Horrible experience with Surface Laptop 7 - About to give up
I've been using a Surface Laptop 3 for nearly five years now and it's been great. Zero complaints. I've just purchased a Surface Laptop 7 and it's been nothing but problems like:
- After completing the setup process everything works fine but on the 2nd or 3rd boot, the search bar and start menu search both cease to function. I've tried restarting Explorer, restarting the search process, rebuilding the index and nothing seems to work
- Basic apps like Slack install and run fine on the first boot but just like the search/indexing function, on subsequent boots the apps won't open. For Slack, I've tried both the ARM client downloaded from the Slack site and installing slack from the Microsoft store and neither work (I did uninstall the app between trying alternative install methods)
- I did two factory resets and the issue persists
- I then downloaded an image from the Microsoft website and did a reimage using a recovery drive and the issue still persists
- I went back to the retailer and took them through the issue and they were also stumped and replaced the laptop and the issue still persists!
I'm really disappointed with this experience. I was a huge evangelist for the Surface brand but after this experience I can't in good conscience recommend Surface to anyone.
After two days of doing factory resets and recovery drive installs across two laptops I am going to take this 2nd laptop back and just get a full refund. The rest of my office uses MacBook and for the first time in my career I am seriously considering it.
I've combed through Reddit and the Microsoft support articles and don't expect anyone to suggest solutions that haven't already been covered there. This is just more of a frustrated vent.