New Surface Book Owner :)

[Astonish]

Hello Everyone!

After a long time of beeing confused between SP4, Ipad Pro and Surface Book, today I bought a Surface Book! I will use this mainly for drawing. (My Favourite apps are: Clip Studio, Photoshop, Sketchbook Pro & Sketchable)

I am living in Turkey and here unfortunately we dont have Microsoft selling the surface products but there is a company/electronics shop that imports them, so I bought it from there. I wanted an i7 16 gb 512 gb ssd model unfortunately it was sold out, and I was a bit impatient so I took an i7 8 gb 256 gb ssd model (it was the highest spec that they had or else I had to wait at least one more month.)

Other than drawing what I may do is listen to some music on Spotify, watch streaming movies, some web brawsing (with several tabs), and if it works (with the amount of ram I have), I may make some 3d modelling.

In the beginning I wanted a SP4 but when I saw the SurfaceBook, the bigger screen offering a bigger real estate for drawing won my heart immediatly.

It took me several hours to set it up, installing windows and firmware updates (which failed several times...) There are still two flash for internet explorer updates that failed but I gave it up for now since all the rest was installed. Had twice the famous blue screen while I was trying to install the firmware update, but when I insisted on repeating the installation, thankfuly it did install! Still installing my apps.

I am coming from an i7 Macbook Pro 15 Retina and Surface Pro 2. I should tell that I love how it looks, I love the size of it and it has been super silent even during the updates.

Detaching the screen needs more force than I had thought, which is good for stability but I am scared to brake it! LOL (yes I am using the detach button and waiting for the green notification, I am not trying it without doing that dont get worried please )

I noticed the cursor lag in the corners with the stylus, but I had read that already on the internet, so I knew that it was coming. I have no light bleed with dark screen so that is very nice to know!

So i hope that 8 gb of ram will be enough, but If I multitask less, closing the unnecessary apps should help.

So far so good, I am pretty happy!

Cheers,

PS: One more issue that I had was plugging in my external harddisk to the usb3 port, it was pretty tight in there that it was a bit hard to plug in or plug out, but fortunately it works!

 

[Mikewired]

I learned to pull the screen off by the corner, I saw it in a video. Works better for me.

 

[Astonish]

Oh thank you! will try that definitely! Top Corners?

And yes please, I would like to hear your tips and advices! I've already read the thread about the Surface Book tips. But if you have more advices, I will be glad to hear. Now I am downloading the Geforce Experience software to solve the small lag issue from Photoshop.

Cheers!

 

[Mikewired]

Top corners, yes.

 

[Mikewired]

I also discovered the screen can be removed while powered down.

 

[Astonish]

Oh thank you very much Mikewired! The top corner realy helps to remove and I had never heard that the screen could be removed while powered down, nice to know!

I have been playing around with it since 3 hours and a half more or less. Long story short, I am seriously impressed! After the firmware update, I never had any blue screen, screen flickering on edge, color changing on edge, not even once an issue with removing the screen. Seriously love this.

I also find the screen size realy ideal, I dont feel like that it is smaller than my 15 inch Macbook screen, I guess it is thanks to the 3:2 ratio, realy amazing. Also the battery life looks impressive.

Tested the Surface Book with Photoshop, Sketchbook Pro, Mischief, Clip Studio Pro, Freshpaint, Sketchable, One note. Overall it is impressive.

Tho Photoshop CC, latest one, I wasn't able to run it smoothly for sketching. I tried using the intel gpu, there is still a noticeable lag compared to the other softwares I listed above. I tried installing Nvidia Experience, I put the Gpu for photoshop in performance mode, still there is a slight lag for the initial registration of the input. It is dissappointing but seeing how nice it runs on other softwares, it should definitely be a software issue and I hope that they fix them soon. If you have other advices for me to try, I will be glad to try.

Sketchbook Pro v8, works like a charm. Lightweight and powerful. In my Sp2 it used to look very blurry and if I disabled the dpi scaling, it looked very small. With the Surface Book, I didnt even disable dpi scaling and it looks perfect out of the box! I also read somewhere that one Surface Book owner had parallax/offset issues with the pen on sketchbook and solved it by disabling the dpi scaling, fortunately for me it works perfectly out of the box so I am very happy.

Clip Studio Pro, no lag at all, may be just a little bit with 350 px brush size on airbrush with minimum hardness, but still much less compared to the Photoshop and it is hard to notice the lag, so I am pleased with the result as well.

Sketchable, is super lightweight but still super fun to use and I have absolutely no issues with it, works very well and also the touch controls like zooming, paning and rotating works the best on this software, most probably because it is a tablet mode software, no idea.

Mischief, in my Sp2 used to lag a little but and when I tried making fast circles it would always start with a broken line instead of drawing what I was drawing, with my Surface Book not any single issue like that, pretty happy with the result.

By the way all those tests (except Mischief and Sketchable) were made on a 3000 x 2000 , 300 dpi canvas.

Even the OneNote experience is lovely!

I got used to the inital pen pressure (which is slightly higher than the wacom pens both on their drawing tablets or tablet pcs.) faster than I thought. Changing the tip to an H helped me to get used to I guess, somehow it registers better the light pressure strokes or at least it feels like that for me. Also beeing able to configure the pen top button is lovely. I am a little bit scared of using the eraser, I am scared to scratch the screen but time to time I use and like it a lot!

May be a critic that I can do to the SP Pen is it's design, when I am holding it with my thumb on the button, the clip looks in an awkward position on my hand, feels just a little bit unnatural, but I think that in time I will get used to it. Anyways I hated the plastic pen of my SP2, the new material of this pen feels more grippy in hand, so love that too.

I had heard that Chrome was not very good on surface pros, that it used soo much resources, lagged..etc. Right now I am using Edge, so far is it the best web browser for the Surface? Or do you advice me to use Chrome or Firefox like I used to use on my other windows computes?

I know may people post to the forums when they have problems to find solutions, but me I wanted to post and share my happinnness with this product. Even tho Surface Book is a v1 product for Microsoft, I would still recomment it to anyone who is interested. For me the screen size is lovely, and windows drawing softwares have nice UI in my opinion, it leaves me a lot real estate to draw on, more or less as much as an A4! Sweet!

IF only the 16 gb, 512 ssd version was not sold out... *sighs* but still, this one works pretty strong!

I am hoping to hear from some of you on advices and tips on Surface Book,

Cheers!

 

[Mikewired]

I too am happy with the SB. I bought the SB and the SP4 and doing my own battle to see which to keep. I really wanted to keep the sp4 do to its small size, but it's battery life is not up to par and the keyboard keeps becoming non functional. I am done with sp4 as I was done with sp3 last year. I also have a MacBook pro retina and its a joy to use, but I may have found something more useful and more fun. The clipboard is awesome to use detached and feels much lighter the sp4. Great balance. I have the base SB and I am wondering if I might upgrade to 256gb model.

 

[compnovo]

I too am happy with the SB. I bought the SB and the SP4 and doing my own battle to see which to keep. I really wanted to keep the sp4 do to its small size, but it's battery life is not up to par and the keyboard keeps becoming non functional. I am done with sp4 as I was done with sp3 last year. I also have a MacBook pro retina and its a joy to use, but I may have found something more useful and more fun. The clipboard is awesome to use detached and feels much lighter the sp4. Great balance. I have the base SB and I am wondering if I might upgrade to 256gb model.

I've had the 128GB SP3 since they released and haven't felt the need to upgrade, since I store my music and videos on a microSD card to free up room on the SSD. When I pulled the trigger on Monday and picked up my Surface Book I got the base model knowing 128GB would work for me.

To the OP, congratulations, I think you made a great choice, the SB is beautifully built (of course, I'm patting myself on the back too ).

 

[ABswl13]

Welcome to the Surface Book community Astonish! I also have the i7 256gb 8ram and love it. I do wish Microsoft or a third-party will develop a protective case for just the clipboard part. And you'll get used to detaching the clipboard. I had the same problem at first, but after a couple days of using it, it became like second-nature. Anyway, keep us apprised of any issues you have with your Surface Book.

 

[Astonish]

Thank you very much for your replies! Yesterday I was testing also the battery while using it. With 50% screen brightness, it went for about 4 hours till 44 percent, then with 100 percent of brightness and with youtube video watching 44 percent drained in 1 hour LOL. But I guess that is pretty normal with those brightness settings. Oh have I said that I love the screen quality?

Actualy protective case just for the clupboard with a thin battery or kickstand could be lovely, but I guess that I will stop dreaming, I will just go and buy myself a 13 inch laptop sleeve, if I find something good looking!

Cheers!

 

[Seneleron]

If they would have put the Surface Pro kickstand on the SB clipboard, they could probably just about discontinue the Surface Pro line. THAT would have made it the ultimate everything machine.

 

[Astonish]

To be honest even a cover that can do that, would be ok, but not a deal breaker for me. For me the ideal device would be a SP4 with the screen size of the Surface Book.

Cheers,