Surface Laptop 7 First Day of Work Impression

I purchased the 15″ black, 16 GB Ram, 1 TB storrage Surface Laptop. I spent all day Wednesday setting up the laptop and found most of my applications were already built for ARM, a few outliers like WinSCP for example weren’t but surprised that putty was ready to go. I did run into the same printer issues others are where the files sent to the printer will make the printer setup for the job but then nothing comes out of the printer. I had Microsoft on chat for about 2 hours with an open ticket being escalated.

For my first full day which started about 6:00 am I decided to run only on battery and also run with a external DisplayPort monitor running at 1080p. Most of my files are also on my NAS which I use the Synology DriveClient like OneDrive to sync files from the computer to the NAS. I then fired off VPN to the work systems and I was on the way.

Since Wednesday was a holiday for the US I had a lot of email to grind though from those that work offshore. Then a lot of reviewing build status of projects zoom and teams calls etc. Worked on a few Jupyter Notebooks in Python, watched some training videos and then spent two hours with Microsoft where they remoted into my system to try to resolve the printer issue. In the afternoon I took a break and viewed a couple of YouTube’s and also had Spotify up and running playing a playlist to an Amazon Echo device the whole day though Spotify connect. I did play around with the AI paint program a bit but nothing major I really wanted to see Recall but that will have to wait until they release it.

By 6:00 pm I still had about 30% of battery left and I was impressed. If this was my HP Spectre laptop the battery would have given up the ghost by noon. I will say this is a keeper and the performance was great. Not a single slowdown. By the way there are plenty of clickbait video’s on YouTube already about the Windows on ARM devices and even one by LinusTechTips berating a person that likes their Windows on ARM laptop.