Surface Laptop 4 observations and a few questions

[zoltan87]

I recently managed to buy a Microsoft Surface laptop 4 15 inch for a reasonable price, as it has a dent on the lid. It's mainly visual, the machine functions perfectly fine. I bought this laptop for my mother, who still uses a Thinkpad X200, but due to her ageing eyes she has been longing after a bigger and more vivid screen.

I am actually quite impressed with this laptop. The 3:2 aspect ratio screen is not quite 4:3 good (my preference), but this is the best available aspect ratio at the moment. The screen also has great colours, but extremely reflective, so would be quite useless in outdoor environments. My mother uses her computer in the house only, so this shouldn't be a problem for her. The keyboard has a very shallow travel, but the actuation is surprisingly nice, it's soft and quiet without being mushy. I think with a short travel keyboard like this they have achieved the best feel physically possible here. I don't like the layout though (I am used to the old standard IBM layout). Also legends on the silver keycaps are not nearly as visible as white legends on black keycaps. It's fine for anyone with good eyesight, not sure how annoying it will be for my mother. In the dark it will be great though, as it has backlight.

The trackpad is great too, large and has a nice smooth surface. The speakers are AMAZING, and incredibly loud too. They made me realise how cr@ppy the speakers in our Thinkpads (X200 and T60) are. The machine is completely silent during web browsing, watching movies and general use. And I mean absolutely zero fan noise (at least on the 15 inch Intel i7 cpu version that I have). And the whole chassis stays cool to the touch. There is an option in the BIOS to limit battery charge level to 50%, which is great, so hopefully the battery won't be shot in a couple of years time from sitting fully charged all the time. I wish this setting had more granularity though, but it's either 50% or 100%. And I don't know any tools that Thinkpads have, to quickly change these things from within Windows, you always have to go into the BIOS to change it. The Surface Connect magnetic charging port is very impressive too, easy to dock it, but keeps the machine safe when you accidentally yank on the cable. So much better than just having a usb-c connector for charging. Phones can be charged from the Surface power brick too which saves clutter and necessary gadgets that need to be carried around.

Most things that I don't like are software related. It has Win 10 pro on it. I have decided to keep it on that, even though there is a Win 11 upgrade option available for it. Win 10 will be fine for my mother, and I would imagine it's probably more optimised for this system anyway. I have managed to disable automatic updates too.

What I haven't managed to figure out so far (if it's even possible) is how to disable the application tiles when I left click on the Start menu. In fact I hate that whole view. All my family and I have been using Win 8.1 for like 10 years now. And there after changing a few settings in Control Panel, when you left click on the Start menu a really nice application screen comes up, with icons only, full screen with no tiles or any other distractions. Is that view achievable in Win 10?

Also I can't figure out a way to switch off the screen without putting the laptop to sleep. My mother often uses her laptop to play a video while she is in the kitchen doing things, so she only wants to listen to the video (or music), she doesn't need to see it. On our Thinkpads we simply press fn+F3, and the screen switches off, everything else keeps running on the machine as expected. This saves power, and causes less wear on the screen. I actually managed to find a little program, that would do just that (it's called "Turn Off Monitor"), but for some reason on this Surface laptop it sends the machine to sleep. I have read from multiple users that it works as advertised on many other brand machines, but for some reason on my Surface laptop it always results in sleep. Any suggestions how I could simply switch off the lcd?

And lastly I HATE the fact that there is no separate sleep and switch on/off buttons. The one existing button is located in the upper keyboard row, right next to the delete key. So even though I could technically set it to behave as a switch off button, that would be crazy, as it could easily result in accidental switch offs when I miss the delete key. So I set it to sleep behaviour (when the machine is on), but now I don't have a separate button to switch the machine off. I know there are multiple ways to switch it off, from Start menu or with some keyboard shortcuts, but come on: wouldn't it be more simple to have a physical button for it? Like we always had for like 25 years? I hate it when companies are being minimalistic to the point of actually getting rid of useful functionality.

So there are definitely frustrations with this laptop, all in all I am still quite impressed with it. It's also supposedly quite easy to open and replace the SSD if needed.