Day 5 with my Surface Pro

 This has been a love-hate relationship.  I bought a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 for my wife to use in Real Estate and for her birthday / Anniversary present. 

I had been lusting after a Surface for a while but was waiting until I had enough cash to spring for one.  The new iPhone 6 plus was very enticing as well.  With a larger screen and other nice to have additions it would replace my iPad Mini (that I love).  I like the size of my original iPhone but it is not very good (too small for old eyes) for surfing the web when I'm out and don't have my tablet with me.

So now I am back to having two devices: a too small iPhone and a too large tablet...  I WISH Apple would come out with a 10" tablet that run a real OS that I can work on!  This Surface is nice but I don't want to drag it around with me during the day.   The Surface did manage to crash and burn the second day I had it.  I opened it up on Monday morning ready to show it off at work and received a nice SURFACE logo but nothing else.  It was in eternal boot up mode.  Apparently the updates that were pushed required a restart and it died on the way back to life... 

After spending hours trying to get the system restored I finally gave up and did a full system restore.  I still have not figured out how to get a recovery disk made and need to get a USB stick formatted with a FAT file system installed (good luck on newer Windows systems).  BTW, you have to use a DOS prompt and a special format command to make this happen... what a pain!  I NEVER had this kind of problem with any of my Apple computers or tablets, they gracefully die and shutdown and then eventually come back to life without losing all the settings and data you put in. 

That should teach me not to trust a new device and, honestly, I had not really loaded anything worthwhile on the Surface yet anyway.  The one thing that was nice is that I had used my Microsoft mail account when setting up the Surface so when I setup the login again all my tiles and settings were pretty much the same.  All in all it has been a decent experience but definitely something I would not hand off to my Mom and not expect her to have problems with.  Karen's Surface has not given her any problems and I do need to back both of them up and create restore sticks for them... Some day soon, it's on my list...