Surface Pro 128gb (First Gen) $500 at Bestbuy

I got the surface pro a month back so I am going to get my 100 bucks! lol...I love it. Had an RT and sold it Have a venue pro 8 will plan on selling that. I got the wedge keyboard and mouse off of amazon for less than 80 total. I picked up an extra charger of ebay for 30. Over all the battery life for me using it on and off during a day it lasts about 5-6 hours.
 
I really want this, but will this handle league of legends at 1366x768 low-med details?
 
The Surface Pro is a decent tablet PC, great Wacom active digitizer + pen. The only issue is the battery life, so I am still waiting for deals on the Surface Pro 2.
 
Hero1711 said:
The Surface Pro is a decent tablet PC, great Wacom active digitizer + pen. The only issue is the battery life, so I am still waiting for deals on the Surface Pro 2.
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Less of a concern now that MS has announced they're coming out with a "Power Cover". At least that's what I told myself as I was ordering one from the MS store yesterday.
 
CHANG3D said:
recent benchmarks show 5-6 hours. Longer if you don't use Chrome.
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As much as a I like the surface I could not in good conscience tell somebody that they'll get 5-6 hours. They won't. I've used 3 surface pros for long periods of time brand new from the factory and they simply won't last that long under any practical use. I think 5-6 hours is a ridiculous expectation for this kind of device in this form factor though.
 
Kueller said:
Less of a concern now that MS has announced they're coming out with a "Power Cover". At least that's what I told myself as I was ordering one from the MS store yesterday.
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Yeah I am waiting for that too.
 
killdrith said:
As much as a I like the surface I could not in good conscience tell somebody that they'll get 5-6 hours. They won't. I've used 3 surface pros for long periods of time brand new from the factory and they simply won't last that long under any practical use. I think 5-6 hours is a ridiculous expectation for this kind of device in this form factor though.
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Were you using Chrome (or had it running in background)?
 
I actually bought one from BB to use as an HTPC.

What a POS.

Woudn't connect to my router at faster then 5.5 MBIT, 2.4 or 5GHz. Yep useless for an HTPC. wouldn't stream a 720p rip let alone a blu ray.

Had terrible uneven backlight bleeding.

It had even been used for a few hours (battery was 100% dead; ssd had 3 hours use)

Had to return it.
 
okashira said:
I actually bought one from BB to use as an HTPC.

What a POS.

It had even been used for a few hours (battery was 100% dead; ssd had 3 hours use)

Had to return it.
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Wouldn't it stand to reason that BB resold a bad unit rather than making a generalized statement that the Surface Pro is a POS?
 
This is rather location specific but if you are near the Square One Mall in Mississauga, Ontario (Canada) they will be selling the Surface Pro (1st gen) for $400 (CND) for the new MS Store opening on Feb 8th.
 
okashira said:
I actually bought one from BB to use as an HTPC.

What a POS.

Woudn't connect to my router at faster then 5.5 MBIT, 2.4 or 5GHz. Yep useless for an HTPC. wouldn't stream a 720p rip let alone a blu ray.

Had terrible uneven backlight bleeding.

It had even been used for a few hours (battery was 100% dead; ssd had 3 hours use)

Had to return it.
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Dunno, I think mine may have backlight bleed, but it's hard to tell. It'd help if you took some pics of yours.

As for your network problem, that sounds like something wrong with the way you were connecting or something. I had mine torrenting and downloading games from steam at like near 7MB/s (~56 Mb/s, which is pretty much my ISP's cap, I'm sure the unit could have gone higher) over the wireless router I have (Archer C7)). I haven't actually benchmarked how fast file transfers were going over the wireless, but considering how fast the internet downloads were going, I sincerely doubt it would have been an issue.
 
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StoleMyOwnCar said:
Dunno, I think mine may have backlight bleed, but it's hard to tell. It'd help if you took some pics of yours.

As for your network problem, that sounds like something wrong with the way you were connecting or something. I had mine torrenting and downloading games from steam at like near 7MB/s (~56 Mb/s, which is pretty much my ISP's cap, I'm sure the unit could have gone higher) over the wireless router I have (Archer C7)). I haven't actually benchmarked how fast file transfers were going over the wireless, but considering how fast the internet downloads were going, I sincerely doubt it would have been an issue.
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It was a POS, I assure you. Had already been returned once, evidenced by the uber dead battery and 3 hours SSD usage.
 
AntiSocialMunky said:
Its not just Chrome, there are several applications that screw with the windows timer.
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Kinda OT; but is it common for Chrome to keep Windows (7 and/or 8) from going to sleep? On my wife's laptop (Latitude E6430, I think), I couldn't figure out why it wouldn't go to sleep for the longest time; regardless of what I set the timeout to be, it would never sleep on its own and I would have to manually put it to sleep. Then one day I closed everything, set the timer to 1 min and it went to sleep. Opened Chrome, kept the timer at 1 min and it never went to sleep. I don't have this problem on my laptop (M11X) or desktop though, so it just seems odd. I found a command to use in the command prompt that tells you what services can keep your PC awake and it wouldn't list anything, but obviuosly Chrome is somehow keeping her PC awake.

It's still an issue to this day. Any advice is appreciated!
 
okashira said:
It was a POS, I assure you. Had already been returned once, evidenced by the uber dead battery and 3 hours SSD usage.
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I don't think the dead battery is any sign. Mine came without much charge as well. As for the SSD usage... well I'm not sure, but they have to get Windows 8 and all of this stuff preloaded on these machines at some point, right? Couldn't that have been from when they did that?
 
My surface pro came today. I already like/hate it. I have hand cramps from holding it one handed. The on screen keyboard is only usable in portrait, but 16:9 blows in portrait. The screen is pretty nice otherwise.
On the whole touch functionality is much better than I expected!
Hand Writing to text is addictive, and far better than on my note 2! Writing by hand is much slower and more error filled than just typing at least for me, but it has this old fashioned appeal I'm sure many will appreciate.
 
StoleMyOwnCar said:
I don't think the dead battery is any sign. Mine came without much charge as well. As for the SSD usage... well I'm not sure, but they have to get Windows 8 and all of this stuff preloaded on these machines at some point, right? Couldn't that have been from when they did that?
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Surface Pro's being sold now are almost certainly old stock, it is unlikely they continued making these post Surface 2 Pro launch (Nov 2013).

I believe if you look at the serial for "Lot #" its year/week number.
 
Old stock maybe, but I don't think that necessarily means used or open box. Mine came wrapped in ways that would be difficult to replicate by hand.
 
Just got mine on Saturday. I like it a lot so far.

Make sure you install the enhanced wacom driver to make pen input work much better. It also enables pressure sensitivity in Corel Painter and Photoshop, etc.
http://us.wacom.com/en/feeldriver
 
StoleMyOwnCar said:
Old stock maybe, but I don't think that necessarily means used or open box. Mine came wrapped in ways that would be difficult to replicate by hand.
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They are surely old stock, as Microsoft overproduced when they made them. It was all over the news. On the Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2 they underproduced them because they didn't expect such a high demand and there was actually a shortage of some models before Christmas. They just didn't want to make the same mistake twice.
 
Is there a case that'll allow me to place this on my lap to type like I could do with my laptop?
 
Starrbuck said:
They are surely old stock, as Microsoft overproduced when they made them. It was all over the news. On the Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2 they underproduced them because they didn't expect such a high demand and there was actually a shortage of some models before Christmas. They just didn't want to make the same mistake twice.
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Went to Best Buy yesterday and the prices were all increased on the Surface 1 and the Surface Pro 128. Salesguy told me they are selling a lot of Surface tablets at his store and not just the old ones that were marked down. Guess that's good news. I would definately get a Surface RT if I knew for sure Microsoft would keep supporting RT or offer a OS update with Windows 9 when it is released.
 
Does anyone know if you can get the student 10% discount on top of the huge markdown? I would call and ask but I am in class (which is why I want one of these :p)
 
voklskier4452 said:
Does anyone know if you can get the student 10% discount on top of the huge markdown? I would call and ask but I am in class (which is why I want one of these :p)
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See post #18. :p

I'm tempted to get one of these for school too. I've been using my M11x R2 for the past couple years and its been decent enough. But sometimes it's much easier or more practical to take notes with pen/pencil if you're drawing simple graphs or just making annotations on things. Can anyone speak to the stylus input for taking notes? Is the software pretty well laid out for it and is the digitizer/display fast and accurate?

Another thing I really don't like on my M11x is the display. I thought it was nice enough a few years ago when I got it, but now I just can't fit enough things onscreen at all to be productive. It's sad that small 5" phone displays now have higher resolution than this 11.1" display.
 
I was tempted but the battery life sucks. Having had the Duo 11 which has the same battery life I had to get the Surface Pro 2. Which oddly enough is stupid hard to find around Houston.
 
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