Just to pick up a few points here about the Surface as my main work device / PC.
Our standard environment is Windows 7 and we are testing Windows 8. So I often run Windows 7 in a VM on the Surface. Now that’s pretty cool seeing Windows 7 running in a VM on top of Windows 8 with Outlook, Word, OneNote, IE and Chrome open and it sitting at around 10% CPU on a tablet. I run the VM with Hyper-V of course which is built in. I usually have a Debian 7 VM open also for local shell access.
On Firefox, I am sure a few people are going to say yes but what extensions did you have, please, forget it. I have EXACTLY the same extensions and then some running on Chrome and most of them also on IE. For example 1Password, FDM, Evernote, OneNote etc and IE and Chrome mostly behave. I was an avid FF fan before this but after seeing it’s CPU usage on a low end machine I have uninstalled it from everything I use. It’s CPU usage is simply unacceptable. You can argue all you like. While not a big fan of the big G I am probably the only person on earth who uses Chrome with Bing as default search engine 🙂
I do have some new found respect for IE though however IE and compatibility mode can drive me nuts sometimes. There is a whole bunch of sites that won’t work without being on compatibility mode. IE remains default browser.
Energy consumption is interesting, I have to be the lowest consumer of electricity in the my workplace. Measured with an inline digital watt meter I get the following.
Surface idles with apps open 7 watts average
Surface active with all my work apps open 10-12 watts average
Surface peaks at around 17 watts
Screen 60 watts during normal use 🙁
For comparison 2 x 22″ Dells would be 15 watts each so still got some work to do on the screen power consumption 🙂
Update 20 May 2014
I have re installed Firefox 29.0.1 and a lot of these CPU usage issues seem to be gone. However at start up Firefox will max out a single CPU for a while before settling down. Am now trying disabling all add-ons etc and seeing exactly whats going on. However after disabling them all and turning back on one at a time it still seems to be behaving itself, this is good.