing up for them, even though it’s showing on my end. I give them the order number, and they tell me that they put through a request to cancel it since they can’t alter any information, but to just go ahead and order it again, and they even gave me a £20 Microsoft Store voucher so that I could spend it on express shipping with I appreciated. I did that, and my device arrived the next day. Before I go into how the laptop was, here’s a weird thing. About a week later, I received a second charge of £3,149. Which put my bank account in more than £3000 in debt. I panicked so much, and Microsoft told me they had no idea why that happened but they couldn’t do anything about it. I ended up having no choice but to call my bank and report it as a fraudulent payment because it was the only way that Santander would perform a charge back on the second payment, but they also charged me £40 for an “unexpected overdraft” fee which hurt SO much. It seems miniscule compared to the amount I’d spent on the laptop, but I lived very frugally and was only just 18 and had been saving that money for actual years, and that £40 really hurt my bottom line. A week later, a delivery man knocks on the door with a parcel, and it is a Second Surface Book??? I have to refuse delivery because I’m terrified of being charged again, but thankfully that’s the end of that saga.
Now for the review of the Surface Book, as remembered by me from 7 years ago. The built quality is amazing and the screen is so crisp. I love the included pen, and I especially love the ability to detach the screen, flip it around and have a chunky tablet. It was literally everything I wanted! The camera was pretty OK, and Windows Hello is something I’m grateful to have every time I unlock my laptop to this day. (For reference, I still use this Surface every day). It was fast compared to anything I was used to, and the keyboard was great. One thing about it though is some things do feel weirdly… sluggish? Apps take a little while to open which I found weird, sometimes when typing there would be a few seconds delay, but I figured it was just a driver thing and it would sorta get ironed out as I updated everything.
Time to test games! I saw some glowing reviews of people playing GTA V on this, but I didn’t own GTA V, so I tried GTA 4. It chugged a LOT. Barely 30fps and absolutely not consistent, and the fans started blaring and the entire PC became incredibly hot to the touch. Okay, maybe not the best example. I tried Spec Ops: The Line, and after tinkering a bunch with settings, I remember getting Low + 720p giving me 60fps which I was… pretty happy with. It’s not a beast, that’s fine. Minecraft then? Another stuttering mess. This is something I remember being so, SO genuinely disappointed with. Both Java and Bedrock ran like complete ass, stuttering and hitching left and right and massive periods of time where the world wouldn’t load in. I troubleshooted online a lot and got a lot of “not sure, buddy. Make sure you’re using the right GPU?” but the task manager always told me that the Nvidia GPU was in the low 90%s of current usage so I could tell it was doing something. I updated all of my graphics drivers with the Nvidia control centre and through windows, and even used the option where you could right click and say “Open with…” and selected the Nvidia GPU. Still barely ran.
My next test was Dolphin Emulator, and this was also pretty bad. It could not run anything I threw at it properly, and I was devastated. I troubleshooted on their subreddit and they gave me a “it’s strange that it’s doing that, but keep trying!”. No luck. Another thing of note, is that whenever I tried to do anything “intensive”, even when plugged in, my device’s battery would drain Fast. When connected to the mains (with the very cool magsafe charger), I could maybe watch videos or play a game of Civ 4 for about 3 hours before the laptop would die. Maybe one hour when it wasn’t plugged in. Weirdly enough, if I just sort of idled on desktop and did file management stuff the battery (or batteries?) would last all day.
Anyway, after that, I sort of just wrote this laptop as a bad investment. It couldn’t reliably run Office applications, browsing the web got slower and slower, the device would get SO hot and SO loud when just browsing the web that the touchscreen would warm up so much that it would stop responding to my finger or pen, and if I ever used the built-in mic the fan noise would drown me out. Additionally, whenever I turn off the device OR put it in sleep mode, if I leave it for more than a day, the entire battery is drained and I have to plug it in before I can use it again which is incredibly infuriating.
Years have passed, about 7. I really regret my purchase. I am actually typing this ON my Surface Book that I regret so much. It’s barely more than a really nicely built chromebook with a LOT of onboard storage to me now.
This evening, I booted up Minecraft on my laptop, remembering how bad it was all those years ago, wondering if it had somehow been more optimised, but no luck. It was still the same stuttering, hitching mess that was barely playable no matter how I tweaked the settings.
I wish I had tried this years ago, when I was first disappointed. I went into my device manage, and disabled the Nvidia 965M Display Adapter. My PC got so much quieter, and the battery is lasting longer (by quite a bit, although it’s an old battery at this point so it’s still not impressive).
Games still, admittedly, do not run great. Minecraft runs more or less the same, but is weirdly more consistent now. It stutters way less when stuff happens, and just had the occasional hitch. It’s the only game I’m confident in enough to try, to be honest.
Now, when I type, the letters appear on s…
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/17clsiw/i_have_had_a_defective_surface_book_for_6_years/