Surface Pro 4

How do the multi point gestures work for everyone that has received their SP4 keyboards?

The trackpad works fine for me but the two finger scroll seems to be really hit or miss(coming from a macbook which works a lot better)
 
2 finger scrolling is awesome on the Surface Book. Dont know about the type cover for the Sp4 though.
 
tangoseal said:
2 finger scrolling is awesome on the Surface Book. Dont know about the type cover for the Sp4 though.
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From doing some research apparently people are having issues with both. Turning off the pinch to zoom really seems to help for those that are having the issues.
 
I'm not sure if this question has been asked/answered but has anyone here considered the vaio canvas z instead of the surface pro 4? It's perhaps a bit more expensive but it is a way nicer device.
 
sonicboom said:
I'm not sure if this question has been asked/answered but has anyone here considered the vaio canvas z instead of the surface pro 4? It's perhaps a bit more expensive but it is a way nicer device.
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And you figure it's nicer how? A maxed out SP4 has same RAM, same SSD capacity, 2 generations newer CPU+GPU, same size but higher resolution screen, costs less, weighs less, thinner... you get the idea.

How exactly is this sony "way nicer"?
 
Got to play with the SP4 at Costco yesterday. Aside from the silly driver issue(s) like screen flicker the hardware is a really nice improvement over SP3. For example, one of the things noticed is type cover keyboard has more resistance for resting your fingers on without falsely registering key presses which was one of the things on the "could be better" list when I had the SP3. Speakers are nice and loud even with the background noise. Would like to test the display for backlight bleed but it also helps if Microsoft doesn't max out the brightness on bootup where it's most visible.

Prefer silent fanless because fan always crap out over time and for doing things like audio work but marks off to Microsoft for gimping the Core M3-6Y30 with only 4GB DRAM when it probably costs like $10 to make it 8GB. Would've been an automatic buy but now looking at other options like the rumored Samsung version with SAMOLED display.
 
To me it looks way more polished and well built. It also does the exact same thing the sp4 does but faster - same gimmick.
 
How is light bleed for everyone who got a SP4?

Mine has some along the bottom edge that is only visible at 100% brightness and black background, so I only see it while watching a movie. I'm going to try swapping for one without. I can tolerate light bleed on a 27" monitor, but not on this tiny thing that my eyes are much closer to.
 
kabobi said:
How is light bleed for everyone who got a SP4?

Mine has some along the bottom edge that is only visible at 100% brightness and black background, so I only see it while watching a movie. I'm going to try swapping for one without. I can tolerate light bleed on a 27" monitor, but not on this tiny thing that my eyes are much closer to.
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I've noticed it some on mine. It isn't horrible on mine but it can be noticeable. I usually don't have mine at 100% brightness though so that might be why it hasn't really bothered me.
 
kabobi said:
How is light bleed for everyone who got a SP4?

Mine has some along the bottom edge that is only visible at 100% brightness and black background, so I only see it while watching a movie. I'm going to try swapping for one without. I can tolerate light bleed on a 27" monitor, but not on this tiny thing that my eyes are much closer to.
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I have some minor light bleed, but the other issues I've had with flicker and battery life are much more significant. I don't think the bleed is a big deal.
 
sonicboom said:
To me it looks way more polished and well built. It also does the exact same thing the sp4 does but faster - same gimmick.
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Have you seen and felt it in person? I saw it at the MSFT Store and was not impressed at all with the Canvas Z. The whole detached BT keyboard idea seems incomplete. The hinge or stand mechanism doesn't feel as solid. The build quality, feel, and engineering is way behind the Surface Pro 4. Like most Vaio products it felt clunky, unrefined, and cheap. I say go take a look at it in person before making judgement.
 
brentsg said:
I have some minor light bleed, but the other issues I've had with flicker and battery life are much more significant. I don't think the bleed is a big deal.
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I thought the flicker issue was only affecting SB. huh.

What specific issue are you having with battery life?
 
kabobi said:
I thought the flicker issue was only affecting SB. huh.

What specific issue are you having with battery life?
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It's chewing through battery like crazy and every thread I have visited has me turning things off till it's an etch-a-sketch in order to get what MS promises. Others say it's a Windows 10 problem and their SP3 is fine with 8.1. It doesn't help that Windows 10's predictions of battery time are terrible. Last night I was doing nothing but reading e-mail and it told me that I had 2 hours and 2 minutes of battery remaining and I was at half brightness at 93% charge.

The flicker is most definitely with both the book and Pro models. It's fine with both Hyper-V and auto adjust off, but if you need either of those it sucks. I'd say with both turned on it's unusable.

For the record, I'm using SP4 with i5/16GB RAM/256GB storage options.
 
brentsg said:
It's chewing through battery like crazy and every thread I have visited has me turning things off till it's an etch-a-sketch in order to get what MS promises. Others say it's a Windows 10 problem and their SP3 is fine with 8.1. It doesn't help that Windows 10's predictions of battery time are terrible. Last night I was doing nothing but reading e-mail and it told me that I had 2 hours and 2 minutes of battery remaining and I was at half brightness at 93% charge.

The flicker is most definitely with both the book and Pro models. It's fine with both Hyper-V and auto adjust off, but if you need either of those it sucks. I'd say with both turned on it's unusable.
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On my Surface Book I've found the flicker to occur with Hyper-V under very specific conditions. It only seemed to happen with video playback in a window. One the app was made full screen it went away. Battery life can be tricky. Sleep doesn't seem to be as efficient as it should be, seems to be burning about 5% an hour in sleep, it really should around 1%. But run time is right about what I expected, a solid 8+ hours of work use with a number of hours of some mix of video and audio play back over Bluetooth. I think one culprit with battery life in 10 is Edge which can start to hog CPU over time, like there's some type of leak. Seems to happen a lot of ad heavy sites.

Keep an eye on CPU usage with Task Manager. Also notice the fans. Once those start to spin up you're going to get WAY less than maximum battery. While web browsing, watching video, music playback, they should be dead silent. If not there's something wrong.
 
I would imagine the flicker and battery life issues are software-related. Come to think of it, the lightbleed would be the only hardware-related issue present in SP4.

I'm still going to try and play the lottery game to get one without bleed. While I don't notice it during 90% of usage, it is blatantly obvious when watching movies.
 
heatlesssun said:
On my Surface Book I've found the flicker to occur with Hyper-V under very specific conditions. It only seemed to happen with video playback in a window. One the app was made full screen it went away. Battery life can be tricky. Sleep doesn't seem to be as efficient as it should be, seems to be burning about 5% an hour in sleep, it really should around 1%. But run time is right about what I expected, a solid 8+ hours of work use with a number of hours of some mix of video and audio play back over Bluetooth. I think one culprit with battery life in 10 is Edge which can start to hog CPU over time, like there's some type of leak. Seems to happen a lot of ad heavy sites.

Keep an eye on CPU usage with Task Manager. Also notice the fans. Once those start to spin up you're going to get WAY less than maximum battery. While web browsing, watching video, music playback, they should be dead silent. If not there's something wrong.
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My flicker was present all the time, even if I just opened a blank email and had only that running. It's terribly visible on white backgrounds like that.

Thanks for the other tips. My Pro was all fans all the time for the first couple of days, even when updates had all been manually completed. It's settled since then so I'm guessing it was some sort of index activity. MS could do a lot to improve first impressions.

I want to like it, but I'm coming from an OSX environment so I'd like to see a smooth transition. I'm not sure I'm willing to wait for MS to fix annoyances, though I can certainly understand why some/many would. In fact one of the reasons I steered clear of the Book was to avoid glitches. I figured the Pro would be pretty tight by this time, despite the incremental improvements.
 
brentsg said:
I want to like it, but I'm coming from an OSX environment so I'd like to see a smooth transition. I'm not sure I'm willing to wait for MS to fix annoyances, though I can certainly understand why some/many would. In fact one of the reasons I steered clear of the Book was to avoid glitches. I figured the Pro would be pretty tight by this time, despite the incremental improvements.
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I guess we'll see how fast all of this gets resolved. This is pretty bleeding edge stuff and there's always going to be issues. Even Apple doesn't get it all right on release often. Threshold 2 should be out in about a week or two and I bet there'll be new firmware for the SP4 and SB.

I've been using the Surface Book for a week and have been able to get everything done wanted to with it without too much difficulty. But I make sure I save stuff before converting because that's really been the hiccup on this thing which like the flickering is GPU related.

The encouraging thing, if there's anything to be encouraged about is that most of these problems are all about GPU drivers. So it's a single point of failure causing multiple problems rather than multiple points of failure causing multiple problems.
 
heatlesssun said:
But I make sure I save stuff before converting because that's really been the hiccup on this thing which like the flickering is GPU related.
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I have none of the issues that anyone is reporting. Either I got a golden machine or your GPU might have been a slightly bad fab.

Might want to warranty that thing. Mine works flawlessly!
 
tangoseal said:
I have none of the issues that anyone is reporting. Either I got a golden machine or your GPU might have been a slightly bad fab.

Might want to warranty that thing. Mine works flawlessly!
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Sweet! I'm sure that no issue that this machine is having is being experienced by everyone. However the issues I'm seeing are being reported by others. Do you still have the Intel HD 520 drivers installed. I did try them but they seem to cause some other issues. However I didn't go back and try all of my conversion tests.

Threshold 2 is supposed to be coming out November 10th and I'm guessing there'll be new firmware and drivers for the new Surface devices coming out as well. I'll wait until then and it stuff is still going on I'll swap it. It's just such a specific set of issues that all related to the GPU that's being reported by others that I'm guessing it has to be drivers and Microsoft has already acknowledge that. If it's something else that should be clearer by next week.
 
heatlesssun said:
Sweet! I'm sure that no issue that this machine is having is being experienced by everyone. However the issues I'm seeing are being reported by others. Do you still have the Intel HD 520 drivers installed. I did try them but they seem to cause some other issues. However I didn't go back and try all of my conversion tests.

Threshold 2 is supposed to be coming out November 10th and I'm guessing there'll be new firmware and drivers for the new Surface devices coming out as well. I'll wait until then and it stuff is still going on I'll swap it. It's just such a specific set of issues that all related to the GPU that's being reported by others that I'm guessing it has to be drivers and Microsoft has already acknowledge that. If it's something else that should be clearer by next week.
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Yeah Im betting on some big bug fixes on this new firmware.....I hope.,
 
So my surface has developed a light circle bleed in the middle of the screen that is only visible on black. It's going back to MS store tomorrow for exchange...
 
tangoseal said:
Yeah Im betting on some big bug fixes on this new firmware.....I hope.,
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Guess we get to find out sooner they we may have thought, new drivers and firmware with new HD 520 drivers: https://www.microsoft.com/surface/e...te/surface-pro-4-update-history?os=windows-10

So far so good. No issues with conversion crashing which I could always do with when detaching while in sleep. Turn Hyper V back on and no GPU corruption thus far. Doing a quick sleep test with Windows Hello back on to see if the battery drain issue is resolved as well.
 
So, I exchanged my Surface due to some white spot on the screen, however, I noticed some cosmetic defects on both of them.

First Surface had a micro scratch on the tilt.

Second Surface has two micro dings on the bezel...

Both of them have a backlight bleed..

Check your Surface..

Not impressed with the MS quality control.
 
hi. i read some battery tests on the sp4 M3 version and apparently the battery life is no better than the i5/i7!
 
jonneymendoza said:
hi. i read some battery tests on the sp4 M3 version and apparently the battery life is no better than the i5/i7!
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the 12 hours was probably idle with screen blanked with all radiation function turned off i.e. bt and wifi, and other stuff.

I get about 6-7 hours of honest to goodness usefulness out of mine. Which is an AMAZING amount of battery life giving the horsepower of this machine. I have the I5 with dGPU. I have turned off all dGPU functions except to game using the nvidia control panel. And in all honesty I am able to play Minecraft with the HD 520 just fine and dandy so I save power by doing that as well.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by tangoseal View Post
Is it possible that we are talking a few mm thicker for a much more robust gamut of new tech?

I would certainly make the compromise as a mobile power user. I am sure millions would if marketed appropriately. Again they, the consumer, must be informed through powerful marketing strategem if we are going to have compromise between the sp3 and the sp4 dimensions vs. iPad etc... You heatlesssun and I certainly know all the jargon but mommy and daddy business man or woman probably doesn't and they are gonna be like mmmm this is little heavier than the pro3 laptop finder online so I will just stick with the 3. But appropriate salesmanship and marketing and it should make a killing for most consumers with all the fancy stuff me and you would dream of having. But i'm an enthusiast/glass half full kind of guy (not comparing you to anything of course) only speaking for my own being.

Edit** There is one thing you mention without having directly mentioned it .... the more hardware we throw at it the more power drain it has to assume. Not to mention price. Ouch.... that price point has to be perfect or else it will be a bust.

So if it came with no thunderbolt ports on this iteration I more than likely would still buy one because I justifiably need one in preparation for medical college as I am changing careers now in my early 30's.
I agree there are better laptop deals out there. Being thicker and/or heavier than the SP3 is simply a non-starter for this device. It has to progress towards thinner and lighter in order to survive in current market pressures. It has to compete pretty closely with the iPad Pro like it or not. The numbers on that are 7mm thick and 1.57 lbs. That is a doable target considering the SP3 is already at 9mm thick and 1.76 lbs. However increasing thickness and weight just isn't an option with current market pressures and general consumer sentiment.
 
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anyone got the i7 sp4 yet? apprently the intergrated gpu is almost twice as fast as the one in the i5 version aka the Inte HD 520 vs HD 540.
 
jonneymendoza said:
anyone got the i7 sp4 yet? apprently the intergrated gpu is almost twice as fast as the one in the i5 version aka the Inte HD 520 vs HD 540.
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Yeah the Iris Pro is significantly more powerful in many respects than the HD 520. However I do not recommend the I7 unless you need fractionally more cpu and do not want to pay a premium for nvidia GPU which I actually think is VERY powerful for this ultra thin class of laptop hybrid thingy. I love my nVidia GPU in mine. I can actually play World of Warcraft @ 90fps in HIGH graphics mode at a medium 4:3'ish resolution. And this LCD looks amazing even when its scaling down.
 
tangoseal said:
Yeah the Iris Pro is significantly more powerful in many respects than the HD 520. However I do not recommend the I7 unless you need fractionally more cpu and do not want to pay a premium for nvidia GPU which I actually think is VERY powerful for this ultra thin class of laptop hybrid thingy. I love my nVidia GPU in mine. I can actually play World of Warcraft @ 90fps in HIGH graphics mode at a medium 4:3'ish resolution. And this LCD looks amazing even when its scaling down.
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Wrong thread, SP4 has no dGPU option.
 
So far I been happy with my Pro 4. There is a bit of light bleed on the bottom which I mainly notice during boot up but not under normal use. I have the screen set at 50% brightness which is pretty bright.

Overall a good laptop replacement compared to my old Lenovo Y580.
 
There's no delay, the i7 SP4 was always scheduled for the 20th. People who didn't pre-order are getting it in December.
 
-Dragon- said:
Wrong thread, SP4 has no dGPU option.
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Nope not wrong thread. I started this thread as the OP. What I am saying is .... the I7 will be a significant improvement over the I5 graphics wise in the tablet. If you want a dGPU power of course you have to go with the book. It is an option and just because an uncomitted non owner is looking at this thread thinking they want better graphics they may read my post suggesting the book with the dGPU. So this information is great even in this thread.
 
tangoseal said:
Nope not wrong thread. I started this thread as the OP. What I am saying is .... the I7 will be a significant improvement over the I5 graphics wise in the tablet.
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In theory yes. The question will be throttling. It does look like that issue has been mostly mitigated with i5 devices and the HD 520 but there's more heat with the i7 and GT3. That's one thing that really sweet about the Surface Book by having the CPU and GPU separated.
 
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