Microsoft's Surface Pro 2

I was putting off replacing my old HP dm3 laptop until I found a Haswell system that had all the features I wanted. I think I finally found what I was looking for in Microsoft's Surface Pro 2.

27Sep13 I preordered the Surface Pro 2 with 512 GB SSD

Product Name: Surface Pro 2 Product SKU: 7SX-00001 (Pre-Ordered) Pre-order Ships by October 29 Unit Price: $1,799.00 Qty Ordered: 1	$1,799.00
Product Name: Type Cover 2 (Charcoal) Product SKU: N7W-00001 (Pre-Ordered) Pre-order Ships by October 21 Unit Price: $129.99 Qty Ordered: 1	$129.99

21Oct13 The Type Cover 2 shipped and arrived the next day.
25Oct13 The Surface shipped 4 days early!
28Oct13 It was supposed to be delivered, but UPS ran into some snag.

They had to delay delivery until the 29th and unfortunately, they didn't tell me that until after I had left work early. So, it was a rather frustrating night.

After my weekly Tuesday night conference call will China, I could finally start playing and installing all of the tools that I needed for work and play. Everything appeared to install fine but the next day, after the system rebooted, suddenly WiFi was no longer working. Panic set in, but I was still running on my old computer. So, I started a chart session with Microsoft Tech Support.

We found that the Marvell AVASTAR 350N Wireless Network Controller was not even listed in the Device Manager and we ended up using the "Refresh your PC without affecting your files" option to recover. The "without affecting your files" is a misnomer, since you still have to reinstall all your apps, but at least I had wireless again.

I had an Anker USB 3 Ethernet adaptor, but in its bad state, even USB devices were not registering. Whatever happened, it was a really bad defect, and I still didn't really know what caused it. I've never been super careful when installing apps in Windows, especially when I've used the app before. However, now I knew I had one that was no longer compatible, but which one?

I couldn't do much on Wednesday night, since I have multiple phone meetings and Choir practice, but Thursday night I start installing apps again, making sure I rebooted in between each one. It wasn't until I got to pulse-windows-64bit-3.1.6.37319.msi that the WiFi died again. The is Juno Pulse and it looks like they have a version 4, but the version 3.1 that my work's IT department supplied did the damage. It also updated after being launched, so maybe the newer version will work. I'm just hesitant at this point, so I filed a JIRA report with our IT department and I'll wait to see what they say before I try again. I can mostly survive without being able to VPN into work, but eventually, I'll have to try it again.

I did another refresh but I also started to notice that the NY Times app no longer worked. In fact, none of the news type apps worked (e.g. News, Finance, Sports and Food). They all would just spin and not open. Even our own Nook reader app didn't work. So I started more chat sessions with Microsoft's Tech Support.

I'm having difficulties remembering which days these events happened, but the 1st night, a level 1 tech climbed into my machine using LogMeIn. After quite a few hours, he gave up and scheduled be for level 2 support a few days later. The level 2 tech went through almost the same identical gymnastics on my system and ended up asking if I had the install disks. I pointed out that this was a Surface Pro 2 with a recovery partition, and he got all flummoxed and told me to call the Surface team.

That got me pissed, since this was the 2nd night wasting my time, and the tech could easily tell what kind of machine this was.  The tech ended up saying that he would call me the next evening and tell the Surface tech what he had done. However, the next night no one called, and when he did the next night, I was busy at Choir (;must have been this last Wednesday;).

I ended up waking up early one morning and did a "Remove everything and reinstall Windows". I made sure that all the news apps were working again and reinstalled everything, except Juno Pulse. I think I have everything working, except VPN, and I haven't had to turn on my old computer all week, except last night when I pulled off my Filezilla sites.

In summary, this is a really nice computer.  The screen is a little small, but it is easy to move it closer to my old tired eyes.  It's a little heavy, but there are various ways to prop it up so it stands on its own. I've gone from a wheeled backpack with way too much in it, to a CamelBack pack with an empty water pouch. I even rode my bike to and from the Caltrain station to add a little bit of exercise to my work commute.

I'm happy. ;)

DaR