Mistreating a Surface Pro 3
/My Surface Pro is really coming into its own now. Folks I know who have purchased new ones recently seem to have a very high opinion of them. None of them are complaining of the issues that I had a while back. Perhaps recent firmware updates have sorted out the problems I was having with suspend and resume.
So for the last few days I've tried something new with my poor device. I've been treating it abominably. Up until now I've been very careful about starting up and shutting down and docking and undocking. But recently I've given up on that. I've been snapping the machine in and out of the dock and just closing it when I'm done and opening it up again when I want to work.
It seems to work really well. In fact last night I went a bit too far and undocked the machine while Adobe Lightroom was still running and connected to an external drive. That caused Lightroom a few problems as its universe collapsed around it, but the Surface took it all in its stride.
The one major difference in my approach is that I'm very careful not to interrupt the machine when it is sorting itself out on startup. Previously I'd press the power button, not see anything happen and then press and prod other buttons. I'd also probably press the power button and close the cover and generally do things that confused things.
I'm much more careful now. If I want it to shut down I just close the cover. When I open the machine I check by touching the Windows button to see if the Surface is trying to wake up. I get a buzz from the haptic feedback motor in the machine if it is doing something and so I just wait for things to appear, which they have done so far.
I hope this post doesn't jinx things, because at the moment the machine is completely living up to the promise it had when I bought it.