54 PCWorld FEBRUARY 2019REVIEWS MICROSOFT SURFACE LAPTOP 2
the headphones.
Personally, I’ve used the Surface Laptop as
a test machine for Windows 10 Insider builds,
banging away on it off and on every week or
so, and especially in the month or so before a
new feature release. From a longevity and
usability standpoint, and speaking specifically
about the 1st Gen laptop, the Surface Laptop
line comes recommended.PERFORMANCE
Microsoft never designed the Surface Laptop
to be anything much more than an
aesthetically pleasing middle-of-the-road
laptop that a student or a casual worker could
tote around to class or a conference. As such,
we never expected its performance to be
exemplary, and it wasn’t. Battery life sold theoriginal Laptop, and it’s the
selling point here, too—but
now, other laptops can offer as
much or better.
(One performance note:
Though we benchmark in
Airplane Mode to prevent
background processes from
affecting our results, we use the
laptops, too—and it was during
this period that we were caught
short by an unexpected update
to the Windows 10 October
2018 Update between tests.
The upgrade didn’t seem to
affect benchmark scores except
for some of the PCMark tests, where scores
seemed to fall by about 7 percent. While the
scores averaged out—we ran two tests before
the upgrade, and two after—it’s also worth
noting that even the earlier scores wouldn’t
have meaningfully affected the Surface Laptop
2’s relative ranking.)
We gathered together several recently-
introduced laptops, all hovering a bit above
or below the $1,000 price point. We also
included the Surface Laptop 1st Gen for
comparison’s sake.
Our first standardized test, PCMark,
supplies three separate benchmarks: Work,
Home, and Creative. While the Work test
measures typical office productvity
applications, such as spreadsheet work and
word processing, the Home and CreativeMicrosoft’s keyboard remains unchanged from the Surface Laptop
(1st Gen) as well as the Surface Pro 6.