Greetings SaeedR_706,
That is a good question, however I would suggest rather then using the USB cable, to transfer files over your WiFi network to a shared folder on your Windows 7 Laptop.
Can I connect Surface RT and PC with USB cable?
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Anonymous
I have a Toshiba Thrive running Android. I can connect it to my PC with a USB cable and access files on my Thrive on the PC. The PC treats the Thrive as a hard drive. Can I connect my Surface in the same way? I have tried and the PC does not appear to see the Surface.
This is a pain, one of the reasons I bought the Surface was to be able to do this type of hard connection and not have to use "iTunes" or the Cloud.
Surface | Other
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Anonymous
Hello Rrccw,
No, you cannot connect the Surface to the PC via USB. However, you can setup Shared folderson your PC. Once you have that, have the Surface connect to the same network via WiFi and then go into Network from the Desktop app, select your PC and then see the Shared Folders. From there, the Surface should have Read/Write access if you gave the permissions on the PC.
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Anonymous
2014-01-07T02:52:50+00:00 I totally realize that Wolfpup3. That is a technical answer though which totally disrespects users needs, which is precisely the problem that MS suffers.
Almost all other PCs have an ethernet port, which avoids the crippling drawbacks of the wireless and two-step drive copying methods you've mentioned. If the Surface had an ethernet port this would be much less of a problem. As it is the Surface is neither fish nor fowl - it is just a tablet masquerading as a PC and as a consequence doing neither well. I'm certain that if MS cared they could build in some sort of client functionality to allow direct usb connection.
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Anonymous
2014-01-07T02:45:36+00:00 Dominic, thanks for those work-arounds. It is appalling though that the Surface does not have this very basic functionality. No wonder I'm the only person I know who has one. I want to transfer 20gb of photos from a recent holiday onto the Surface and use it as a digital photo frame. Every other tablet I've had I could just connect up to the PC USB port, drag and drop and it was done. To do this on the surface I have to do the same thing twice:
- Copy from PC to USB flash drive;
- Copy from USB flash drive to Surface.
That automatically makes it take twice as long as any other device. That MS can think that that is OK shows a huge disrespect for their users. I won't even comment on the idea of crippling my net for the hours or days it would take to upload the 20GB of photos to Skydrive, to do something that would take minutes on any decent device. Sure there are other benefits to cloud storage but they are solutions to a different problem.
Massive fail Microsoft! To think that I originally saw the USB port on the Surface as a positive. :(
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Anonymous
2013-12-14T21:57:24+00:00 It isn't "BS". You guys aren't realizing that the Surface *IS* a PC running something really close to regular Windows. It's a USB host, just like regular Windows PCs are, just like a Mac is, and unlike what most phones and tablets are.
You can share files around quite easily, but you do it in the same ways you'd share files between any other two PCs, through Windows networking, or through an external drive, or through Skydrive for that matter.