Got my PC Refresh machine - a Surface Pro!

One of the nicer advantages about working here at Microsoft was our big "PC Refresh" push this year with Windows 8. Company wide we all got to choose a new machine from a fairly large list of manufacturers. The intent was to replace our "primary" machine with a new one that works really well with Windows 8. Anecdotally, most folks on the team chose Lenovo or Asus laptops and Dell had a pretty good representation as well.

I went with the Surface Pro. I honestly had not used tablets too much in my day to day life since I prefer the nicer keyboards on a notebook but decided to give this machine a try. One of the downsides to my laptop, which this is replacing, is that undocking is annoying, the 7 year old battery with it only lasts about an hour (frankly, I'm surprised it still works at all) and as a result, I have not been able to take it to as many meetings as I would want to. This causes me to miss out on taking key notes.

So I figure the Surface will be smaller and therefore I will be able to take it to more meetings. I've had it for a few weeks and that has already happened - I am much more likely to take this machine with me. The battery life is much better too - I don't think I recharge it more than once every other day. And I am getting many more notes taken, so that really helps long term when I need to go back and look at what we discussed.

The only downside is that enough other folks chose this that it can be confusing as to who owns which machine if they all get left on a table together. I ordered a skin for mine (this is the same skin I use on all my devices which makes my life easy…and coordinated…) so the back of my device looks like this:

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And I use that same image as my wallpaper for the front.

I'll let you know how this works for the longer term.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John