torsdag 25 juni 2009

Our Surface is dead!

On the last day of the Malmö conference our Surface unit broke down! After shipping it from Stockholm to Malmö (about 600 km/370 miles) everything worked perfect on the press viewing and on the first day of the conference. But on the second day it didn’t boot!

You can hear the fan start and all the status lights indicate normal running mode but nothing happens on the screen. We checked the project lamp, plugged out BlueTooth usb, plugged in an external monitor but nothing changed. It was dead!

Last week I got in contact with a Surface Escalation Engineer that tried to help me get access to the registry. There is one setting that says what x-coordinate the display starts at and that might get corrupted if you unplug an external monitor the wrong way. I have seen it happen with the Surface Shell not showing up on the table but never during boot. I think it is a very strange solution that the bios checks the registry for this value. It feels like the table should always boot with the table as main display.

Anyway, it was impossible to get access to anything on the unit. The I/O panel is completely dead. I don’t get an IP-address and there is no response when I plug in an usb mouse or keyboard. And since I will void the warranty if I try to open the unit and since there are no Surface technicians in Sweden a complete exchange is the only way to solve this issue.

Microsoft has been really helpful with my case, both from Microsoft Sweden and thru the Surface Community. But I still think it is remarkable that they sell a piece of hardware for +10.000€ with no technicians in the country!

By the way, I just got the exchange confirmation and the new table will arrive next week. The good thing is that now it is delivered with SP1. The bad thing is that I’m having hours after hours of installing and configuration to get the unit back to where it was when it broke!

1 kommentar:

  1. Hello my name is Scott, and I run the website http://www.surfacehq.com . I've had my site running for about a year. It has information about MS Surface, all original articles, and a blog.

    I was wondering if you would like to team up with me on my website. I would give you your own blog, and several permissions.

    This would be good for you because you would be blogging on a pure domain name (rather than a sub-domain here on blogspot), and it would be good for me because I would have another blogger on my team (which consists of only me at the moment) as well as a developer (i can code c and c# but haven't stayed up to date with WPF) with a table.

    Please consider my offer, thank you :)

    SvaraRadera