#SurfacePro – How to update #SurfaceDock firmware and avoid a nice and shiny brick

Hi!

Those who saw my on events or demos, knows that I use my Microsoft Surface Pro 4 for this. I shared my opinion on this device several times, it is great to work with PowerPoint or Excel or office tasks. However, I must also share that it’s not good at all for serious development work like Hololens which involves Visual Studio 2017 and Unity3D.

During the past few months, between client sessions and Hololens demos, I lost my Surface Pro 4 charger. Most of the times, this is a bad news; for me is the perfect reason to get a shinny Surface Dock. $250 which seems to be an amazing investment if you are using a device like the SurPro a lot.

So, after some waiting time for the package delivery (you know Canada, big distances, FedEx people avoid bears attacks, and more), I finally get my device. However, after a couple of required updates, I find out a very bad news: the additional screens feature is not working.

Note: Here I must admit the use of a lot of betas, insiders, and testing software which not always works fine. On top of this, the Surface Dock was not very well received at the beginning because it went into “Brick mode” for several users.

So, the 1st idea in my mind was: Now I got a nice $250 brick; of course this was now a good moment for me.

Lucky for us, the Microsoft Devices team not only creates amazing hardware, they also have a very complete online database. There I found the Microsoft Surface Dock Update application. This app updates the device firmware, which seems to be a good idea after all the problems with the device. The app is created for “simple users” like me, take a look at this screenshots: