Microsoft Surface Pro 4 (Intel Core i5, 4GB RAM, 128GB) with Windows 10 Anniversary (Renewed)

Beware! Defective Devices
I purchased a refurbished Surface 4 hoping to use it as a lightweight work device. I chose a refurbished device to perhaps save some money and keep an old, but otherwise useful, device from the landfill.I wish the absolute lemon of a device I received was in a landfill.Appearances were, at first, good. As standard for used devices it shipped with no documentation, only a power cord. It was wrapped and shipped quite well, and it was clearly cleaned before shipment. There was only one very tiny (less than 1mm in length) chip in the metal case which took me some time to notice. In terms of external quality the device looked excellent. Unfortunately, the excellent outsides belied the irredeemable insides.The device was nearly inoperable, and is utterly beyond saving by a normal user. When performing first time set up problems quickly became apparent. Touch controls did not work for this touch screen tablet computer. The device came without a pen or keyboard, and I was fine with this as I did not expect a used device to come with peripherals. However what was not fine was the fact that the device would not register touch inputs outside of the “power+volume up” menu. Touching would not move the cursor, touching would not bring up the on screen keyboard, touching the *touch surface* of this Surface Pro tablet did nothing whatsoever.Fine, perhaps the device expects you to have a keyboard or some other peripheral. I plugged in a USB mouse and was able to, with some difficulty, complete first time start up and connect my device to my internet. My problems were not yet over.Now on the windows desktop home screen new problems set in. I attempted to update the system – as I thought perhaps an update to the device’s software would correct the device’s issues. Here I ran into something rather novel, the settings menu would not open. No matter how many times I clicked, no matter how many resets I performed, I could not open the settings menu in order to update the device. I tried sifting through the menus to try to find some setting or other that might turn on touch controls, or otherwise render my device operable but, alas, nothing.At this point, frustrated with the increasingly useless device I had spent $274 on, I resolved to try a factory reset. As the settings menu obstinately resisted any attempt to bring it up, I brought up the command prompt and (still using a usb mouse and the on screen keyboard) entered “systemreset”.Enter the final, most damning, issue with this device – the battery. During multiple attempts at a system reset the device blue screened. The issue, I suspect, is the battery which cannot hold a charge. The device, by some miracle, shipped with the correct power cable. The cable was apparently the only thing about the device that could handle electricity. The machine holds no charge and instantly turns off the moment the cable is unplugged. The battery, I suspect, is fully cooked, or somehow removed. In any case, the machine would be useless for my intended purposes in such a state, even if the touch controls worked at all.In summation the machine I was sent:1. Would not respond to touch inputs2. Would not load key functions on the operating system3. Blue screened several times4. Had a battery life of approximately 0 secondsUsed and refurbished electronics are always a “your mileage may vary” proposition – especially in sight unseen purchases like over Amazon. Based on other reviews many people are happy with the devices they received, and you might be too should you order from Amazon Refurbished. I warn you, however, that your mileage might be like mine: a beautiful condition but useless device with an even more useless battery.

Moderately good
Would recommend to a friend . The only isssue I was disappointed with was battery life. The seller claimed 6 hours of battery life but the actual battery life is approximately not more than 3 hours

Don’t buy this refurbished from Amazon. We’ve gotten 6 from Amazon and 5 were clearly lemons.
I love Amazon and I love buying refurbished, so when we needed several of these as security camera monitors, this seemed like a great solution. We bought them a couple at a time over the course of several months, and from different sellers, and all but ONE were lemons. Fortunately, we discovered it before Amazon’s generous return window on all but one of them, so we’re only out the cost of one of these. Most of them had screen problems that weren’t apparent until it was used continuously for an hour or more. Some of them were clearly heat-related issues that could be temporarily resolved by not using the screen for a while or by putting them in the fridge briefly, though that of course is not an acceptable state of affairs for a Surface.One of them had a non-OEM screen that had clearly been replaced, and it was about 1/2 or 1/3 the dpi of what the device should have. It was like looking at a laptop screen from twenty years ago through a screen door, and it was obvious that someone scamming Amazon. In that instance, clearly nobody at Amazon had even turned it on to attempt to vet it, because the comically low DPI was blatantly obvious as soon as the screen displayed anything at all at startup.Amazon was accommodating at taking them all back within the lengthy return window, which I appreciated, but it’s clear that there are a number of people sending Amazon devices they claim are good which are clearly not. 1 good one out of 6 is not a good success rate, and we lost several hundred dollars on the one whose screen failed after a few months (beyond the return window). I don’t know what processes Amazon has for “refurbishing” these, but whatever it is, it’s not working very well. I won’t buy any more of these from Amazon.