i7 Classroom use experiences

[tonypitt]

I bought an SP3 i7 with the plan to use it to teach my university classes. After 2 days I'm pleased to report many good things and a couple of big frustrations.

• Inking works great. I mainly ink on mostly blank PowerPoint slides and that has worked flawlessly.
• Connecting to the projector using the mini-displayport to VGA has worked great.
• Recording class using Camtasia and a wireless USB mic has worked great.

I have had 2 big frustrations, one of which I think I've solved.

• I haven't been bringing my power cord with me to class. I go to class, set up, teach, and then 2 hours later pack up to head back to my office. On the first day I got back to my office and restarted the machine. It got to the desktop and then froze. I noticed the screen is not at full brightness. After 2 minutes of nothing, I forced a restart. I then got the thermometer display (won't boot). After 5 minutes I was able to boot just fine. I figure that when I get back to my office I should probably give it a few minutes plugged it for the temperature to adjust before starting it back up. That seemed to work OK today.
• A major headache is what I'm seeing now between my office machine and my SP3 as far as file exchange using OneDrive. I suspect this isn't a OneDrive issue but more of a Windows issue. My inked PPT slides are in a OneDrive folder, so when I get back to my office I give OneDrive some time to sync. Once it has done so, if I try to open the PPT file (I've had this happen with Excel, too), it reports the file as corrupted. If I go to the web interface of OneDrive and download the file manually, it opens just fine. The file is not actually corrupted. Something about the automatic sync of Office files is causing a problem. Various online reports seem to indicate this being caused by some security settings behind the scenes that are flagging the file as potentially problematic because of the automatic update. I've got to try to figure this out or I'm going to go nuts.

All in all, I love the SP3.

 

[mitchellvii]

My personal opinion is that i7 is just overpowered (and overhot) for this form factor. i5 is the sweet spot IMHO.

 

[samurai]

I would suggest running this onedrive troubleshooter. It helped me resolving sync issues. It is available in the following page.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/onedrive/troubleshoot-sync-problems#1TC=windows-81

 

[tonypitt]

Re: the i7 being overpowered, I mainly chose the i7 because of the larger internal storage. Processor capability was secondary. The performance is so much faster than the Lenovo X10 tablet it replaced, I'm happy. I have seen it get toasty, but only had notable heat issues when described above. When running PowerPoint, Camtasia, SAP GUI, Tableau, and Excel all at the same, and context switching a lot, (while also having an external display) it has kept up. A traditional laptop might be a bit better, but I can't say enough about how much better the form factor is for me.

Re: the OneDrive troubleshooter, it and I are good friends. I've run it a few times on a few machines. I believe I have my problem resolved. (I'm sure I've now jinxed it.) What wasn't clear in my original post was that I ink on my SP3, sync to OneDrive, and then try to open the inked slides on my desktop machine. That was a problem. In fact, anytime I edited an Office file on my SP3, allowed OneDrive to sync it, and then tried to open it on my work machine there was a problem where the file was reported as corrupt. My belief is/was that my work machine was treating this file as potentially insecure since it came "from the Internet". Instead of reporting that, the Office apps just said it was corrupt.

To resolve this, I went into all my Office applications and adjusted the Trust Center settings. I turned off Protected View and then made my OneDrive location a "trusted location." That has seemed to solve the problem.

 

[double07]

You will never have too much power!

 

[LadyRaider]

I have an ipad mini and an apple tv that I can hook up to the projector in my classroom and run stuff wirelessly.

Do you think I can get a miracast dongle and do the same thing from my surface pro 3? I don't want to be tied to a wire.

 

[GreyFox7]

I have an ipad mini and an apple tv that I can hook up to the projector in my classroom and run stuff wirelessly.

Do you think I can get a miracast dongle and do the same thing from my surface pro 3? I don't want to be tied to a wire.

Netgear PTV3000 works.

 

[jnjroach]

I have an ipad mini and an apple tv that I can hook up to the projector in my classroom and run stuff wirelessly.

Do you think I can get a miracast dongle and do the same thing from my surface pro 3? I don't want to be tied to a wire.

Yep.... do it all the time.....

 

[tonypitt]

Well, I thought I had my file syncing problem fixed, but I don't. Microsoft support wasted (literally) 3 hours of my time this morning and also caused a problem on my home machine that will take me a few days to clean up. Not a way to instill loyalty. I think I'm going to discontinue working with OneDrive and go back to Dropbox for now and see if this can be resolved that way.