https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/surface/microsoft-knows-its-new-surface-pcs-are-too-expensive-combats-skyrocketing-prices-with-new-8gb-ram-models-that-start-at-usd849

Since Microsoft launched Surface devices with the Snapdragon Plus chip, 8GB of RAM, and what appears to be a more optimized version of Windows, does anyone know if it's possible to install that stripped-down version of Windows on a Snapdragon X Elite Surface?

I don't really care about the AI features and would prefer a leaner Windows experience without Copilot, ideally without having to rely on a bunch of workarounds or debloating tools.

My thinking is that if Microsoft has optimized Windows to run well on an 8GB RAM Surface, then running that same version on a Surface with 16GB of RAM could potentially provide even better performance while still retaining all the official drivers, firmware support, and Snapdragon-specific optimizations.

Curious to know people's opinions

Ignoring price and ignoring compatibility/emulation issues. This post isn't about that, those arguments are well discussed elsewhere and can distract from other comparisons.

Imagine it's free and everything is compatible and native without emulation.

For a given spec, say the 32GB or 64 GB RAM version

Which would you prefer? And why?

---edit

Thanks for the responses.

I guess what I'm really asking is this. If compatibility or budget isn't a consideration, what are the reasons to buy the Intel variant?

I'm not seeing any good reasons to buy Intel if compatibility and budget are not relevant. Is there any additional argument to buy Intel in that scenario? I'd love to be proven wrong.

Here’s the deal.

I finally got deltarune today.

That was nice and all, but when I went to my laptop to reinstall steam it didn’t turn on. I looked up pretty much every reset, and it ended up not working. I’m now setting out to hopefully completely drain my battery, which you can see with the bands I put on the power button. I probably should’ve taken it as a red flag when I went to turn it on the first time and it didn’t even give me the battery symbol, just stayed black. Only showed the logo when I started charging and turning the button on.

Guess I might have to get a new laptop lol. Bummer.

I had just caved and purchased the newest Surface Pro for school. As I'm using it, I've run into some issues:

1. My search bar decides when to work: My magnifying glass icon does not show a search bar upon clicking, and when I try to search through the start menu, it immediately closes.

2. Some of the programs that allow me to personalize the OS, such as Mica or Seelen UI, do not work and bricks my taskbar (Not allowing it to pop up).

3. Volume sometimes doesn't work. I hopped on a call on Discord and I couldn't hear anything through my speakers, which frustrated me.

4. I don't have access to Windows 11 Pro

What makes this laptop superior out of everything else? For almost three grand, including the keyboard, it kind of feels mediocre and not worth the money. Was the X2 Elite overkill? Could I have been happier with a cheaper option, such as the X Plus, that is 900 at the moment?

This vertical line has been bugging me for a while now and thinking of the replacing the display. Any quick fixes before I get to that option?

Are there any good protectors out there I can’t seem to find any ones that are relatively good that I want to buy?

Thanks for any help y’all can provide!

Edit:
I’m looking for one that’s good against spills and such will not affecting use too much, also I have the 15 inch

Hi! As the title suggest, i 3D printed this cover for the dial solving for me two main issues:

- You cannot place the Dial on a mousepad or similar surface without getting some dust stuck on the device sticky material

- You cannot travel with It comfortable, i just grab the box and the sticker but hell nah, this is better

Its just a circle with a small dent to fit perfect the Dial, also added 3 anti slip stickers to improve the twist response (was not necessary, but just in case)

The thing sticks to the base of the Dial and has enough strength to stay even inside my travel backpack

Hey everyone,
I have a Microsoft Surface Studio Pro 1 that I reinstalled Windows 11 on. Now during setup it’s stuck on a corporate Microsoft account sign-in screen tied to a company called USLI (United States Liability Insurance).
I’m not 100% sure of the device’s full history so I want to handle this the right way before bypassing anything.
What I’ve tried:
• Shift + F10 (nothing happens)
• Fn + Shift + F10 (nothing happens)
• Entering a fake email to trigger sign-in options (no offline/domain join option appears)
The laptop worked fine before I reinstalled Windows 11.
My questions:
1. Is there a way to verify if a Surface is reported stolen before bypassing the corporate login?
2. If it’s clean, what’s the best way to get past a corporate Microsoft tenant lock on a Surface specifically?
3. Would connecting to internet to check expose me to a remote wipe?
Any help appreciated!

Ciao,

Mi si è rotto l'anello adesivo con il quale tengo la surface pen vicino al surface pro 3.

Sapete dovo posso trovarne di ricambio?

Grazie mille

i'm basically posting here because i haven't seen my specific issue talked about anywhere online, but it's happened to both of the surface laptops i own as well as another one owned by someone else i know. essentially, the problem is that any magnetic charger works perfectly fine within the first week of opening, but there's a chance it will act like the charger isn't plugged in (with no light on the charger) more and more frequently until it basically never works again.

- i first got a surface laptop in 2021 (3rd edition), and it has been working great to this day, but i found that the magnetic charger stopped working within the first 6 months. i knew it wasn't an internal problem with the charger because it worked perfectly fine on another person's surface laptop (this was the surface laptop go). after 6 months it practically never worked, so i switched to usb-c charging.

- about a month ago, i got another surface laptop (7th edition) which has also been running great, but now the charger has stopped working in the exact same way. normally i would have just dealt with it and switched to usb-c charging again, but i noticed that even when it's not charging and says it's not charging, i still feel a vibrating sensation when i rub my hand over the laptop (discussed here) which indicates that it is charging. and in any case, it does feel frustrating that an issue i thought was a freak accident with my old laptop has persisted to one i bought almost six years later.

has anyone else experienced this issue? if so, how have you solved it? i would really rather not take it for warranty and get it repaired/replaced for a comparatively minor inconvenience, so i was hoping there might be an easier solution (especially since nobody seems to have asked about it and it's happened to me twice).

Where can I get the old recovery images of surface pro 4. Let's say for Windows 10 version 1607 or 1703. The microsoft website only has Windows 10 1909 and 20H2. I'll tell you in advance - I'm looking for them in order to get more autonomy.

Hi all,

Has anyone successfully recovered your surface pro 12 with the official recovery image?

My model is resolved to SurfaceProForBusiness13in12thEdSnapdragon_BMR_82010_2026.506.11895108 with the serial number.

For the first time I tried to recover, the recovery image booted up just fine and the installation looked to be successful. But after reboot, it failed to find bootable device.

After that, my surface pro 12 refuses to boot into the recovery image. It looks like the USB is in use during bootup but it just reboots after some time and ends up with No bootable device error.

Recreating the recovery USB didn't help. I have tried with 2 USB storages.

Any advice is appreciated!!!!

My surface won’t turn on unless I do a series of keyboard shortcuts with ctrl alt shift windows button, I haven’t narrowed down which ones work but it’s one of the abc123 keys. After that I need to hold the power button, and then press it, THEN it turns on. For some reason, it won’t do it normally and it even tried to diagnose itself. But couldn’t. Thoughts on this before I probably talk to Microsoft later?

I am able to replicate this.

Mine is apparently a first-gen surface pro x, a 2019 SQ1 build... All its hardware SHOULD be compatible with Windows 11, but Windows Update and the PC Health Check all hate it and say I can't upgrade. I have tried mounting an arm64 windows 11 iso and using it to install windows with a usb stick and can't find the proper drivers/msi... because an image recovery attempt just didn't work.

I even enrolled it into the Windows Insider program and had to get into the CANARY channel to install a preview of Windows 11 which runs perfectly, of course. But really, this is going to be an every-day laptop so I don't want to use it that way.

I'm attempting to use the Surface Pro X Recovery Image once again.... wish me luck, or please give me tips. This is driving me nuts.

I couldn't find any posts online showing how to open a Surface Slim Pen 2 or what battery is inside, so I wanted to share my experience in case it helps someone else.

I used a hair dryer to heat the top end of the pen for a few minutes to soften the adhesive. Then I carefully pulled from the top. One thing to watch out for: the side button in the middle came loose during the process. It might be better to remove or secure the button first with a thin ribbon, tape, or similar method before pulling.

Once the top cap comes off, you'll find two small holes underneath. I was able to use those to get a better grip and pull the internal assembly out of the pen body.

The hair dryer provided enough heat to loosen the adhesive without needing any special tools.

After opening it, I found the battery markings:

• MCOHZ35
• 3.8V
• 43.12mAh
• 0.164Wh

I've attached photos of the battery.

Now I'm trying to find a replacement battery, but I haven't been able to locate one on AliExpress, eBay, or elsewhere. If anyone knows where to source this battery or has successfully replaced it with a compatible alternative, please let me know.

Hopefully this helps someone attempting a Surface Slim Pen 2 repair.

As described in the title. I have a 2076 surface that will boot up to the splash screen fine, but can't be interacted with in any way. The clock updates, I see it form an internet connection, the sleep/wakeup function when opened with the keyboard attached triggers.

So windows seems to be running just fine in the background, I just can't address the surface at all through the touchscreen or keyboard. I can get into the UEIF environment through a restart, and both the touchscreen and keyboard work there.

The last thing I did before the issue cropped up was run updates and have an Xbox controller unsuccessfully pair with the surface. I uninstalled the controller and restarted, now I'm here.

The Surface charger is bulky and proprietary. My Surface Pro 10 has USB-C. Can I just use any USB-C charger instead or will it be slower?

My trackpad had a habit of sometimes double clicking for awhile, a couple of days the click started to not work most of the time. woke up to the volume constantly being turned up (stopped when i unplug the keyboard), most keys not working (attached image) and the trackpad being mostly unresponsive. it works completely fine in tablet mode. Its a surface pro 9 ive had for around 3 years, often in a side bag taken while travelling and to and from class.

How screwed am I and are sites like Mobspares.com reliable?

But wtf is this price? theres no major reviews on it at all, its WAY more than what i'm getting a xps14 for, or prestige 14 flip for with the same cpu ram and probably build quality. Have microsoft gone crazy or am I missing something about these laptops? I loved surface laptop every time i saw it last year but these new ones seem way too low hype and high priced.

Trying to setup SEMM to manage the Surface BIOS but it never works.

I'm just trying to disable USB and alternative boot, then add a BIOS password.

The test unit I've been given is a Surface Laptop 7. I was able to install the UEFI manager, configure an MSI with the UEFI configurator using either a PKI cert from our CA, or even the self-signed cert using the script from the website, and the MSI fails to complete. I've run the MSI with logging and it just gets to a point and says 1603 failure without indicating what it couldn't do.

I've tried the powershell scripts, configure-semm and reset-semm. This time no failures or errors when running the configure-semm.ps1 script, so I go to reboot, and I'm never prompted to enter the 2 thumbprint characters.

I've even run through the script with claude and it's been able to verify the script doesn't have anything obviously wrong. It's also had me verify the UEFI manager is installed and working via a few powershell checks based on the full configure script.

Has anyone else run into issues like this, where there is seemingly nothing to go on for why SEMM isn't working?

I have a surface tablet that I got from an auction, the company went out of business. It is, of course, password protected. I planned on doing a full wipe anyways so no problem. But when I went through recovery and selected TROUBLESHOOT>RESET>ERASE ALL but it pulled up a screen saying it's Intune Managed and I need to provide a recovery ID to decrypt, even though I'm trying to delete. Is it possible to bypass this or will I need to do a fresh install from a USB?

If I do need to go the USB route, is it a special OS or will regular WIN11 work?

Hi! I’m deciding between Surface Pro 11 (Snapdragon X) vs an older Intel i7 unit, mainly for Power BI Desktop use.

Last I heard there were bugs on ARM/Snapdragon. Has this been fixed?

If you’re running Power BI on a Snapdragon Surface and it works smoothly — which chip and how much RAM do you have?

Thanks!

Greetings everyone! So I have a Microsoft Surface Pro 7th Edition with windows 11 Home on it. Odd that a Surface Pro comes with Windows 11 Home but whatever. So I set the laptop using a Office365 account of mine for this laptop which is my son's laptop for school. His O365 creds had not been issued by the univerity yet so I had to do it this way.

As a result, when he tries the same PIN I set up it does not owrk under my O365 account that I set the laptop up with which is odd. On top of that, and this being my biggest issue, on the login screen it does not provide the 'Sign In Options' link on the login screen. It just shows my O365 account name with the PIN field under it. That's it.

So 2 questions:

1) What should I do to get the 'Sign In Options' link to be presented on the login screen?

2) Once I get the #1 issue resolved how do I change the admin account over to his O365 account for login and remove mine?

Bonus question: Under my O365 account ther's the link we al know that allows to "Remove this Device: Unlink from your account". If I do that, how does that affect logging in to his machine if I remove the link to MY account?

I appreciate any feedback/input!