I have a Dell laptop, and the Intel/NVidia driver combo has been the buggiest part of the whole thing. Really irritating.
Re:The Microsoft Surface Book Review
by mring33621 on Tuesday November 10, 2015 @09:42AM
(#10539543)
Same for my Asus laptop. Makes me wish for just one card. I know, I can always disable one of them...
Re:The Microsoft Surface Book Review
by soylentcola on Tuesday November 10, 2015 @11:46AM
(#10540393)
Same on my Asus. The problem is that forcing the nVidia GPU means hotter/more fan/faster battery drain while forcing Intel means...it uses the buggy Intel drivers.
I'm not complaining too much if only because when I bought it, a 17" i7/16GB/nVidia/1920x1080 laptop for under a grand was a great deal of power for the cost (and it's only a backup machine for occasional use at events) but man...it's the one thing that's been a pain since I got the thing. Additionally I was bummed to learn that even with the dGPU forced on, it doesn't play well with my Oculus dev unit but I didn't know the requirements when I bought the notebook so that's just hindsight. Usually I just force the dGPU and leave it plugged in whenever humanly possible.
The function lock is actually "smart" even though they don't document it properly, it is actually a toggle and hotkey in one.
Whenever you hold the function key and hit another key while holding function, then release function it will stay in the mode you started in.
I discovered the 'toggle' property recently and that's a real improvement to it, which is why I find it less problematic than every other implementation of Fn keys. Still would rather have a full set of keys, though.
Re:The Microsoft Surface Book Review
by nicolapede on Tuesday November 10, 2015 @09:38AM
(#10539513)
> * You can charge the tablet by itself if you want to.
What you mean by that?
There's a surface connector on the tablet, just like on the base. So if you've been using the tablet you can plug it in to the charger directly and keep using it. (Not sure I'd ever do this...)
Good:
* The build quality is stellar.
* Having the CPU in the screen means the keyboard never gets uncomfortably hot, even when running games. Very comfortable.
* Pretty fast CPU.
* The SSD is obscenely fast, I can get more than 1gb/s on sequential reads. Wish I got that kind of performance in my desktop.
* All the custom hardware integration (the latch, rotation, tablet mode, etc) is pretty robust.
* Good touchpad and pretty decent keyboard.
* Great battery life. When I'm reading ebooks or news I can easily get 5hrs out of the tablet; the laptop mode lasts way longer than that. The numbers in the Anandtech review are pretty representative. Playing Armello on the tablet gets a few hours battery life; I'd probably get 5+ using Steam In-home Streaming.
* When the fan is running (high cpu load, etc) it's very, very quiet. This is the quietest laptop I've ever owned.
* The external port dock is pretty convenient.
* The charging connector is magsafe-style and it's already saved me from a couple nasty incidents.
* You can charge the tablet by itself if you want to.
* The pen and digitizer are great. I have a pretty reasonable time doing web browsing, email and IM on the tablet using the pen to write. The quality of the pressure sensitivity and precision tracking on the pen is pretty good.
* The iGPU is actually (though still only somewhat) up to the challenge of driving the panel at full DPI. Past high-DPI laptops I've owned had Intel GPUs that were clearly not up to the task of compositing the whole screen at 60hz while rendering webpages.
* Considering the problems I've had with the device, Microsoft customer support has been helpful and responsive.
Bad:
* In general the Surface Book and its accessories are just too expensive.
* Intel's video drivers are a goddamn trainwreck. It's an embarrassment. I've had more BSODs (all in the Intel drivers) and TDRs (at least a dozen video driver resets) in the couple weeks I've owned this thing than I've had all year on my desktop. When you're using the NVIDIA GPU in the keyboard things are pretty solid, except that Intel's surface sharing implementation is also totally hosed so vsync doesn't work right. :(
* The WiFi drivers (and probably some other device - I haven't figured out how to profile windows user-mode drivers) are really terrible, they burn a ridiculous amount of CPU and cause latency spikes that make audio hitch. The ethernet in the port dock is fine, at least.
* The cable on the port dock is too short and it's actually quite inconvenient.
* The keyboard/tablet latch requires ever so slightly too much force to remove - It's pretty hard to do one-handed without lifting the whole device. (Very easy with two hands, though.)
* The Fn-lock setup on the keyboard is an annoyance (but not remotely as bad as past Microsoft keyboards with this design)
* Microsoft hosed palm detection for pen input in Win10 and it's a real annoyance. It's not as good as it was in 8.
* The touchpad drivers don't have adjustments for things like palm detection.
* The weight balance between keyboard/tablet is ever so slightly off, such that if you fully extend the screen it tilts backward a little. Not a problem when typing, but it makes me nervous :-)