Find My Device is a feature built into Windows 10 that can be used to pinpoint the location of your Surface on a map from a web page. Better yet, it doesn’t require any 3rd party software or services to be installed.
Since it is free with Windows 10, the feature doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles. In fact, it only allows you to locate your Surface on a map and only if the following conditions are met:
- The Find My Device feature is configured for your Surface.
- You normally log into Windows 10 on your Surface with a Microsoft Account.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because I already talked about this feature in my article titled Find Your Surface – How To Locate Your Tablet. In that article, however, I was discussing the features in comparison to a pair of 3rd party tracking software packages.
In this post, I’m going to cover how to configure and use the Find My Device. Let’s start with configuring it…
Configure Find My Device on Surface: The Steps
By default the Find My Surface feature is turned off on your Surface. However, it’s pretty easy to turn on, just follow these steps:
- Open All Settings then go to Update and Security.
- Select the Find My Device option then select the Change button.
- Turn the option On.
That’s it. Pretty easy right?
Configure Find My Device on Surface: Using It
Now that Find My Device is configured, let’s go over how to use it to locate the last location of your Surface. For this example, I’m going to track my Surface Book:
- Fire up a web browser and go to account.microsoft.com/devices.
- Sign in with your Microsoft account.
- Browse to the device you want to locate then tap or click the Find My Device option.
- When you do, you’ll get a map that looks a lot like this one…
As indicated, the location will update periodically when the device connects to WiFi; so, the location it shows may not be exactly where your Surface is when you check.
Basically, showing the last known location is the extent of the functionality. If you want additional features such as remote wiping or remote locking, you’ll need to look at 3rd party hardware-finding programs.
Despite this limitation, however, I recommend you configure Find My Device. If for no other reason than to help you to remember where you last used your Surface, in case you misplace it.
Tim
