Ask Paul: April 21 (Premium)

Happy Friday! This has been a fairly normal week after a few months of uncertainty and change, so let’s kick off the weekend with another round of great reader questions.

The coming OneDrive reckoning

jrzoomer asks:

Paul how do you manage your OneDrive 1TB storage? I’m like you and have many files and more than 1 PC and am finding it difficult. What files do you selectively choose to sync (or not sync) to conserve space, and also how you manage with every PC you have and/or move to, do you disable sync on some of those too?

Right now, I don’t do much of anything to manage it, because I’m still under the 1 TB cap on my primary account. But I am getting close to that limit (892 GB of 1 TB), and OneDrive has occasionally thrown up a helpful reminder that I may want to buy additional storage. So I started looking into what I can do.

OneDrive on the web offers a view of the largest files you have (OneDrive.com > click on storage used > Free up space (OneDrive)), which can be useful. But you can also use File Explorer in Windows to see overall sizes for folders (Right-click, Properties). The “Size” (as opposed to “Size on disk”) number is correct.

In my case, I see the following (ordered by size):

• Documents: 428 GB
• Photos: 396 GB
• Videos: 49.6 GB
• Music: 8 GB

The Documents folder holds my entire work archive (174 GB), a messy “_old” folder that needs to be sorted through (246 GB), and whatever else. The Photos folder contains our entire photo library of scanned and digital photos, generally pretty well organized (149 GB), a Camera Roll folder (239 GB), some older home movies (4.4 GB), and whatever else. I cleared out most of my videos years ago, but that now holds the Eternal Spring videos I posted to YouTube. Maybe that archive is not necessary.

What will likely be necessary is going through the weeds in Documents and Pictures, but that will be time-consuming and tedious. It’s not something I look forward to.

Others have other options with OneDrive. If you are paying for Microsoft 365 Family, as I am, you have six accounts to play with, each with 1 TB of storage. And one strategy is to specify accounts for certain purposes. I could put all my photos in an account dedicated to that, for example. Theoretically: I have a wife and two kids all using Microsoft 365 Family, and my wife’s parents. So that’s the allotment of 6 accounts. But others should be able to take advantage of that.

Anyway, that leaves my final option as buying more storage. And I could buy up to 1 TB more storage if I wanted to. I don’t. So I will need to start culling unnecessary files.

With regards to syncing, my overhead is low because of the way I manage this. I wrote about this recently in Don’t Be a Statistic (Premium), but the short version is that I basically sync two folders to every PC, basically. My To-do folder (1.4 GB), which contains articles and reviews I’m actively working on for the site, and my Book folder (1.4 GB), which contains the files for the Windows 11 Field Guide and Windows Everywhere. The size fluctuates, but that’s less than 3 GB of syncing. That’s good stuff, and I keep it that way by aggressively moving completed (non-book) content out of there and into an archive folder that is not synced. I usually only need a small SSD on any given PC.

Will we ever fix Windows?

helix2301 asks:

Microsoft always building new features into Windows but yet there are many third party tools for windows that are better. On Windows Weekly you spoke about search and Mika spoke about void tools being the best search for windows and it is very good. Just like clipchamp you can tell it was not made by Microsoft because how good it is. There is also a third party windows file explorer tool thats really great. My question is why doesn’t Microsoft just buy these companies like they did clipchamp they will get great features and the cost of development might be cheaper. They did that with the compiler a few years back as well and now with the windows phone tool they bought from Dell.

I suppose it sometimes does buy third-party tools (like Clipchamp), though that’s the exception. I assume it’s a return on investment thing, and that Microsoft is trying to wring more revenues out of Windows now, not invest more in it. And to be fair, there’s an argument to be made for Windows supplying basic functionality that meets most people’s needs, while those who want more can acquire that elsewhere and perhaps keep a healthy ecosystem going in the process. But that assumes Microsoft isn’t mismanaging Windows in the first place, and I think they are. Which leads us to…

My other question is the ads in windows has Microsoft ever said if they will be adding ads to paid versions of windows. Like if I buy copy of Windows will there be ads. Its one thing show ads in free upgrade its another to show ads in version of windows you paid for out pocket.

So, 100 percent, I agree with you: if you pay for a product, it should not contain ads.

But this is complicated.

For example, I do pay for products, like newspapers (digitally) that contain ads. I don’t like that either, but your options vary by example. (My response to the escalating ads in these publications was to use NextDNS on my devices.)

Operating system vendors used to charge people for upgrades. Apple stopped doing this years ago on the Mac, but Apple has a direct subsidy model thanks to its high-margin hardware business and so that actually makes sense for them. Windows exists in a different market in which it sells Windows to third parties (PC makers) that then sell hardware to consumers, and because of the high-competition, low-margin nature of this market, prices are lower for everyone, but then so are the profits. Over time, Microsoft had to stop charging for upgrades too, but it doesn’t have a subsidy to make up the difference. And so Windows makes less for Microsoft now. (Businesses pay per user/per month licensing fees and make up about two-thirds of Microsoft’s Windows revenues, so it’s not a total loss.)

But you’re not a business. And your options for acquiring Windows range from free (just upgrade an existing PC) to imperceptible (you get Windows with a new PC and don’t have any idea how much it cost) to expensive (you buy Windows at retail). Almost no one gets Windows that latter way, however, so the notion that we pay for Windows is harder to argue these days. Almost no one really pays for Windows.

What you’re asking for, I think, is a system by which you don’t get the ads (and presumably the other crap) in Windows when you do pay for it. And … amen. I am asking for the same thing. Indeed, if the price was right, I would even pay annually for this service. Make it part of Microsoft 365, whatever.

There are so many precedents for this. So many.

Here’s a simple example: you go to buy a Kindle or Fire HD device or whatever from Amazon. There’s one price for the device and then a slightly higher price for it without ads. You can do that at purchase time or, anytime later, hand Amazon $20 or whatever and get rid of the ads. Why can’t PC makers do this where you could configure the PC and pay $20 for no crap? Why isn’t this a function of Windows itself? This isn’t rocket science.

I don’t know why. But I do know that, even in my own tiny business, it’s possible to give people a choice. Most will opt to not pay and either suck it up with the ads and other crap (or circumvent them in whatever way when possible). But some will pay because that’s what they want: they see the value and can afford it. But that choice is key.

As Microsoft continues to ruin the Windows user experience, it will continue to drive users to other, cleaner platforms. The Mac, most obviously, but also Chromebooks and Linux. Each has its own trade-off, of course. But this is Microsoft’s user base to lose. And from what I can see, it is doing everything it can to alienate people and force them to make a decision. This is a huge and easily avoidable mistake.

Microsoft’s AI hardware

Ezzy asks:

Any comments on recent reports that Microsoft is building there own AI silicon?  I know they have a lot of data-center hardware that’s been custom designed, but chip design is a whole different thing.

I did write this up the other day, and was perhaps overly proud of the too-cute headline, but I don’t know anything about that work personally. I do know that Microsoft has been making its own datacenter chipsets for years, however, and that its competitors have been making AI chipsets for datacenters for years as well, so Microsoft is perhaps behind in this department. I also know that Microsoft plans to add NPUs (neural processing units) to future-generation Surface PCs (yes, already available in the Qualcomm-based version of Surface Pro 9 and Windows Dev Box). But that’s a low bar: NPUs will be a stock feature of all mainstream microprocessors in the coming years regardless.

The Taskbar is dead, long live the Taskbar

OldITPro2000 asks:

Looks like more Taskbar options that were previously yanked from Windows 11 are now coming back, continuing the complete waste of engineering resources to remove features only to return them after users complain. Any idea how Microsoft decided what to remove in the first place? I would say telemetry, but I imagine that (for example) right-click Taskbar to open Task Manager is used all the time.

The Taskbar has emerged as the poster child for what’s wrong with Windows 11 and for good reason. And while few understand what Microsoft really did there and why, knowing the truth does nothing to exonerate them. So let’s dive in.

If we go all the way back to the original Windows 11 announcement in June 2021, we can reacquaint ourselves with the language Microsoft first used to describe this release and, more specifically, its user interface.

“We’ve simplified the design and user experience to empower your productivity and inspire your creativity,” Panos Panay wrote at the time. “It’s modern, fresh, clean, and beautiful. From the new Start button and taskbar to each sound, font, and icon, everything was done intentionally to put you in control and bring a sense of calm and ease.”

Looking back on this now, this description is likewise intentional and, go figure, accurate: Microsoft took the Windows 11 user interface and simplified it with specific goals in mind. It would be “modern, fresh, and clean,” which I think is objectively true enough, and “beautiful,” which I’m sure we all have opinions about. But the important point here is that this was the goal, and whatever we think of the functionality—which we should note is not at all mentioned with regards to the base UI—Windows 11 is simpler, is more modern, fresh, clean, and (I think) beautiful, than Windows 10. So mission accomplished on that note.

But as I’ve observed many times, it’s not possible to take a complex user interface and make it simpler without removing functionality: it is the density of commands in the Windows 10 user interface that makes it complex. And when you remove commands, you take away functionality that some number of users expect because they use them regularly. So the hope is that someone (or some group of someones) is basing its decisions on meaningful real-world data, knowing that the things they take away—the feature regressions—will impact as few users as possible.

This is not what happened. Instead, Microsoft made three key mistakes with the Windows 11 user interface (some of which impact Windows 11 more generally than just the UI). They only provided the public with less than four months to evaluate Windows 11 before shipping it broadly via new PCs and upgrades to existing PCs, and none of the feedback those testers provided was implemented in the initial release of the software. They chose badly by removing some key features that many users relied on, the Task Manager option off of the Taskbar being the obvious example, suggesting that the decisions were based more on the personal opinions of someone/someones rather than on a nuanced examination of the telemetry data. And while the new user experience is subjectively better looking, they furthermore chose to obfuscate some of the most used features that they did leave in the UI by turning them into space-saving but inscrutable icons instead of using more space-sucking individual text-based menu items. (Some subset of the Cut, Copy, Paste, Share, and Rename items in Explorer context menus can’t possibly be understandable to most normal people. They’re like Egyptian hieroglyphics.)

Exacerbating the problems they caused, Microsoft then moved slowly to fix things, and even had the bad form to ship buggy fixes (like the post-22H2 Search “pill”) that had their own functional regressions. Only Microsoft could ship a feature with a functional regression to a feature that itself first shipped with functional regressions. This is getting depressing, let me move on.

The question we’re really asking here is, why? Why would Microsoft do these things? Surely, no well-meaning leader who speaks endlessly about quality would ever allow something this half-baked to go out into the world. Well, that’s where the real purpose behind these changes comes into play. Yes, it was a good idea to simplify the Windows 10 user experience. But what the designers at Microsoft discovered was that there was too much cruft built into the UI to make the meaningful changes they wanted. They would, in other words, have to start over.

And so the unspoken truth of the Windows 11 user experience is that key components of it are not Windows 10 user experiences with features removed. They are, instead, new user experiences, built from scratch, that have more modern underpinnings that should prove to be more easily extensible in the future. This sounds wonderful, and it is. But because Windows 11 was rushed to market, the new UXes were only partially completed. And what we got wasn’t the most important bits. It was just what they could do the time provided. Which wasn’t much.

Looking at the Taskbar specifically, this UI is brand new to Windows 10. It is built completely with XAML and the Windows App SDK and is therefore more modern than the old Taskbar, which had code in it dating back decades. But it is also, and was initially even more so, far more basic than the Taskbar it replaced. It cannot be moved to other sides of the screen. There is no concept of toolbars, sizing options, or icon grouping. The right-click menu had just a single item in the first release and has just two now, and not the dozens of options provided by Windows 10. Etc. Etc.

Shipping this overly simplistic Taskbar in Windows 11 was, I think, a mistake, and I feel like one more year of testing, with the resulting updates provided by feedback, might have shaped this thing into a more sophisticated product. But they didn’t do that. Instead, they are employing the “ship it first, fix it later” methods that Netscape initiated and Google perfected, methods that have no place in a legacy client computing platform with over one billion users. The problem is, they fix it slowly. And they fix it poorly. (Reference the Search pill note above.)

On the one hand, I appreciate Microsoft’s efforts to simplify Windows. I really do. But the way they handled this was, and still is, so poor that I find myself in a constant state of frustration because this level of incompetence is disrespectful to the people who use and rely on Windows. I stated very early on in a sort of “mark my words” sense that Microsoft would ship a basic Taskbar in Windows 11 with many regressions, get lambasted for it, spend the next two years adding back virtually every feature they removed, and that we’d end up on the other side with the Taskbar we actually wanted. And that’s exactly what we’re experiencing.

The Devil’s advocate response to all this is that rearchitecting the Taskbar and whatever other UI components in Windows 11 would have taken years and that what Microsoft did let them get this out into the world more quickly. And, sure. That would be true if they moved more quickly to address issues, did so more reliably, and actually gave a crap about feedback. But they are right now adding more missing Taskbar features and by the time 23H2 ships, we may very well be at a place most are happy with. It only took two goddamned years.

It’s not just the Taskbar. The Search functionality is another example of functional regressions fixed over time. So is Widgets. So is the system tray area. At Build, we’re going to learn how Microsoft is modernizing File Explorer in (sort of) the same way as it did the Taskbar, by using the Windows App SDK and XAML. That should be interesting since no third-party developers will be able to do anything that Microsoft did internally. Wait for it.

Let me actually answer your question. How did Microsoft decide? Poorly.

Wipe it, wipe it good

eeisner asks:

I’ve been procrastinating on downgrading my gaming PC from insider Dev to stable since the change to the program a few weeks ago, mostly out of fear of losing the hundred + gigs worth of add ons I have for MSFS. I know you reset machines regularly – any advice to make this as seamless as possible when I finally bite the bullet and blow my machine up? Is there any software out there that will make an easy to use backup image of the drive without Windows to make restoring easy?

Unfortunately, Windows isn’t componentized to the degree that would support this, though I feel like it could be, and that mobile platforms like Android and iOS handle this sort of thing far more cleanly. My PCs are easy to wipe and (re)load because I keep things simple, for the most part. I keep all my data in OneDrive and only need to sync ~3 GB of data (as noted above) to any new PC. And I have a fairly limited number of apps to install: Brave, Visual Studio Code, Notion, Adobe Photoshop, Affinity Photo, Teams, Skype, and WhatsApp are pretty much most of it (Office is usually just there). And most of those sync my settings/data too. I’m running lean, basically. And I’m good to go in just over an hour, I bet.

For something big and complex like Microsoft Flight Simulator, you basically have to just reinstall it all, unfortunately. I would love to see some formal separation of system, system state (user settings), and data, where you could wipe the first one while retaining the other two. But that’s an OS-level function and not something that could easily or reliably be accomplished with third-party software.

Trains

spacecamel asks:

Can you recommend some good books on trains? 

Not exactly. I’ve never read a general-purpose book about trains, history or otherwise, unfortunately. When I saw this question, the first thing that sprung to mind is a fantastic book called The Man from the Train, which is a fantastic true crime story I listened to on Audible that doesn’t really speak to your question. (Though I recommend it highly.) I also read Paris to the Past: Traveling through French History by Train, which is a history of France and not trains, and is the sort of thing I’m into. And The Lunatic Express: Discovering the World . . . via Its Most Dangerous Buses, Boats, Trains, and Planes, which I barely remember at all. (Though I may take another look at it now.)

Does anyone else have any thoughts about this? I would also like to learn more about the trains that go by close to us at our new apartment, and about the history of trains in this area.