By George Crowley ’16, Tech Desk Editor

Starting our second year of using the Microsoft Surface Pro 3 at Country Day, this seems like a good time to give a round up of its specs and abilities, especially considering many students will soon be faced with getting a Surface as their 4-year-warranty expires. Released June 20th 2014, the Surface is the third in a line of Microsoft tablets attempting to compete with Apple in the portable laptop market. The Surface Pro 3 is essentially an upgraded version of the base Surface, featuring a more powerful processor, a bigger screen, and basically a better everything. The Surface features a high resolution 1440p screen, and an Intel i5 with either 4 or 8 gb of ram, depending on which option you choose. The actual storage on the device has been downgraded somewhat from the previous Fujitsu’s 320gb, with 128gb being the standard, and 256gb as an option. However the Surface holds no ordinary hard drive, unlike the previous Fujitsus— it holds a solid state drive. What this means for you is that your computer that took a few minutes to boot up and get started should now take around 10 seconds to be booted up and ready to go. So all of this sounds great right? Well perhaps not—despite featuring more impressive specs than our older laptops, the Surface seems to have one glaring flaw: any hardware repair will have to be done by Microsoft itself, as even trying to take apart the Surface will likely result in a shattered screen. As such, you can’t get a loaner and drop in your hard drive any more, so I’d advise storing all your important school projects on My Cloud Storage the Tech Desk has so thoughtfully set up for us.
Now with all those new features the Surface should be a great upgrade, right? For the most part, yes. Coming from a Fujitsu Lifebook, the computer feels much snappier, and a lot more substantial. But when I first got mine, out of the box its battery was faulty! So I pretty much had a lightweight, portable laptop that had to be plugged into the wall constantly. I had to wait about a week for the Tech Desk to get in a new Surface to replace the faulty one, and I was past that issue. During that week, however, I was pretty inconvenienced. And honestly, couldn’t help but feel that if the computer could be more readily taken apart, the issue would be easy to solve. However, the new laptop performs quite well. Battery life is also excellent, perfect for hours of Netflix or OneNote–whichever you choose. It does have the somewhat distressing habit of running its fan really loudly when watching even just some YouTube videos, producing a not inconsiderable amount of white noise in the background. As for the keyboard, you’ll either love it or hate it. The backlit keys are pretty sweet for those late night essay writing crunches, but the trackpad has nearly made me throw my device across the room in frustration more than once. But that’s not to say our previous laptops didn’t have more than their fair share of issues. In fact I may be guilty of tossing my old one across the room once or twice. But overall, the Surface is a huge upgrade in quality and overall performance. While probably not worth upgrading to if you already have a laptop, absolutely worth it if you’re considering getting a Surface vs renting or buying a Fujitsu.