So, I’m now managing 50 Surface Pro tablets, which is well and good, but it has its challenges. Particularly for someone who did Macs for the last 20 years!

They are all standalone machines—that is their entire purpose in life, so creating accounts and adding them to an Active Domain is right out. As such I’ve had to get a little creative. I’m using one master tablet, which I update with exactly the settings, accounts, applications, etc that it needs. Then I clone it using Clonezilla (only clone the major partition, don’t overwrite the entire disk!). This has been going swimmingly for about 10 months now until on Tuesday, I happened to have the master tablet and a cloned tablet open on the firmware screen simultaneously and I noticed that the firmware on the cloned tablet was way out of date, despite the master having received all the latest firmware updates.

Turns out that Windows 10 doesn’t actually check the hardware to see what version it has, but rather looks at the installed packages and goes, “Cool! This one is up-to-date!” 🙄

Long story short, here’s the basic recipe to force a refresh, because it’s not an easy process. (Windows also doesn’t want to let you install a firmware package twice…)

Download the latest Firmware package for your tablet from MS’s Surface Firmware web page.

Extract the contents with msiexec /a path\to\firmware.msi /qb targetname=c:\desktop\extracted-firmware

Acquire a copy of devcon.exe somewhere; basically you have to hunt it up from links on the internet, pull it out of the .cab file and rename it.

somewhere; basically you have to hunt it up from links on the internet, pull it out of the .cab file and rename it. Open an Explorer window into the folder c:\Windows\INF .

. Open a second Explorer window into ~\Desktop\extracted-firmware\SurfaceUpdates\Firmware

For each folder inside the SurfaceUpdates Firmware folder, find the name of the .cat file and search for it in the contents of the INF folder. This will be things like surfaceuefi.cat, surfaceme.cat, surfaceish.cat, surfacetouch.cat, surfacesam.cat and possibly others (although that is a list of all the ones I saw at the time).

Get the name of the latest oem###.inf to contain each of those names by doing a search contents inside the Windows INF folder. For example, you should end up with something like oem139.inf, oem140.inf, etc.

Use the devcon file on your desktop to delete each of these inf files. For example ~\Desktop\devcon -f dp_delete oem139.inf

And finally, go back to the extracted-firmware folder and in each subfolder inside the Firmware folder where you found a .cat file, right-click on the .inf file for it and install it. Delay restart until you’ve chosen to install the last one and then reboot. Preferably do them in the order from lowest to highest that they were listed in the INF folder. EACH .INF SHOULD REQUEST TO DO A RESTART OR SAY EVERYTHING WAS SUCCESSFULL. THIS IS HOW YOU KNOW IT’S GOING TO TRY AND UPDATE THAT FIRMWARE PACKAGE.

You should see your Surface Pro go through a number of system updates with variously colored progress bars, one for each install you did.

EDIT: You will have to reboot TWICE for all firmware to install. (This must be what Microsoft tech support was talking about when I initally contacted them.)

You will have to reboot TWICE for all firmware to install. (This must be what Microsoft tech support was talking about when I initally contacted them.) Reboot a ~~second~~ third time and do power+UpVol buttons to get into the BIOS. Verify that you now have the most current firmware on the tablet and you’re good to go!

buttons to get into the BIOS. Verify that you now have the most current firmware on the tablet and you’re good to go! Repeat as necessary when your master tablet receives new firmware updates.

Hope this helps others. It took me several days to piece together. The Microsoft tech claimed that if I rebooted 2x it would install everything, but to be honest, it wasn’t even installing all the necessary firmware files on the hard drive, let alone triggering updating with them. Also, some of the tablets had partially updated firmware, depending on what students had accidentally downloaded in the field. Good times! Hopefully at some point in the future, Microsoft will make the firmware MSI you DL from their website just force update all the latest firmware in it, rather than checking to see if it’s ever had it written to it before…