1. Tips And Tricks Windows Surface Pro 3
2. Tips And Tricks For Surface 3

Tips 'n Tricks 4 things every Surface Go user should do right away Want ideas for things you should do now that you have a Surface Go? Here are four tips and tricks you might not know.

I'm a longtime lurker in this subreddit (and reddit in general). I've noticed some people having similar issues that I've had in the past so I decided I should make a ridiculously long post explaining everything that I've learned while using the SP1, SP3 and now SP4.

First of all make sure you have installed all the windows updates as some of these things are quite recent additions.

There are a couple of simple things you should do to greatly improve your experience with the pen.

NOTE: Don't attempt to calibrate your stylus using the windows 'Tablet PC Settings' as its calibrated well by default and this tends to mess it up, same thing with touch. (EDIT: not everyone agrees with this point - some have found the calibration helpful, so might be worth trying out. there is a reset button should you decide to revert it).

Open 'Settings', go to 'Devices' > 'Pen'

• Choose whether you are Left or Right handed, this also has an effect on the way palm rejection works (in windows 10).

'If you are right handed touch remains active to the left of the pen, but touch is accurately rejected to the right of the pen where your palm actually is.'

• I also recommend turning 'Show Cursor' to OFF: the N-trig pens used in the SP3 and SP4 have very good parallax and register accurately underneath the pen tip but the windows cursor tends to lag behind where it actually is, so turn it off as it can be misleading.

• There is a 'Surface' app which is automatically installed with the surface (or can be found in the store), in it you can configure and test the pen pressure curve.

• The handwriting recognition actually works really well, it can also be trained for your specific handwriting: Control Panel > Clock, Language and Region > Language > Click on 'Options' beside your language and then 'Personalise your handwriting'.

• Radial Menu is a tool that will give you a handy touch menu for various tools and shortcuts when you are using the tablet on it's own. (NOTE: the tool is incorrectly flagged as malware, and has not been updated for a while).

• Tablet PC Mouse is a similar tool and has a lot of other features, it may be a better choice though I haven't actually used it.

• Ntrig Wintab Drivers can be downloaded here should you need them.

I'd recommend 'double-tap and drag' with the touchpad. I think this is disabled in windows 10 by default.

• Open 'Settings > Devices > Mouse & Touchpad': Allow double-tap and drag.

If you are coming from a mac touchpad and wondering why the typecover's feels weird its probably due to the setting in mouse properties: 'Enhance pointer precision'. Switching this on turns on mouse-acceleration and makes the touchpad feel much nicer, however it makes using an external mouse feel horrible (especially if playing games).

Ideally you should be able to have separate settings for touchpad vs mouse, some people have requested this feature in windows feedback so please vote for them - its one of my biggest annoyances (note: might need to open these links in edge):

• Windows Feedback Link 1

• Windows Feedback Link 2

Having to go to the mouse settings and changing this on and off is very annoying, for now I have a suitable workaround:

• Download the portable zip of Mouse Acceleration Toggler

• Create a shortcut to it named 'Toggle Mouse Acceleration' with the right-click properties of the shortcut 'Target' field set to C:PathToYourFolderMouseAccelToggler.exe accel=toggle

• Then right-click on the shortcut and 'Pin to Start'.

• Whenever using the touchcover touchpad without an external mouse press the button in the start menu to toggle on mouse acceleration, and turn it off again when using a normal mouse.

NOTE: If you are using an earlier typecover that does not have the 'fn' toggle. You can use 'FN + CAPSLOCK' key combination to toggle the F1-F12 keys behaving as normal or as special keys.

In Tablet Mode (swipe in from right or open action centre and toggle 'Tablet Mode'), right-click on the taskbar and turn on:

• 'Show touch keyboard button' (handy if a program won't automatically open the keyboard)

• 'Show all notification icons' (useful for programs that minimize into a tray icon)

Settings > Devices > Typing

• Tick 'Add the standard keyboard layout as a touch keyboard option', this is a full touch keyboard which often comes in handy for less used characters, also has an 'ESC' key (Incase you are not aware, the touch keyboard has a button in the bottom-right corner which lets you switch the keyboard into various different layouts).

• Also tick 'Show the touch keyboard or handwriting panel when not in tablet mode and there's no keyboard attached'

I see a lot of people prefer the behavior of Windows 8.1 for touch (and I was a fan aswell), however with the recent updates in Windows 10, I much prefer Windows 10 for these reasons:

Desktop Mode:

• The modern apps open up in their own self-contained window.

• As before you can drag a window to the left or right edge of the screen to fill half, you can now also drag a window to the top-left, bottom-left etc for the window to fit a quarter of the screen.

• In the latest big update you can now resize two windows side by side in the same way you would do so in tablet mode, with both windows resizing at the same time.

• I prefer the swipe in from left for the task view and multiple desktops are great.

Tablet Mode:

• Recent big update means you can now drag the windows from the task view (swipe in from left), to either side of the screen and replace any split apps that are already there, this was my biggest issue with windows 10 in tablet mode compared to win 8.

Great suggestion from jty1012.

I am mostly using my surface plugged in at the moment, so have not needed to do any of these. However if you are out and about and are struggling with battery life, here are some general tips:

• Enable Battery Saver

• Dim screen brightness

• Disable Wifi

• Disable Cortana

• Disable Wifi When asleep

• Enable hibernate

• Enable cpu power management

• Background app permissions

• Disable windows hello

• Disable Flash

• Use an adblocker

These recent posts below explain in greater detail and are worth checking out:

Also according to windows central, microsoft hopes to improve the SP4/Win10 sleep problems in a patch sometime early next year.

Tips And Tricks Windows Surface Pro 3

I actually use the modern apps quite a lot, especially as they tend to work well when resized to a small width (eg. using reddit in a browser resized small usually ends up with a massive side-bar and unreadable posts and comments often indent too much and become super tiny), the modern apps also scale nicely at high resolutions.

Heres a list of some of the best applications that I've found work well with the surface (store apps and otherwise).

TIP: /r/windowsapps is good for discovering newly released store apps.

Web Browser Choice

• Chrome is what I use, mainly because of the extensions. Works well with touch, not great for battery life, looks a little out of place in windows 10. Has great developer tools. Some handy extensions are:

  • uBlock Origin good adblocker (no ad's also helps with battery drain)

  • The Great Suspender automatically suspends unused tabs.

• Firefox looks nice, good developer tools, unfortunately has a pretty poor touch experience at the moment.

• Edge is really nice, quite fast and light, but lacking extensions and swipe forwards and backwards does not currently work. Has probably the nicest feeling touch and zoom in any browser that I've used (including any on phones), and actually has a really fast javascript engine with good ecmascript 2015 support, which is going to be open-sourced. Dev-tools are also pretty decent. If extensions aren't an issue for you its a pretty nice browser, otherwise I think they are coming sometime next year.

General Applications

• Mail App (I like the default one, also think the most recent update now allows a unified inbox which a lot of people have been asking for).

• Readit / Baconit: Both really good universal reddit apps.

• Poki: my preferred pocket app, Latermark is also good.

• Twitter: not a big user but the official app suits me fine, others may prefer Tweetium.

• Facebook: not a big user either, current official app (actually made by microsoft I think?) is ok, I also think Facebook have a new universal app currently in development.

• Hyper for Youtube: good youtube app, have also heard good things about Tubecast.

• Unstream: I've tried a few twitch apps, this is my favourite.

• Groover Podcast: really nice universal podcast app.

• TuneIn Radio: nice radio app also handles podcasts

• Netflix: Official app works well (no chromecast unfortunately)

• Drawboard PDF: think it's installed by default, if not you should get it for PDF annotation.

• Wunderlist: nice app for keeping track of TODOS, works well cross-platform.

• Office: Windows store official Office Touch Apps are nice, Office 2016 also works nicely with touch. A good free alternative is Libreoffice, haven't used it in a while I think it has basic hidpi support but does not control well with touch (have to use a tiny scrollbar).

• Onenote Touch I prefer the touch version for my use, some tips:

  • Go into the Settings > Options and 'Use touch to zoom' (its disabled by default for some reason)

  • If Left-Handed you probably want to select 'Hide Page List' in the View Tab.

  • The eraser has two modes that can be switched to either erase entire lines (default behaviour), or erase parts of the lines.

  • Recent update added a 'Convert to shapes' toggle in the 'Draw' tab: it means you can draw squares/circles and other shapes in pen and they are automatically converted into proper shapes (that you can then select, resize, erase as usual).

  • Please vote for an option to disable auto-capitalization in windows feedback (may need to open link in Edge) as it makes writing any programming syntax in a note incredibly frustrating.

• Onenote Desktop is also free to download and has a lot more advanced features you might like, like converting handwriting to text, recording audio and saving to pdf, printing etc (probably a good idea to have it installed aswell).

• Cover is a good comic reader

• Windows Snipping Tool: really handy built-in basic screenshot tool, also checkout ShareX for a more powerful alternative.

• Spotify official desktop program now supports hidpi screens and works well with touch.

• PassKeep pretty decent KeePass 2 compatible password manager, LastPass also has an app which seems decent.

• 7zip good free open source archiving tool which supports .zip, .rar and .7z etc. Also adds a handy right click context menu in explorer for zipping and unzipping files.

• f.lux changes your screen colour to be warmer late at night, though can cause flickering issues when using multiple displays, apparently SunsetScreen is a good alternative with more customization options (thanks tedharvey).

Art / Design Apps

There are quite a few, here is a big list on surface pro artist.

• Adobe Creative Cloud: Don't have a subscription myself, apparently they work well with touch (especially Illustrator) and Photoshop has recently updated with some more touch features heres a recent youtube video that covers them.

• Clip Studio Paint / Manga Studio: (currently on sale) has a really nice touch interface, works really well on the surface pro, you can also purchase some nice brush sets here.

• Mischief works really well, has infinite canvas and zoom, can even make the entire window semi-transparent to see programs underneath which is neat.

• Krita: really good free open-source drawing program, might need to install the wintab drivers, good brush set here.

• Inkscape: good open-source vector program, however does not support hidpi or have any real touch support, still nice though.

• Sketchable is a really nice to use windows store drawing app with notebooks you can set to various sizes like A4 (300dpi), has layers and other nice things however its pretty restricted unless you pay to unlock the extra tools.

• Don't really use any 3D software, but here's a recent post with zbrush on the SP4.

Music Creation

Check out Surface Pro Audio for lots of reviews of audio software and how they perform on surface. Some highlights that work well with the surface:

• Bitwig Studio: Made by ex-ableton devs, latest version introduces nice touch + pen features reviewed here.

• Staffpad: its been in some of the surface adverts, for writing sheet music.

• Figure: free came out recently, made by propellerhead. Tunesbro whatsapp transfer serial key.

Games

• Dolphin GameCube and Wii Emulator.

• PCSX2: Playstation 2 Emulator.

• AMIDuOS, Bluestacks: android emulators.

• Steam and Steam In-Home Streaming which works really well.

• uPlay, Origin, GOG Galaxy, Epic Games Launcher - which you will have to install if you're going to download Shadow Complex (which is an awesome metroidvania which is currently free).

• Official Xbox app, can stream games from Xbox One to windows 10.

• Some touch-screen supported games that run well on SP4:

  • The Banner Saga

  • Shadowrun: Returns, Dragonfall, Hong Kong

  • Civilization V, Civilization Beyond Earth

  • XCOM: Enemy Unknown

Development

• Atom, VSCode, Brackets: Three great open-source cross-platform editors created by Github, Microsoft and Adobe (they all have nice sharp text at high resolution).

• cmder: really nice command-line/terminal tool, allows you to use a lot of nice unix commands and includes git (looks nice too), a good alternative worth checking out is babun.

• NVM-Windows: Node version manager for windows, allows you to swap in and out different versions of node. Also note: NPM 3 fixes a longstanding windows issue with long file paths.

• Chocolatey: Package manager for windows (similar to apt-get or homebrew on mac).

• MAMP Pro Windows if you are more into PHP.

Mice

• Logitech MX Anywhere 2: my current mouse, works via bluetooth and you can pair it to three different devices and toggle between them with a button. Rechargable battery that lasts ages and can be recharged via USB. Has a nice gesture button, however the middle mouse button toggles between clicky mousewheel and free-scrolling mouse wheel, so if you want an actual middle-mouse button you need to use the logitech options software to set it to a side button.

• Razer Orochi: decent portable bluetooth gaming mouse, comfortable. Requires batteries which run out pretty quickly and need replaced. On the plus side you can also plug in it and use it as a standard USB mouse

• Sculpt Comfort Mouse super comfortable bluetooth mouse, cheap and also has a nice side gesture button, uses batteries which actually last a good while.

• Arc Touch Surface Edition really nice compact bluetooth mouse, uses batteries, downside is the fake middle mouse button which requires a double tap to middle click, and can be a bit iffy registering mousewheel scrolling.

Game Controllers

• Steam controller: has a big learning curve but it's my current favourite, I use with the dongle but I believe it can work with bluetooth aswell (more latency however). Requires batteries but can also run off the MicroUSB. Check out /r/steamcontroller or woodsie on youtube for tips.

• Dualshock 4: If you prefer a traditional controller this is good, configure with DS4Windows or InputMapper. Works with bluetooth and can be charged via MicroUSB which is nice. Can even use the little touchpad as a trackpad (quite difficult though). Also most games use the xbox button icons in them so might take a while to get the hang of it.

• Xbox360 / Xbox One controller work great too, requires a USB slot for either direct wired controller or a wireless adapter, Xbox One controller requires a wireless adapter which came out recently.

• NES30 Pro don't own one but might make a nice portable controller for the surface.

Misc

• Logitech Wireless Headset H800 decently priced bluetooth headset that folds up small and has a decent microphone. What is also nice is that you can charge it via MicroUSB (and can continue to use it while it is charging).

• Anker 3-Port USB Hub and Ethernet handy for extra USB slots, and ethernet should you need it.

• Razer Kabuto Mouse Mat thin portable mouse mat, can be used to clean your screen, and also fits snug as a screen protector between the surface screen and closed typecover.

• Evecase Sleeve nice big padded protective sleeve.

• RAM Universal X-Grip big 12' tablet grip should you want to mount your surface somewhere.

• Standard Figure 8 C7 Power Lead: The surface power brick uses a standard figure 8 connector, so if you find the length too small you can buy a longer figure 8 lead on amazon for really cheap.

• The Xbox app has a handy 'Game DVR' that can actually be used in windows 10 in general for recording the screen. You can configure it in the Xbox app settings, and use the hotkey Win + R.

• You can use the program Synergy or Mouse without Borders to share your mouse and keyboard across multiple computers.

• If you have an iPad you can use Duet Display or TwomonUSB / TwomonAir (which also supports android) to use it as a second monitor for your surface.

• If you want to do the opposite and use your Surface as a second display for your PC, the best program I have found is Spacedesk, although I find it currently has too much latency for me.

• Note that: Duet Display, Twomon and Spacedesk install a special display driver to work, which may cause graphical issues with games or may also cause issues with miracast.

• Also in the past VirtualBox has caused Miracast issues, though that was Windows 8.1.

• If you are coming from a mac and are familiar with using the 'enter' key to begin renaming a file, in windows you can do the same using 'F2'.

Haven't used AutoHotkey myself but it was suggested by alR_ and I've seen it mentioned on this subreddit quite often. It's basically a tool that lets you set up macros/hotkeys for various handy shortcuts and key combinations. Again I'm not too familiar with it or how to set it up, but there is the potential to do some mad stuff like this:

Anyway I'm gonna end this here, I've already spent an embarrassingly long time writing this.. enjoy!

EDIT: I'm trying to update this post with anything I've missed and some suggestions from this thread. Thanks for the great responses, glad you like it!

Tips And Tricks For Surface 3

EDIT: Ok, I've added a fair bit of extra stuff, fixed some dodgy links etc..