Weekend Gamer: Revisiting the Surface Pro 7

 

All this thinking about the MacBook Neo reminded me that I actually own an old Surface Pro 7 that I bought in Nov 2019 for $600 (the price as the Neo). I did think that this would be my laptop, but after using it for a while, I wasn’t happy with its performance. The i3 chip, combined with the 4GB of RAM wasn’t great. I found that my iPad was just better, when you compare them.

When I am not at my desk, I like to work sitting in the open-air room in the house, as it’s breezier and cooler than the rest of the house. I used to bring my iPad out here, but it’s a bit of a hassle as I have the iPad near my bed because I like to fall asleep reading news or watching some YouTube.

So, yeah, I dusted off the old Surface Pro 7 and am in the process of updating the software and installing some new software (including my current favorite Standard Note as my prefer note-taking software).

Man, I can confirm, the Surface Pro 7 is slow. When it was updating in the background, the Surface Pro was excruciating slow, so make sure you have it all up to date to get the best performance. I also had to disable all the auto-start applications.

Still, as a tablet (with an optional keyboard), it is pretty good. I really like that it is running full Windows, I like the idea of taking off the keyboard and using it purely as a tablet. But clearly, Windows wasn’t really tablet-friendly. You can tell MicroSoft tried to make Windows work for both desktop and tablet, but somehow sucks at both. However, since it’s full Windows, I can run any software, including Steam and Affinity or MicroSoft Word.

The nice thing is that I purchased Office 2021 in January 2023, and the software shows up in my Windows Account. So, I can install the software on my Surface Pro, if I need the software again.

The other nice thing is that it has Windows Hello, so instead of using a password or passkey, it uses the webcam to identify my face and uses that as a way to sign me into my account without having me input the password. That’s quite cool, and I feel a much safer way instead of traditional password.

I mentioned that the Surface Pro 7 is slow, and it is. Just installing software takes minutes. If you’re also running YouTube in the background, it will stutter or slows down. I’m not a fan that it struggles so much. When it works, like right now as I’m typing away with YouTube playing in the background, I love it. But I it’s because word processing isn’t exactly high-intensive activity.

Since I’m logged into my local network, I instantly have access to my local backup drives – meaning all the photos in my backup vault is available on my Surface Pro. That’s so nice, as long as I’ve uploaded the photos to my local drive, all the devices can suddenly see the files. That just means I can work on my Surface Pro, upload it to the local drive, and then work on the files on my regular desktop when I get around to it.

If you lost the charging cable that came with the Surface Pro (as I have seemed to have misplaced it), you can alternatively charge the Surface Pro using a USB-C, so that’s actually quite cool.

Battery life is rated at 10 hours, but I found that whatever they advertise, you need to divide that by 2. Still, that’s not bad, especially compared to my Strix.

I think the one thing that still plagues Windows devices is that they are terrible when it comes sleep and hibernation. Like today, I opened the Surface Pro and found that all the battery had been drained, because it didn’t sleep (or perhaps it did but still drains the battery at an astonishing rate).

I’ll have to admit; I am pretty happy with the compatibility of the Windows device. I do everything on the Surface Pro that I can do on my PC (except for playing games), but have been unhappy with the slowness/performance. However, at this time, I think the Surface Pro 7 might be “good enough” for me. It’s been kind of exciting to re-discover my Surface Pro.

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