Living with the Surface, Maybe

No major updates at the moment. I still haven’t played with remoting through PowerShell. I’m just living with it.

Had an interesting problem start today. You can swipe from the sides to get different behaviors. Swipe in from the top or bottom and you get menu choices in the app you’re in. Swipe in from the right and you get the Charms. Swipe in from the left… well, you’re supposed to get the list of recent apps or the ability to set an app in another window or even switch to the previous application, all depending on how you swipe. Except, mine stopped. Hurrah.

I did a bunch of poking around to figure out why this happened, hoping I’m not looking at a hardware issue (oh please, not that). When I couldn’t figure it out, I posted to the forums (the only resource for help unless you call Microsoft I think). I found a setting that does in fact turn it off. So I turned it back on. Nothing. Restart the Surface. Still nothing. Oh boy. I cleaned the screen really well. Nothing.

Next thing to check, are there outstanding updates? There are. They’re scheduled to get installed during scheduled maintenance. Scheduled? When did I set up a schedule? Oh, that’s right, I didn’t. Installed the updates manually, I’ll look into the scheduling later. Swipe still isn’t working. Crud.

When I hit problems with Microsoft products, I usually go straight to Connect and find out who has a solution. No Surface and no Windows RT on Connect. Nuts. I’m in trouble. We might be seeing an interruption in the Surface service.

But, I found a chat support window. The person walked through all the stuff I had done. Then had me open a command window as the admin and run the new version of checkdisk, sfc. Took a while and I had a nice chat with the support technician. Good guy. Thanks for the time and the assistance Nicholas M. That didn’t fix it either, so we did a process called Refresh. Note: Not Reset. That’s like crossing the streams, it would be bad. Refresh also took a while. And it fixed the problem. Whew!

And we’re back in business. This Surface thing has really been an adventure.

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