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.

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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
    2014-01-12T20:26:33+00:00

    You could also say that it's ridiculous of Apple and Google to not include network client capabilities in their tablet OSs. While there are Android apps that let me access my PC's shares across the network, they're very hit-or-miss in how well they work. I would have preferred that capability be built-in.

    Is it even possible for a device to have both USB host and client capabilities? Is that part of the USB standard, or would the Surface have to be non-standard to add that ability? I just skimmed the USB Wikipedia entry and didn't find an answer.

    If it's not possible for a device to switch between both or would cause problems, I think Microsoft made the right choice.

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-01-13T00:08:09+00:00

    If it isn't possible to have both capabilities, then that would be a different story.  But that wasn't what has been presented so far in this thread.  The only responses have been 1) being told it can't be done and a way to accomplish it through another means and 2) several people acting like there is no reason anyone would ever want to do it the way requested.

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  3. Anonymous
    2014-01-13T09:44:59+00:00

    Kind of off topic but vaguely connected:

    My wife is taking deliver of a Dell Venue 8 Pro tablet this week.  It looks like a tablet and in many ways behaves like a tablet.  However, it runs full Windows 8.1.  I'm wondering how long it is before she tried to connect it to her PC via USB to transfer content.  Who knows, maybe it will work in that way.

    As an experiment, I'm saying nothing but will just watch how she intuitively starts to use it.

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