Can I connect Surface RT and PC with USB cable?

Anonymous
2012-11-30T00:08:13+00:00

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
2013-03-05T02:57:40+00:00

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.

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Anonymous
2012-12-05T00:46:39+00:00

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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  1. Anonymous
    2016-11-18T21:10:36+00:00

    This is really crappy. I am so glad that I did not buy this ignorant device. What use is a mobile device that cannot  talk directly with a Windows PC? It is way too frustrating to **** around with this stuff. Upload and down load and transfer to a thumbdrive, what a crock. MS, get your **** together, will you? My company bought this for me to use at work, and now they have to also pay for me to diddle around. I want a cable, plug the freaking thing in, and share the information. Going WiFi or the cloud is such a security hassle, too.

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-08-11T14:16:10+00:00

    I haven't used Outlook in a few years and I'm not really sure how well it syncs with various accounts, but it sounds like you'd want to sign up for one of the big providers for this type of thing.  Probably Outlook.com, Gmail, or even iCloud or Yahoo, although I'm not sure Outloook 2013 supports OAth that both Microsoft and Google prefer to use for authentication now?

    But anyway you'd want to be using a big provider like that, and then using whatever clients you want on various PCs and  other devices.

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-08-11T13:42:53+00:00

    Thanks for the reply.  I may not be explaining my issue very well.  It's really not an issue of syncing email, its more an issue of syncing contacts, calendar, notes, etc.  My primary provider doesn't even offer an IMAP option, so even if that was the case, not sure how syncing email accounts with provider helps me.

    I will check to see what options may be available that allows Outlook to sync between devices, but in the meantime, will have to continue to copy the .pst file, since I don't see a better option.

    '

    Thanks again for the reply.

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