I ran into issues with my Surface Book 2 last week. Since I needed to get up and running very quickly, I ordered a new Surface Book 3 from the Microsoft Store. Generally speaking, the Surface Book 3’s price was similar to the Surface Book 2.

Unpacking and Booting it up

One of the first things I noticed is that unlike the typical retail packaging that Microsoft uses for their devices, they shipped my Surface Book 3 in a recycled insert and box.

Unboxing the Surface Book 3

I ordered the 15”, i7, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD model. I also picked up the new Surface Dock 2 in hopes that I had better support for my wireless keyboard and mouse. So far, that too has been working flawless.

Booting up the Surface Book 3

The only issue I ran into is that my old Dell U2414H monitor was not compatible with the Intel Iris driver. I ended up ordering two ViewSonic vp2771 monitors. I’ll post more about those tomorrow.

What I Typically Install

I wanted to take a moment to list out the applications I typically install on my machine when I unbox and power it up.

  1. Edge (New Edge Chromium Edition)
  2. Visual Studio Code - Stable Build
  3. Visual Studio Code - Insiders Build
  4. Git-SCM
  5. Visual Studio 2019
  6. Slack
  7. Tweeten
  8. SQL Server Management Studio
  9. Azure Storage Explorer
  10. Postman
  11. Chrome
  12. Adobe Creative Suite