Day 5 of Surface 2 as Primary PC

I was excited to see one of my heroes Scott Hanselman blog about his using an RT 2 for primary PC. We drew a lot of the same conclusions (link).
My week ended on a high note – took the advice of one of my great friends from college (hi Ian) and got a 64GB Micro SD card and moved SkyDrive to it. That has been a phenomenal speed boost. Seems to me that putting 10,000 files (even if just pseudo symlinks) on the primary Surface partition != good.

I continue to refine my operating maneuvers. For the most part, the HDMI dongle is a life saver. Even with the excellent screen and new angle of the stand, staring at that tiny of a screen for an entire day is a bit of a challenge. I really wish, however, MSFT would release a driver kit for Surface so USB screens could be attached as secondaries. That’s just silly when there is a large native USB repository. I also discovered on XDA that there’s a neat PowerShell command that you can run to generate native ARM libraries and a Visual Studio tweak you can do to develop/compile and then sideload through the deploy button desktop based apps. I don’t have an immediate use for this, but if I ever wanted to port something small, I could do that. Then, once the 8.1 jailbreak comes out (they are hard at it), I should be able to even distribute some of my apps – they all suck so not sure why I would, but timesavers for me. The alternative is to actually write a Win8 store version…maybe. I need two apps – a SkyDrive Pro sync tool (the SKP app in the store is a joke) and an OwnCloud app or three since most of my world is moving into that.

As I wrap up the week, I certainly found some high points and some low points. Will I continue to use my 2 as my number 1? I think so for the time being. My next fun little project is putting together a remote app installation to deliver my remote desktop based apps like Visual Studio, Chrome, etc to my desktop like a real app. That should eliminate some of the other headaches I’ve been experiencing 🙂

Cheers!