disambiguous1
New Member
If you managed to find a dock to go with your Surface Pro 3, you have no doubt discovered that the dock does not work right out of the box. In most cases the video out will not work at all, and the charging port will tell you that it is plugged in but not charging. This, unfortunately, seems to be normal.
The vague drawings in the instructions and the admonitions on forums to "just do the updates" don't really tell you much. Here's the secret. First, you must find and install any updates to the computer itself BEFORE you try to use the dock (that much they tell you in the instructions). Step two is to make sure that the computer's battery has a decent charge in it, it doesn't necessarily have to be fully charged but I'd make sure it is more than 60% (this is because the computer cannot access the power from the dock until after a certain point in the update process). Only then should you plug the computer into the dock, and THEN go through the update procedure AGAIN. A whole bunch more updates will show up. Apparently it is the dock itself that requires many of those updates, and the computer will not download them unless it is attached to the dock.
For those unfamiliar with how to do the update, on the touch screen pull in from the right margin, click on the gear to get to the settings, and at the bottom of the settings menu hit "change PC settings." Then click on "Update and Recovery." There will be a button the next menu which will initiate the update process.
Get ready to spend some time waiting for this to finish. In my case there were 54 updates, and I made the mistake of starting this late at night, which kept me up for way too long.
It looks like there is hardware and memory in the dock that mates a specific dock to a specific computer (see my other post on this subject), so you might to make sure you set up the dock using the computer it will be mated with most often. (To use the dock with a different computer, you'll have to log in on that computer BEFORE you put it in the dock, or it won't accept the password.)
Good luck to everyone. If anyone else has some tips, feel free to chime in. -DA1
The vague drawings in the instructions and the admonitions on forums to "just do the updates" don't really tell you much. Here's the secret. First, you must find and install any updates to the computer itself BEFORE you try to use the dock (that much they tell you in the instructions). Step two is to make sure that the computer's battery has a decent charge in it, it doesn't necessarily have to be fully charged but I'd make sure it is more than 60% (this is because the computer cannot access the power from the dock until after a certain point in the update process). Only then should you plug the computer into the dock, and THEN go through the update procedure AGAIN. A whole bunch more updates will show up. Apparently it is the dock itself that requires many of those updates, and the computer will not download them unless it is attached to the dock.
For those unfamiliar with how to do the update, on the touch screen pull in from the right margin, click on the gear to get to the settings, and at the bottom of the settings menu hit "change PC settings." Then click on "Update and Recovery." There will be a button the next menu which will initiate the update process.
Get ready to spend some time waiting for this to finish. In my case there were 54 updates, and I made the mistake of starting this late at night, which kept me up for way too long.
It looks like there is hardware and memory in the dock that mates a specific dock to a specific computer (see my other post on this subject), so you might to make sure you set up the dock using the computer it will be mated with most often. (To use the dock with a different computer, you'll have to log in on that computer BEFORE you put it in the dock, or it won't accept the password.)
Good luck to everyone. If anyone else has some tips, feel free to chime in. -DA1
