I sat down with my wife's Surface Pro last night to work through the issues she's experiencing.
First, thank you to
@Zaphod for the keyboard toolbar suggestion, that worked exactly as I hoped. One down!
Next, her battery was rapidly depleting and I worked through a number of items to find root cause. A large part of it was Cortana -- she was supposedly turned off, yet conspired to chew through ~22% of my wife's battery usage in the last 24 hours. I went back through the Cortana wizard to again re-certify that she's turned off, and then removed her tile from start. I also then disabled the Edge browser's ability to operate in the background, as it had ganged up with Cortana to knock another ~26% of my wife's battery into the dev/null bucket.
Also discovered that bluetooth being enabled (and yet, not being used) sucks an inordinate amount of power for some reason. Turned that off, also ran the powercmd.exe /energy report and found that W10 keeps the removable keyboard + mouse driver loaded as an active device, even when it's not attached. The selective suspend on that USB root hub would then not function as those devices were allowed to wake the PC, and were always seen as available. As my wife never uses the keyboard for waking the PC, I unchecked that box for the device and immediately got selective suspend working for another 500mA of reported draw savings.
Finally, I loaded up Intel Burn Test, set the critical battery alarm action to "Do Nothing", and let the machine run the battery to absolute zero. Dorked with it a few times after it "died" to continue milking the battery to as close to zero as feasible. Purportedly, this is the only way to re-calibrate the Surface Pro battery life logic. Let it fully charge up overnight, and now her battery life meter as well as general battery usage should now be well in check.
Showed her the difference between tablet mode and not-tablet mode , I think she prefers not-tablet mode for how she uses the device. She's getting better with Edge browser, even moreso when in "not-tablet" mode since she at least now understands it's a desktop-based browser experience (ie requires use of the back button.) Also makes more sense for her to use the taskbar icons and the "X" window close rather than swipe-down.
When I get home today, I'm sure I'll either get an earful of how it still sucks, or else I'll hear nothing and all is well
