[Microsoft Surface] Proxyep:
ok, i will start of with the TLDR part because this is going to be quite long.

TLDR

: 99% chance your tablet uses a v1.1 touchscreen digitizer, it will not

work with anything else

don't even try.

Explanation.

I purchased quite a few surface pro 3s (6 units) in the hope that I could get it fixed, I'll share my findings here.

Chassis

The magnesium alloy frame bends when you drop it, durable my ass, because the magnesium alloy has a low compression yield stress (I'd cite it but I don't have outside link privileges). Because the tolerances are so god damn tight,

any

bend is likely to prevent installation of a LCD because it will no longer fit. It's possible to get round this by bending it back (hard) or cutting the excess metal (harder) but chances are you need to to both to even get a decent result. But even then it'll never be the same.

Frankly I suspect its the same for all magnesium (or any metal framed) device, but on all the metal devices I've owned/fixed/refurbed it's the most pronounced on magnesium frames.

LCD

Don't let the LCD dealers lie to you, not all the LCDs are the same. For a while on eBay (the November to January period) it was flooded with SP3 LCD assemblies. Unfortunately I have no idea what bin they dug it out from but the LCDs attached to those were a slightly different make and were defective. It would not run on the original resolution, it had to be run at a lower resolution or else the picture would freeze (the initial image would stop refreshing) and I suspect something was defective on the LCD controller side.

Touchscreen

Interestingly enough the first unit I bought actually kind of worked. The touch was completely functional but there was issues with ghost touches. The other 4 units I purchased were lemons (don't buy the one from Shenzhen Saul E-tech on Ali-express) , the only other person who left a review on the D***s S is actually selling his unit on eBay right now! I was talking to him and it works differently for him as well, touch only functions after the unit has been on for a few mins.

What happens when you install the LCD assembly for the first time is that the SP3 detects it and installs whatever drivers it needs to (8? items) but it will not function properly.

I suspect there are 2 possibilities right now:

1. anything below v1.0 (I suspect this is the version at release, if you look on iFixit's teardown this is the version they have) is a prototype/ non functional.

The Chinese people dug all the v0.1,0.3,v0.5 screens out of a bin somewhere and decided to flog it to the rest of the world. Heck, some of the units I purchased looked like they were laminated separately from the digitizer (it had OCA stains all over the back and very poor quality control like dark spots and light-spots on the LCD). That means that anything below v1.0 is inherently faulty which kind of fits in line with my experiences with finding different faults across multiple units.

2. I works but requires calibration.

Apparently nTrig has a calibration tool ( I tried it, doesn't work) but maybe the touchscreen is registering input but needs to calibration to accept the signal (or reject noise signals)

right now your best bet is to pay microsoft to fix/replace it.

The LCD ranges from 200(avoid these ones)-300 bucks.

Apparently replacement is 300-320, go figure.