Month: May 2016

Glossy screens might be useful for color rendering, but for normal work related tasks they are horrible. So I needed a non glare screen “protector” for my surface.

I ended up buying a tech armor anti glare screen protector:
http://www.amazon.com/Tech-Armor-Anti-Glare-Anti-Fingerprint-Protectors/dp/B00KMC5RIG?ie=UTF8&psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o06_s00

Good fit. Takes away all the glare and makes the surface very useful in normal office environments.
Is the sharpness slightly reduced: yes. Do I care: NO. It is that much more pleasant on the eyes not having the glare!

For touch screen, I use Edge as my browser. As I also noticed efficient CPU use when looking at video’s (compare cpu usage when looking at any youtube video in edge versus chrome for example).
But I wanted to get rid of all these ads. Solution:
http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

What it does: replace the hosts file in windows. This file is a first lookup from web-address to IP address. It is used before a DNS server is queried.
By putting entries in this hosts file for most known advertising sites (like doubleclick.net) and redirecting these to “nothing”, the ads are effectively filtered. Making for a much cleaner browsing experience.

Check out the link. It is free and very easy to install.

Installed bing desktop. But not for the search. Still noticed that google gives me better hits (keep trying Bing though…..).

Bing desktop gives beautiful desktop background pictures and login pictures. That makes it worth it. Combined with the nice screen and resolution of the surface, these look gorgeous.

The search bar -> you can minimize it out of the way….

So still using my surface pro 3. Seems less blue screens or crashed drivers these days. Still early to tell if it is stable.
Got another weird microsoft one, high CPU usage, out of the blue, from “Windows Shell Experience Host”. Killed the process. It restarted and behaved after that.

One possible link suggestion a way to fix the surface issue:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/forum/surfbook-surfdrivers/i-am-having-a-display-driver-stopped-responding/99bf51a0-669d-4f35-abdd-07135ff07768?page=47&auth=1

I realize this is mostly for the surface book. But applied it this morning. Let’s see how the surface pro 3 works after this.

If still not stable, I might have to do a full re-install from a downloaded file that you put on a USB stick, and reset the surface pro from that. So much trouble…… 🙁

So my surface got updated to windows 10.
All seemed well at first, until I realized that the video kept crashing, causing blue screens.
Now, several months and windows updates later, including a complete factory reset, I can no longer advice someone to purchase the surface pro 3. It is just not a stable, reliable platform. I typically get about 3 blue screen per week. At random situations.

A remote support session with Microsoft had them install an old (june 2015) video driver. At first that seemed to work, only to cause issues with that driver a few weeks later. It seemed to not work with the windows 10 updates.

Using computers as a tool for work and pleasure, I do not want to keep troubleshooting a system over and over. The surface pro 3 seems to require this level of attention and maintenance. Making it a useless device overall. VERY DISAPPOINTING.

So for now, I’d suggest to make sure you read up on many people having issues with the Surface pro and the surface book. You pay a premium, Apple like prices. But you don’t get a premium, apple like experience.