My daughter just bought what she was told was a Surface Pro 3. I have looked at it and it's operating system and am dubious about the seller's claim. I have searched the internet and can't find a good answer. Is there a way for us to determine whether it is a Surface or Surface Pro? Is there a way to tell if it is a 2, 3, or 4? Thanks in advance.

I believe screen size & CPU/Processor is the difference:

http://www.windowscentral.com/...ties-and-differences

There used to be a Sufrace RT, now discontinued. The Surface Pro will have a real W8 or W10 operating system.

If it is a pro you will be on win 8.x or win 10.x. To find out which version it is running hit this link .

O.K. I definitely have a 12 inch display. I am definitely running Windows 10 Pro. I definitely have an Intel Core i5 4300UCPU 1.90 GHZ, 64 bit operating system. Thank you all. This, if I'm interpreting everything correctly, means I have a Surface Pro.

You can also differentiate a Pro 1 from a Pro 2 from a Pro 3 by the "kickstand" which is the pull-out support on the back.

The Pro 1 has a single position kickstand, the Pro 2 added two positions. The Pro 3 and 4 are continuously variable and allow you to position the screen at a wide variety of angles.

Wow, not sure how anyone didn't hit on this yet, but...


Click the start button.

Type "system"

System Information should show up.

Click on it.

A window will open with two panels. In the right most panel, 7th item down, it will say "System Model". My Surface Pro 4 clearly says the following:

System Manufacturer: Microsoft
System Model: Surface Pro 4

Type systeminfo in powershell or a command prompt window

exx1976 and smschulz, thanks. That enabled me to confirm. Believe it or not I do google these things; but, I'm never ashamed to ask. When I did google it in numerous ways, the simplest solution seemed to be as smschulz said, type systeminfo in powershell. Unfortunately, I could never find what the hell powershell was. I was looking for exactly what exx1976 described. Unfortunatley, I was trying to do so in a manner much more difficult than it actually was.

Thank you all. Now, to the next step. I can find the steps for a factory reset. Before I do, I want to make sure I don't screw things up. For example, this has Windows 10 Pro. If I do a factory reset, do I run the chance this had an earlier version, Windows 8X and reset losing 10? I hope that makes sense. It currently has no accounts on it so somebody did some sort of reset. What is the best way for me to set this up with my daughter's account? Thanks again in advance.

quote:

Originally posted by Tomkat:
Now, to the next step. I can find the steps for a factory reset. Before I do, I want to make sure I don't screw things up. For example, this has Windows 10 Pro. If I do a factory reset, do I run the chance this had an earlier version, Windows 8X and reset losing 10? I hope that makes sense.

It currently has no accounts on it so somebody did some sort of reset.

What is the best way for me to set this up with my daughter's account?
Thanks again in advance.

Why are you doing a factory reset?

You can just set up an account/login for her separate from your profile.
Just be sure both users have a password and she is not an administrator.
That would be for a local account.
You can also setup a different MS account at live.com ~ one for you and one for her.
Using the MS account enables some cloud features and syncing, etc.

Resetting your Surface is pretty easy:

https://www.microsoft.com/surf...indows-10&=undefined

Don't worry about losing Windows 10. It's a digital entitlement that's tied to the unique identifier in the hardware. Even if you completely wiped off everything on the hard drive and started with a blank slate, you could easily re-install Windows 10 from installation media downloaded from Microsoft.

The instructions above should be a completely automatic reset of the computer. It will copy the drivers needed to a separate space before nuking and paving the OS and reinstalling itself. I did it the other day, and was completely surprised that I didn't need to update or reinstall any drivers after the reset.

quote:

Originally posted by smschulz:

quote:

Originally posted by Tomkat:
Now, to the next step. I can find the steps for a factory reset. Before I do, I want to make sure I don't screw things up. For example, this has Windows 10 Pro. If I do a factory reset, do I run the chance this had an earlier version, Windows 8X and reset losing 10? I hope that makes sense.

It currently has no accounts on it so somebody did some sort of reset.

What is the best way for me to set this up with my daughter's account?
Thanks again in advance.

Why are you doing a factory reset?

You can just set up an account/login for her separate from your profile.
Just be sure both users have a password and she is not an administrator.
That would be for a local account.
You can also setup a different MS account at live.com ~ one for you and one for her.
Using the MS account enables some cloud features and syncing, etc.

Looks like the OP's daughter bought the computer used. Pretty good idea to reformat in case he left some malware on there, or in case there's some kiddy porn or something hiding somewhere.

Personally, I would do a secure wipe of the computer. Encrypt the whole disk. Reformat. Reinstall OS from scratch with new drivers. Then do a secure wipe (5 passes, DoD) of the empty drive space.

Referencing a previous post of mine regarding the information left on the hard disk even if you "erase" it:

Imagine a book is your hard drive. It has 99 pages and a 1 page table of contents.

When you write in your book, you go back to the table of contents and notate that you used up a page.

When you decide you no longer want what's on the page in the book, instead of sitting there with an eraser and erasing the whole page, you just go back to the table of contents and note that the page you wanted gone is available. The next time you go back and need the page, you just glue a whole new page on top. In the end, this saves you time because you don't have to sit there and erase pages that you might not use in the future. However, if you were to casually flip through the book, all of your writing is still in the book--even if the table of contents says that page is supposed to be empty.

Your hard drive works the same way. It has a table at the front that tells your computer which sectors are empty.

Back to the book. After you've used your book for a while, there will be a bunch of pages that can be reused throughout the book. Sometimes, as you reuse these pages, you end up writing something that takes up more than just the one page, so you start writing on one page, then have to skip a few pages with stuff already on there that you want to keep, then finish writing on the next available page you find. After a while, your book gets pretty out of order with all the pages mixed up...so one day you decide to cut all the pages out, rearrange all the pages that go together, then put all the blank or reusable pages at the end. This makes it easier to read the book, and also to write in the book. For a hard drive, this process is called defragmenting or defragging.

Lastly, to the security question. Since you don't sit there and physically erase all your words on any given page, the page can be read by anyone who has the time to flip through the whole book. So, lets say you want to destroy all the information on a particular page, and so you paste a blank page right ontop of the writing. The page now looks blank to anyone casually flipping through the book. For a hard drive, this is a called a 1 pass wipe.

But anyone who wants to look carefully can look closely at the glued in page and can see that there's writing underneath. For a hard drive, this is also true--a lab can use sensors to see the state of the molecules inside of the magnetic plate and SSD chip to see the what's previously been written.

So, you get a little crazy and you glue 1 blank page, then a second page with fake writing on it, then a third page that's blank, then a 4th page that has fake writing on it, and so on and so forth. Writing the fake pages takes a long time, so you might only do this 1 or 2 times, but your spy friends at the NSA say you should layer at least 7 pages in there, just to be safe. Hard drives work the same way--you pass over the same sector with 0s, then again with 1s, then 0s, then 1s again. In the end, there's so many layers of writing ontop of the original, that it would be very hard to look through all the pages to see what's underneath.

And that's how hard drive wiping works as well. You can choose to write 3, 5, or however many passes that's required by your organization. You can choose to write all 1s, all 0s, alternate passes between 1s and 0s, or fill up each pass with random 1s and 0s.