Microsoft and Projekt Neptun: A new beginning

In the last years we could only offer Surface devices from the consumer line at Projekt Neptun. From the upcoming sales wave from 5.9. to 3.10.2022 this is changing thanks to the great effort of some motivated employees at Microsoft Switzerland. We are now able to offer Microsoft Surface devices from the commercial range, which offer several advantages over the devices from the consumer range.

Operating System

On Surface for Business devices Windows 11 Pro is installed instead of Home. The Pro version supports the laptop encryption Bitlocker, which provides significantly more security in case of loss and effectively prevents data access by unauthorized parties. Furthermore, the Pro version can delay Windows updates, which is useful if you want to wait for first user experiences before updating. More differences between Home and Pro can be found here.

Warranty

In warranty cases, Surface devices are generally not repaired directly, but replaced with equivalent, sometimes already repaired (refurbished) devices. For consumer models, the defective device must first be sent in before a new device is provided by Microsoft. For commercial devices, this is handled the other way around. This means that downtimes are shorter and there is time for the user to transfer data from the old device to the new one. In addition, the warranty for business devices is valid internationally and is handled via a separate channel, which we hope will result in faster response times.

Hardware options

There are a few small differences between the consumer and commercial products in Microsoft's current Surface lineup. The most important one is found in the Surface Laptop Studio, where not only Nvidia Geforce graphics are offered in the commercial devices, but also professional Nvidia RTX A2000 GPUs, making the Surface Studio suitable for CAD, scientific computing and other applications aside from content creation.

Sales channel

Instead of selling directly through the Microsoft Store, we sell the Surface Business devices through our long-term partner Computacenter TS GmbH, through whom we also sell laptops from HP and Lenovo. With Computacenter, we have much more control over the product range and inventory, and we have short lines of communication if there are any problems with an order or warranty processing.

In addition, all Microsoft Surface devices can now also be purchased by institutional customers in any quantity. Of course, institutional customers can also pay by invoice.