I've had the SP3 I7 512 now for a week and I think I've put it through enough paces to have a preliminary conclusion/observations etc that I thought I'd share for people with similar needs and uses FWIW In my home office, I'm running the unit in a docking station with 2 printers running off it, 2 backup desktop drives attached, a wireless Keyboard and mouse and a 27 inch HD display hooked via a Hdmi/dataport adapter plugged into the docking station.
Overview:
Good
- Form factor
- Keyboard (although I have the trackball turned off permanently)
- Pen
- Power
- Storage
- General Speed
- Handwritten Notes and conversion to type in One-Note
- Usability as a tablet a desktop & a laptop (for me)
Bad
- Wifi Inconsistency (since 9/19 update)
- Automatic Scaling of desktop applications
- Storage of Pen
- not having a 4G capability (Nit)
Detail
What my needs are.
I use my SP3 for 3 main functions:
1.) Heavy Office 365 user. I live in the desktop world of Office 365 Small Business Edition relying heavily on Outlook, Excel, Word, Power-Point, One-Note & Linc as my business management platform, often having all of those open at the same time. I am auto syncing with my One-drive business folder continually to give me both 2 copies of everything as well as giving me remote access if necessary. My Excel Models can be very large with multiple linked sheets and workbooks and often involve iterative calculations, Pivot tables and solver functions.
2.) Management and development of my Photographs using The Creative Cloud bundle of Lightroom & Photoshop 2014. My Catalog is relatively large and resides on a 2TB portable USB 3 hard drive.
3.) Browsing for both business research as well as private browsing
I am attempting to replace a Lenovo W520 with a 512GB HD, a second 1TB Internal (trey) HD & 8GB of memory I7-2760 QM 2.4Ghz that I've had for a few years and has served me needs well. Unfortunately, I got tired of carrying 6 lbs. with charger.
So far, the SP3 has done everything at least as well if not better than the Lenovo. hard stop. Having multiple Office apps working while downloading 120 Lightroom files from a USB 3 card reader, I watched the performance go from a peak of 2.9Ghz and throttled down to 2.3 as the heat built up. The fan kicked on when Lightroom was about 1/3rd through rendering the High Quality previews I prefer (which is very processor intensive). I downloaded the exact same files on the Lenovo & the SP3 and the start to finish time on the SP3 was about 4% faster.....and there were no Outlook apps open on the Lenovo. For me, that is good enough. The interesting insight (at least for me) is that once the fan kicked on the Processor ran at approximately that 2.3 Ghz level for the remainder of the rendering which tells me that the temperature stabilized with the fan.
The one-note Handwriting conversion to type has gotten better each day this week. I'm confident it will work for me and save me a ton of time.
One Other observation...The SP3 feels "snappier". everything from the start-up to opening desktop and Metro applications seem to happen quicker. It's not enormous but to me it is noticeable.
Overview:
Good
- Form factor
- Keyboard (although I have the trackball turned off permanently)
- Pen
- Power
- Storage
- General Speed
- Handwritten Notes and conversion to type in One-Note
- Usability as a tablet a desktop & a laptop (for me)
Bad
- Wifi Inconsistency (since 9/19 update)
- Automatic Scaling of desktop applications
- Storage of Pen
- not having a 4G capability (Nit)
Detail
What my needs are.
I use my SP3 for 3 main functions:
1.) Heavy Office 365 user. I live in the desktop world of Office 365 Small Business Edition relying heavily on Outlook, Excel, Word, Power-Point, One-Note & Linc as my business management platform, often having all of those open at the same time. I am auto syncing with my One-drive business folder continually to give me both 2 copies of everything as well as giving me remote access if necessary. My Excel Models can be very large with multiple linked sheets and workbooks and often involve iterative calculations, Pivot tables and solver functions.
2.) Management and development of my Photographs using The Creative Cloud bundle of Lightroom & Photoshop 2014. My Catalog is relatively large and resides on a 2TB portable USB 3 hard drive.
3.) Browsing for both business research as well as private browsing
I am attempting to replace a Lenovo W520 with a 512GB HD, a second 1TB Internal (trey) HD & 8GB of memory I7-2760 QM 2.4Ghz that I've had for a few years and has served me needs well. Unfortunately, I got tired of carrying 6 lbs. with charger.
So far, the SP3 has done everything at least as well if not better than the Lenovo. hard stop. Having multiple Office apps working while downloading 120 Lightroom files from a USB 3 card reader, I watched the performance go from a peak of 2.9Ghz and throttled down to 2.3 as the heat built up. The fan kicked on when Lightroom was about 1/3rd through rendering the High Quality previews I prefer (which is very processor intensive). I downloaded the exact same files on the Lenovo & the SP3 and the start to finish time on the SP3 was about 4% faster.....and there were no Outlook apps open on the Lenovo. For me, that is good enough. The interesting insight (at least for me) is that once the fan kicked on the Processor ran at approximately that 2.3 Ghz level for the remainder of the rendering which tells me that the temperature stabilized with the fan.
The one-note Handwriting conversion to type has gotten better each day this week. I'm confident it will work for me and save me a ton of time.
One Other observation...The SP3 feels "snappier". everything from the start-up to opening desktop and Metro applications seem to happen quicker. It's not enormous but to me it is noticeable.
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