Microsoft Surface Book
- Thread starter Ronnie-
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My old Dell Precision laptop started to fall apart (it served me very well for many years) and I needed something bigger than a Surface Pro. So, I went ahead and purchased a new 15" Surface Book 2. Fully loaded: 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD. This will be my main computer for work, so I needed plenty of horse power, mainly to be able to run multiple VMs.
So far I am very impressed with it. Feels very solid. High-quality construction. The keyboard is very good. Runs cool and quiet. This new generation has a USB-C port in addition to two standard USB3 ports and an SD-card slot. It is compatible with the old Surface Pro dock. The only thing I am not so impressed with is Windows Hello seems to be less quick and reliable than the one on the Surface Pro. Perhaps I need to keep training it.
Found a couple of pleasant surprises. First, I really like Microsoft's 3:2 aspect ratio! For my purposes it works way better than 16:9 or 16:10 found on most other laptops. Another good surprise, this laptop can be safely used on a bed or a couch without worrying about the dust clogging the fans. There seems to be absolutely no air suction from the bottom or even from the sides. Even the MacBook Pro, which doesn't have any vents at the bottom is not fully safe on a bed as it sucks air from the sides and even from the bottom near the screen the way it is constructed. On the Surface Book, the vents are on the top side and around the display.
I wasn't necessarily looking for a detachable display, but I love having it!
So far I am very impressed with it. Feels very solid. High-quality construction. The keyboard is very good. Runs cool and quiet. This new generation has a USB-C port in addition to two standard USB3 ports and an SD-card slot. It is compatible with the old Surface Pro dock. The only thing I am not so impressed with is Windows Hello seems to be less quick and reliable than the one on the Surface Pro. Perhaps I need to keep training it.
Found a couple of pleasant surprises. First, I really like Microsoft's 3:2 aspect ratio! For my purposes it works way better than 16:9 or 16:10 found on most other laptops. Another good surprise, this laptop can be safely used on a bed or a couch without worrying about the dust clogging the fans. There seems to be absolutely no air suction from the bottom or even from the sides. Even the MacBook Pro, which doesn't have any vents at the bottom is not fully safe on a bed as it sucks air from the sides and even from the bottom near the screen the way it is constructed. On the Surface Book, the vents are on the top side and around the display.
I wasn't necessarily looking for a detachable display, but I love having it!
Roland- I'll look at it but my first gen Surface Pro is doing just great, still. I can even stitch my 360VR camera files but 30 seconds takes all night. I never use it as a tablet, always have the keyboard attached. I have a powered USB 2.0 switch/hub dongle so I can attach a hard drive. I do struggle with the 128GB C drive but I have my full complement of video editing software installed. 500GB is ideal. 1TB is a waste of money.
That observation is three years old. I've no idea about the new Surface Book 2 the Ilya is sporting, but he appears to like it!
It depends on what you use it for. 500GB is not sufficient for my work. Virtual machines take a lot of disk space. Raw photos and videos take a lot of space too, but those can be transferred to an external drive. My VMs have to reside on the local drive for performance (and portability) reasons. My old Dell laptop actually had two drives (one SSD and one HD), 1.5 TB total, but I think 1TB will suffice. And I love having SSD-only drives.
Plus RAM but as I recall with mine, I have the reserved ram set to dynamic but my small machine has 24GB of ram. What are you using? VMware? My only experience is with a winXP on my win 7 computer. I use it for several programs that only run in 16bit. I also have one program that only runs in win 10 but for that I now have a separate computer with 18 hyper threaded cores.
I am using Hyper-V. It's included with Windows 10 Pro.
Unfortunately 16 GB is the maximum on the Surface Book. I would prefer 24 or 32 GB RAM, but that's OK.
It does have an 8th generation Intel Core, which is pretty fast!
Unfortunately 16 GB is the maximum on the Surface Book. I would prefer 24 or 32 GB RAM, but that's OK.
It does have an 8th generation Intel Core, which is pretty fast!
Last year at work our new Sales Manager wanted to get our Sales Team all on common hardware and make it look like we are super modern and hip. All of our traveling sales guys and their direct supervisors were issued various models of Dell Precisions in the early 2010s and then various generations of iPads in 2014 and 2015. The really only need the iPad for one specific app but they tend to use them for other things. In addition to sales literature and presentations, the sales reps are supposed to give customer demos of our own in-house 3D CAD/CAM software. Hence the need for a more powerful laptop with a bigger power supply and decent dedicated GPU. Oddly enough, the one app that the iPad is needed for (and it’s not a big name app either), is also available on the Windows Store and can be run on Windows 10 machines. Anything that helps rid my work of Apple devices, I’m 110% cool with. We are primarily a Dell shop, but we’re not locked into them, so after looking at some 2 in 1 convertibles with the Dell XPS and HP Spectre, we decided on the Surface Book
The sales guys always complained about having to carry two devices, one of them being a ‘heavy’ laptop. They wanted only the iPad. Trying to explain to these guys that with Apple’s prison of a walled garden ecosystem, there is no way to put our software on an iPad, plus even it was possible, there’s no way the hardware would support it.
Half of the sales team has Surface Books now, the original, not the Second Generation, when they were all in a few weeks ago for a meeting and stopped by bugging me too enable Hello, I noticed they are beat to hell. I think of the seven in use, only two don’t have physical damage of some sort. Screen chips and cracks, bent keyboards, dents all over the back of the screen, hinge problems. And these things are barely a year old.
They have the Original Surface Books, with Core i5 Processors, 512 GB SSDs, 8 GB RAM and while the first test unit I bought had integrated graphics, the rest have the GeForce 940M. These things can barley handle of home grown CAD and CNC software and the thing gets super hot with the fan running constantly. You can feel the heat the most on the back, where the Microsoft logo is. A company we contract out to developed a plug in/add on, for our software to work in conjunction with SolidWorks and now they all want me to install SolidWorks on their Surface Books. At $6000 a seat minimum that’s not going to happen anytime soon and can just see SolidWorks destroying the performance of the Surface Books.
One thing that really sucks about the Surface Book, at least the original, is the lack of ports on the screen. Don’t know if the second generation has any or not. All of our guys thought they were going to be so slick giving customers demos on a tablet, only to realize that there’s no USB port on the screen, so it must be docked to the keyboard. Our software requires a secure USB dongle to run.
The sales manager offered to let me have SB we used as a test that has integrated graphics. I said thanks, but no thanks and keep in in my desk drawer as a spare ready to be issued if need be. I don’t do dainty and frail computers that can’t be taken apart and upgraded. And while the 15.6” screen on my Precision 4800 is still too small for me, no way would I be able to tolerate the 12 or 13” screens on the SB.
The sales guys always complained about having to carry two devices, one of them being a ‘heavy’ laptop. They wanted only the iPad. Trying to explain to these guys that with Apple’s prison of a walled garden ecosystem, there is no way to put our software on an iPad, plus even it was possible, there’s no way the hardware would support it.
Half of the sales team has Surface Books now, the original, not the Second Generation, when they were all in a few weeks ago for a meeting and stopped by bugging me too enable Hello, I noticed they are beat to hell. I think of the seven in use, only two don’t have physical damage of some sort. Screen chips and cracks, bent keyboards, dents all over the back of the screen, hinge problems. And these things are barely a year old.
They have the Original Surface Books, with Core i5 Processors, 512 GB SSDs, 8 GB RAM and while the first test unit I bought had integrated graphics, the rest have the GeForce 940M. These things can barley handle of home grown CAD and CNC software and the thing gets super hot with the fan running constantly. You can feel the heat the most on the back, where the Microsoft logo is. A company we contract out to developed a plug in/add on, for our software to work in conjunction with SolidWorks and now they all want me to install SolidWorks on their Surface Books. At $6000 a seat minimum that’s not going to happen anytime soon and can just see SolidWorks destroying the performance of the Surface Books.
One thing that really sucks about the Surface Book, at least the original, is the lack of ports on the screen. Don’t know if the second generation has any or not. All of our guys thought they were going to be so slick giving customers demos on a tablet, only to realize that there’s no USB port on the screen, so it must be docked to the keyboard. Our software requires a secure USB dongle to run.
The sales manager offered to let me have SB we used as a test that has integrated graphics. I said thanks, but no thanks and keep in in my desk drawer as a spare ready to be issued if need be. I don’t do dainty and frail computers that can’t be taken apart and upgraded. And while the 15.6” screen on my Precision 4800 is still too small for me, no way would I be able to tolerate the 12 or 13” screens on the SB.
Microsoft recently sent me a recall notice on my Surface Pro. Seems the power cord was catching fire. So they sent me a new one and asked I throw away the old one. It is heavier then the original. I never had a problem but I gladly put the new one in use.
