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
    2015-08-11T00:38:18+00:00

    I'm not sure I agree with you.  The .pst file needs to be current, which includes not only my email, but contacts, calendar, notes, etc.  Additionally, my .pst if large, so other than a cable connection to sync, not sure how, what you suggest would work.  I'm open to ideas, but not sure a simple sync is going to do what I need.

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-08-11T00:54:42+00:00

    Are you trying to just have a local copy, and not use an online service for this?

    I don't know that there's any good way to sync this kind of stuff if you're trying to only use a local copy.  You could theoretically manually move the file around, remembering not to open it before updating it, but that would quickly get to be a pain most likely.

    Last/maybe only good way I know of to do it locally was to use Palm Desktop and a PalmOS device on multiple PCs.  That worked great, but unfortunately hasn't been an option for years.

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-08-11T01:09:20+00:00

    Yeah, the Palm system worked great, of course years ago.

    My issue is that I use my desktop as my primary computer, but since I'm on the road quite a bit, I need to have my Outlook file current on my laptop, hoped it would be my Surface.  What I do know is sync the two computers via ethernet cable, which takes about 15-20 minutes, yes a pain, but at least it does work.  Everything else I save locally and to the Cloud, so that I can access it anywhere, but that's not an option with Outlook.

    As I said earlier, I would have thought that Microsoft would have developed/created a cable to allow this type of syncing.

    Thanks for your input.

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