Windows Surface RT

[Iain.Faulkner]

Morning all,

 

I'm looking at hybrid tablet devices, in particular the Microsoft surface RT.

 

Does anyone know anywhere that would lend me a demo piece of kit to have a play with for a month or so?

 

Thanks

 

Iain

[Hefferzzzz]

Morning all,

 

I'm looking at hybrid tablet devices, in particular the Microsoft surface RT.

 

Does anyone know anywhere that would lend me a demo piece of kit to have a play with for a month or so?

 

Thanks

 

Iain

 

 

We tried that and got short shrift from everyone. They seem quite happy to come in with the device and demo it but are less keen to leave one on site. We even tried a buy and then return type thing but that got us nowhere too. Let us know how you get on though.

[synaesthesia]

For £133, just buy one

[bushby]

go in to john lewis and have a play with a unit set up in there I done this for 10 min's I then eneded up taking one home with me

[Iain.Faulkner]

Thanks for the replies :-)

 

We're looking to buy 5 of them for our PE department, so they would be used for Microsoft Office, bit of browsing, email....however the main thing is that we want to know if it will run Sims so PE can do their registers wirelessly before we buy them. They currently have some old Acer netbooks, which need replacing, and this looked like a device that might meet their requirements.

 

Anyone used one for this purpose that could give me a brief review?

[synaesthesia]

No, they won't directly run SIMS. I suspect it may do if you use Intouch (haven't looked into that specifically) however you can push SIMS out to them via RDP, but check licensing for that. Do you not have a VLE that handles registration via sims without having it installed? If not, that may well be worth looking into. That way people can do it on *any* device that can handle a web page. They would be perfect for that, and if you buy into that limited time offer there really isn't an excuse not to!

Frankly, for 5 devices I'd do it anyway. I'm sure you'd find use for 5 extremely cheap tablets.

[bushby]

you cant install sims however I use RDP to my machine / terminal server to access sims and admin tools for the system and it works just as well as a laptop the only thing you need to keep in mind is the fact that they have little storage on them if you get the 32gb but they can connect to network drives still playing with this myself.

 

on the side note im have just arranged a whole lot of staff to get some for them selfs via the Microsoft education offer that ends the 31st aug

[Iain.Faulkner]

Brilliant, thanks again for that.

 

At the moment we don't have anything that allows us to do sims registers via a webpage, it is all done directly through the full version of sims. We do have a remote desktop solution in place though, so that may well work as an alternative.

[bushby]

the only thing is if the staff want to use them on a projector the adaptor cost £35

[Max_Power]

Is there a way to sign into the Surface without using a MS live account, reg edit or something maybe?

[bushby]

yep on set up you make the account. the only reason it wants the Microsoft account is to sync settings to other devices you use with windows 8

[flyinghaggis]

Some updates on the next gen surface RT roday :-

 

NVIDIA CEO: 'We're working really hard on' second-gen Surface RT - Neowin

 

Sounds like it's going to be Tegra4 based which will hopefully be an improvement perforamance-wise over the current one. Even with the recent price cut to £280 I just couldnt live with the performance offered by the Tegra 3 chipset.