10th time's the charm: Microsoft finally solves big problems with Surface Pro 3

21.01.2015
Judging by many comments on the Microsoft Answers forum and elsewhere, Microsoft's Jan. 15 firmware update for the Surface Pro 3 has solved almost all outstanding issues with Wi-Fi connections, hibernating, Bluetooth connectivity, battery drain on standby, Hyper-V interference with Wi-Fi, and more.

My initial report from last week details many of the changes delivered in the firmware update, and points to Barb Bowman's Microsoft Community Wiki article on how (and why) to manually set 2.4GHz or 5GHz Wi-Fi bands. That's a crucial step for getting decent Wi-Fi speeds with a dual-band router.

In that article, I pointed to a troubling post in the Microsoft Answers forum that said the Jan. 15 update caused a blue screen. I've seen a few additional complaints about BSODs when applying the Jan 15 firmware patch (one more here, another here, and one here), and some odd hardware behaviors. But the general level of satisfaction with the patch runs quite high. At least we didn't see mass BSODs with a new Surface Pro 3 firmware patch, as we have several times in the past.

So it now appears that the Surface Pro 3 is relatively glitch-free and ready for the big time. That's a big step up from the problems we've seen with the last nine firmware patches.

Wonder how long it'll be before we see a Surface Pro 4

(www.infoworld.com)

Woody Leonhard