Lol, the sickness never ends. For just $$ more I could get... Man I miss the days of the pet rock and simple, non upgradeable toys.
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I Got Myself A Surface 3!
- Thread starter Renzatic
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Lol, the sickness never ends. For just $$ more I could get... Man I miss the days of the pet rock and simple, non upgradeable toys.
I never got to enjoy those simple days. When I was a kid, it was all about Super Soaker water guns, and GI Joe vehicles. The problem with those was that there was always something just a little bit cooler for just a little more money...
Can't speak from experience on the trackpad, since I only rarely use them, though it does feel more roomy in comparison to the previous cover.
But the keyboard? That I can speak on, and it's a MASSIVE improvement.
Eh, 9 hours isn't terrible. That'll translate to about 5-12 hours, depending on usage. Though the more finger friendly file browser probably isn't coming until the Redstone update next year sometime, when MS finishes converting all the old Windows standbys to Universal apps.
Never gotten remotely close to 9 hrs on my SP3. More like 3.5-4 hrs with a bright screen. 4.5-5 with dim. Edge browser is making things worse.
On a rough guesstimation, I'd say I was getting around 5, 5 1/2 hours on average at 25-50% brightness with my S3, and that was through decently heavy usage, beyond the usual web browsing and watching movies standard. Decent enough, but not exactly squeal worthy.
That's nuts, I get 5-6 solid hours with 75% or more brightness on my SP3. I would have thought the Atom CPU in the S3 was better than that. I know my old Lenovo tablet with last generation Atom got a solid 7-8 hours.
I bought the original Surface Pro because it interested me, second because I live and work in a very mobile cross platform environment.
Having found it very useful I bought a Surface Pro 3 upon its release. Faster, smoother and just delightful I really enjoy it.
Next up: Surface Book I've preordered. MS is on a roll and I'm enjoying every minute
Having found it very useful I bought a Surface Pro 3 upon its release. Faster, smoother and just delightful I really enjoy it.
Next up: Surface Book I've preordered. MS is on a roll and I'm enjoying every minute
Like I said, it's a rough guesstimation. A very rough one. The longest I've spent with it in a single sitting was about 2 hours, and it dropped about 35% of its battery life in that time. Most of the time, I'm playing with it in quick bursts. I'll pick it, do something, put it to sleep, drive off somewhere, pick it up, do something, and so on and so on. Other than the first day I had it, I haven't drained the battery below 25%.
So spinning numbers off my head, I figured I get about 5 1/2 hours out of it. It could be more, but that feels like a good, honest number to me.
Oh, and I figured out some more things about the M3 processor in the SP4. At its most basic, a Skylake M3 is about equivalent to a lower clocked Broadwell i3, though it does have some distinct advantages, like sporting some of the nicer features of the i5-i7 line. It has a larger cache, better burst performance, a faster GPU, Hyper-V support, and it's hyperthreaded like the i7.
Same here, I also get a good 8 hours of work on the SP3, though I think my brightness may be lower.
In about an hour, I'll no longer have a Surface 3. It's boxed up, bagged up, and ready to be traded up.
Kinda sad about it in a way. It was a good little machine. Though in the long run, I'm sure I'll be happier with the SP4.
Kinda sad about it in a way. It was a good little machine. Though in the long run, I'm sure I'll be happier with the SP4.
So you're going to format the new one and install Fedora/Gnome before you need 30 jillion winders updates right??
So you're going to format the new one and install Fedora/Gnome before you need 30 jillion winders updates right??
Not at first. I want to see how long it takes to download and install those 30 jillion updates.
Gonna use it as a benchmark. If I can get through it in half an hour, then my SP4 is, like, TWICE AS FAST!
You mean you don't want to be like RMS and eat your toe cheese?? But Free SW!!
In all seriousness let me know how Linux works on the new toy I think lowendlinux Jr. could use a tablet but I really don't want her on Winders or OS X/iOS.
You mean you don't want to be like RMS and eat your toe cheese?? But Free SW!!
...he didn't even put it on a cracker. O_0
I can tell you right now I won't be doing it immediately, since I'll want to make sure it has proper driver support before I attempt the experiment myself. I'll wait for those braver pioneers to do their thing, since they're far better versed at compiling parts and troubleshooting Linux than I am.
I'm not in any particular hurry I'm hot going to buy her one until she gets her Ubuntu Minecraft server set up on DO, she's close but not there yet. It's kind of a deal, right now she uses the one I put together for her once she gets hers working then she get a tablet.
Well, if she ends up finishing it up faster than you thought she would, there's always the Surface Pro 3. I've read through plenty of articles showing how to get it up and running just fine with Ubuntu. On a semi-educated guess, I'd say it'll run Arch just as well.
The SP4 has its perks, but for kids wanting to run Minecraft, you could probably go all the way back to a SP2 for it.
She's a scary smart little girl (thanks to my wife) and she loves MC so I'm thinking it'll be better than mine before Christmas
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She's a scary smart little girl (thanks to my wife) and she loves MC so I'm thinking it'll be better than mine before Christmas
You know, you should really consider buying her some Minecraft Lego. Also, an old Nintendo. Because, comeon, nothing's cooler than the original Nintendo.
And on that note, I'm off to Best Buy, then to do my tasks 'o the day! Catch you all when I get back later.
You know, you should really consider buying her some Minecraft Lego. Also, an old Nintendo. Because, comeon, nothing's cooler than the original Nintendo.
And on that note, I'm off to Best Buy, then to do my tasks 'o the day! Catch you all when I get back later.
I found some MC key fobs and it sits on her computer and she loves it. MC seems to be really popular amongst the youngun's in her school and I can't figure out why it seems like the most boring game in existence, so I'll leave it with what she told me, "daddy your not a gamer so you won't understand"
You'll be happier, and I'll likely do the same thing with my woman's S3, assuming I can pry it form her fingertips. The better graphics and performance, even with the base M3 model, should be noticeable. The keyboard will be night and day.
Another thing that bugs me about the S3 is how loooong it takes to recharge. Yes, it;s cool that you can recharge with the same cable/charger that charges most of the devices you own, but it sucks that recharge takes 4-8 hours, depending on whether you're using it or not. That alone is enough to make me want something else.
Another thing that bugs me about the S3 is how loooong it takes to recharge. Yes, it;s cool that you can recharge with the same cable/charger that charges most of the devices you own, but it sucks that recharge takes 4-8 hours, depending on whether you're using it or not. That alone is enough to make me want something else.
Nah. You don't even have to be a gamer to like Minecraft. It's all about building cool things, and, if you want, defending these cool things from monsters.
I'll tell you exactly what it is, and why it's so popular. When you grew up, you had Legos, Construx, and Robotix, and all that good stuff, I'm sure. MC is basically a digital version of those toys for this generation of kids.
After I took back my S3 and preordered the SP4 (1125.15 altogether with the keyboard, damn Tennessee sales tax), I spent a good while playing with the demo model. I looked at it all over, compared the thickness to my iPhone 4, carried it a bit. I went nigh on scientific about it.
First, the keyboard. I've already said it was nice, but I'm going to say it again. It's nice. I've always said that the keyboard was the weakest thing about the Surface line, but now...nope, I can't. It's good stuff. Even the trackpad is nice. It has that same smooth, frictionless feel that Mac trackpads have. And just like with the Macs, you barely even have to think about the gestures to perform them. Three fingers up launches Task View, Three fingers left-right swipe through open applications like Alt-Tab (it even brings up the overlay window). Two fingers scroll through pages, about what you'd expect, and a two-finger press is a rightclick.
I don't normally use trackpads unless I absolutely have to, except on Macs. They're too much of a pain in the ass to use anywhere else. To say that the SP4's trackpad is about as effortless and smooth is pretty high praise coming from me. The only downside is that it's a bit more cramped comparatively.
If I have one complaint, it's that the keyboard does have a tiny bit of give when you have it attached to the screen. It's nitpicky, but it could be considered a downside when compared to a traditional laptop keyboard.
Thickness? I played around with the i5 rev, and it's just a smidge thinner than my iPhone 4. It's not as thin as the iPad Air, but really, once you get to a level of thickness where you're comparing differences in millimeters, it becomes more a bragging right than a practical matter.
Weight. Yeah, it has more heft to it than my now old S3 with the type cover on. Though to be fair, it did have a security bar wrapped around the keyboard, so it's hard to make a good judgement call there.
The screen? It's easily as good as the iPads are sporting. That's high praise, because iPad screens are impeccable. On my S3, little icons, like the wifi symbol looked a little pixelated. Here? It's all smooth lines and gentle arches. No complaints. One weird thing I noticed is that the larger screen with the reduced surrounding bezel makes it look weirdly smaller than the SP3 sitting next to it. OPTICAL ILLUSION! :O
The stylus. I only used it in OneNote, but it did seem to be a little more sensitive to pressure. Not a huge difference, but it seems to pick up featherlight touches a little better. The one thing I didn't test was the magnetic dock on the side of the screen. Didn't think about it until I left.
I'd say overall, it's a solid built, well designed machine. I'm glad I'm getting it.
I really want to buy these hybrid tablet/laptops but the ****** battery life always puts me off. My iPad Air 2 gets around 13-15hrs of battery. The SP4 is rated at 9hrs but I doubt it'll get more than 5-6hrs. The Surface Book on the other hand is rated at 12hrs. Perhaps that'll get around 9-10 which is decent.
I read the first page of the thread, I skipped to the last cause I knew you would return it. That is all since I tried one and returned it back when.
Thing is, I though it was a pretty decent little machine once I got past those bad first impressions. It took a lot of internal debate, and even more waffling to get to the point where I decided to return it for the SP4.