Meltdown (Premium)

Like many of you, I’m the person that family and friends turn to when they have issues with PCs, phones, or other personal technology products and services. But every once in a while, I encounter a problem I just can’t solve in the moment or at all. And it is in these darkest of times that I wonder. I wonder how normal, mainstream users would ever get past these issues. And I wonder why technology, which is composed entirely of 1s and 0s, can be so fickle and unpredictable.

Curiously, these moments often occur when I’m recording Hands-On Windows (HOW), which is unique among the podcasts in which I participate for many reasons, but most notably because it requires me to record my screen and then send it to Benito, the wonderful producer at TWiT who creates each episode by combining that recording with the Zoom recording he made of me.

I spend more time on this than you may believe.

Generally speaking, we record three episodes of HOW every three weeks or so. The podcast roughly parallels my Windows 11 Field Guide book, which has grown to become one of my longest-ever at nearly 1,100 pages and counting. This wasn’t my intent: Indeed, one of my goals with this book was to cover as much content as possible as concisely as possible, and, well, that’s another story. But as a tale, it has certainly grown in the telling.

Most HOW episodes are straightforward from a production standpoint. I come up with the episode topics, create notes for each episode, ensure that a PC is ready for recording, and then we connect at the agreed-upon time on Zoom, I record the screen, Benito records the call, and we step through each episode in turn. Afterward, we figure out the next time and day for recording, and I upload my videos to Benito’s Google Drive.

If only it were that simple.

As it turns out, each part of what I described above is more complicated than it may sound, some parts dramatically so. And I am absolutely positive that no one reading this will ever truly understand how much work I put into this, how much time I spend, and how much I stress over this and the need to get it right. The only person who knows and understands this is my wife, who has watched as I fritter away entire days just preparing for the hour-ish that we spend in actual HOW recording.

Individual HOW episodes aren’t that long, maybe 7 to 20 minutes, depending. But for each, I create a set of notes in Notion to guide my discussion. This is not a script, it’s just a set of talking points, things I want to make sure I don’t miss, with a structure that has an order, a beginning, a middle, and an end. Once the notes for each are complete, I sign in to the same account I use for the book screenshots, which is clean and unmodified for consistency. And I step through my notes again, to make sure the PC I’m using for recording has the necessary bits in place.

I record the screen with OBS Studio, a free and open source video recording solution. Like so many complex apps, it was foreign and unclear at first, but now I’m a whiz, at least for my own needs. And even when I have to set it up yet again on a freshly installed or reset PC, I can blow through it in just a few minutes. But I still perform test recordings ahead of the show to make sure everything is working correctly. And I can lose an entire afternoon between the notes, the checking to ensure everything needed is in place, and the recording tests. I usually do: My goal is that when Benito calls in, we blow through the recordings efficiently, and I don’t waste any of his time.

I often waste his time.

You would never believe how often things go south. I can’t explain this, but it’s almost like I’m cursed. I can spend an entire day making sure that everything is just right, and the second that I connect with Benito, everything goes wrong. To be clear, this guy is a sweet, wonderful person, and I have never seen him act impatiently or get upset. I have no idea how he puts up with me. I find myself apologizing to him a lot.

Technology fails are not exactly uncommon. In fact, one could reduce my professional life to a series of technology fails that I’ve documented so that others don’t make my mistakes. My early January article From the Editor’s Desk: Technology Has Never Failed Me (Premium) is just one obvious and recent example, a broken record for the ages. But also in January, Benito and I recorded three episodes of HOW, and I had a fun idea for one of them, an episode about Dynamic Lighting, a new feature in Windows 11 version 23H2. I was going to use a second webcam, positioned off to the side of my desk with a tripod, so that I could record some Dynamic Lighting-compatible devices, a keyboard and a mouse, in addition to my normal screen recording.

Right. In addition to all the normal work I do, work that literally takes up an entire afternoon and prevents me from the writing I’d rather be doing, I decided on the day of the recording that I was going to add more time and complexity to this process by introducing another camera, another variable. I thought it’d be fun.

Well, that didn’t work. And without getting into the details, the wasted time and effort, I ended up simply giving up on the idea. It worked out: If you are a Club TWiT member and have seen that episode, you know that I stuck to the normal recording regimen but did the show in the dark so that viewers could still see how the keyboard I ended up using by itself would change colors. It was still a pretty fun episode, not exactly what I intended, but a nice one-off.

With that recording out of the way, Benito and I recorded two other episodes, about AI PCs and new screenshot features in Windows 11 23H2, respectively, and that was that. The only thing notable there was that the PC I used during the AI PC episode, the terrific HP Spectre x360 14 (2024) that I recently reviewed, was reset right after the recording and shipped back to HP. Then January ended and we flew to Mexico City for our current five-week stay. Everything was fine.

And then Benito emailed me.

“I just started editing HOW 79 and 80 and the 2nd screen recordings you made for both episodes are cropped and missing space on the right and the bottom,” he wrote. “Is that what the files look like to you? It looks like you may have the screen pushed in a little on OBS.”

Come on.

I explained that the original files were on a PC back in Pennsylvania and thus inaccessible, but there was no way they were any different from what he had. After checking to make sure that they were indeed unusable, we arranged to shoehorn in another HOW recording session so that I could re-record those two episodes here. Note that we already scheduled a three-episode recording appointment for this trip. So now I would be recording HOW twice. In the same week. Nicely amping up the stress levels.

I also lucked out somewhat: That Spectre was the only AI PC I had ever used and, as noted, I had shipped it back to HP, as one does with review units. But Lenovo contacted me at the start of this trip and offered me a ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 12) for review, and that’s an AI PC too. They shipped it here, I’ll review it, and then I’ll ship it back to them before we head home, which is nice. But it also made the re-recording possible. Otherwise, I’d have had to skip that episode until I had another AI PC in hand. So that was good.

Benito and I re-recorded those two episodes this past Tuesday, and it was mostly drama-free. The only issue, and I noticed this during my pre-recording check of the PC I’d be recording on (the AI PC) was that the key demo, during which I use Windows Studio Effects and observe how it impacts the PC’s NPU, would not work. I can’t explain this, but when I did it on the HP, you could clearly see the NPU being triggered. But when I recorded it on the ThinkPad, nothing. So that’s in the episode, and I explain what happened. I just can’t explain why.

I should get used to that feeling. It’s happening a lot these days.

This past Thursday, we recorded three more HOW episodes. And because I can never learn a lesson, I once again attempted to introduce a second webcam—actually, a third—into the recording matrix. The second of the three episodes, but the first I’d record to get it out of the way, was about folding PCs, and it would be based around the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold 16 I have with me here in Mexico for review too. As with the Dynamic Lighting episode, I felt that this episode was visual enough that it warranted something different. A screen recording wouldn’t make any sense.

Last week, I wrote about the new More Mobile setup I have here, so you can get an idea of the logistics involved. I put the ThinkPad X1 Carbon on a laptop stand to the right of the desktop display and would record the three episodes with it because it’s the most modern PC I have with me right now. The desktop display is perfect for screen recordings because it’s a Full HD (1920 x 1080) display, the same resolution we use for the recordings, and it’s set up as the primary display. I had the Dell 4K webcam on the display for the Zoom recording. And plenty of space on the left side of the table where I could place the ThinkPad X1 Fold to demonstrate how it works.

This could be fun. I just had to figure out a camera that I could put behind the table and to the left, facing the space on the table where I would demonstrate the X1 Fold. The Dell webcam is my only external webcam here, and so I figured I could use that and just use the laptop’s built-in webcam for Zoom. But when I tried to mount it on a tripod I also keep here, it wouldn’t work. Inexplicably, this webcam does not include a standard threaded camera mount. And it wouldn’t stay on the tripod reliably.

Damn.

Then it dawned on me: My Pixel 8 Pro can be used as a webcam when connected to a Windows PC with a USB cable. And I do have a camera mount for the tripod. So I wired it all up, positioned the Pixel on the tripod (and on top of a small corner table) perfectly, and ensured that everything worked. It did: I could switch the camera in Zoom between the Dell webcam (me) and the Pixel (the PC) seamlessly. This was going to be a fun episode. Everything worked fine.

And then I connected with Benito. And my meltdown began.

Zoom crashed. And crashed again. And again and again and again. Between crashes, I explained what I was trying to do, that in addition to all my normal pre-recording work that I had, in fact, not only tested this exact configuration, but had tested it in Zoom to be sure. I rebooted. Again. We tried again and again and again. It would not work.

It was time to recalibrate. I disconnected the Pixel from the HP Thunderbolt Dock that ties everything together, moved the Dell webcam to the top of the laptop, which is angled at the corner of the table, and we ended up recording the whole thing that way, a one-shot using the webcam. In a way, it ended up just like the Dynamic Lighting episode, different from most HOW episodes, which is nice, but not exactly what I wanted. Ah well.

But the issues escalated. That first recording was only via Zoom as there was no screen recording needed. For the other two episodes, I would need to move back to a more traditional recording setup. I would need to use the book sign-in account, with its clean configuration, and not my normal MSA sign-in. So I disconnected from Benito, rebooted the PC, signed in to the book account, and re-called Benito. We would blow through the next two episodes quickly, I figured.

Nope.

For reasons I’ll never understand, nothing worked.

The second episode we were going to record was about accounts changes in 23H2, most specifically how the email accounts feature from previous versions no longer works because of the new Outlook replacing Mail, News, and Calendar. But the PC couldn’t see the Dell webcam all of a sudden, and I didn’t want to fall back to the lower-quality built-in webcam. No problem: I have multiple PCs here. I’ll just use a different one for the recording.

Except, this was a problem: This PC wasn’t prepped for the two episodes I was going to record. Worse, it didn’t have Zoom, Notion, or OBS Studio installed, let alone configured. I could feel the heat rising through my back, the curious mix of frustration and embarrassment. I had spent the day preparing for this moment. But now nothing worked. Nothing was right.

This was going to take a few minutes.

I brought up the second PC, signed in to the right account, downloaded the apps I needed, and configured each in turn. Several minutes and about 100 “Sorry’s” later, I was pretty much where I needed to be. And we recorded the accounts episode normally. Late. But normally.

And then we turned to the third episode, my eye on the clock as it passed the one-hour mark and my mind on all the time I had wasted for Benito.

The third episode was about Widgets, and how they’ve changed (dramatically) in 23H2 (enough that I will soon publish a new version of that chapter too). And so before starting the recording, I clicked the Widgets Taskbar button just to make sure Widgets was set in its default configuration and I could then run through the changes, and the new ways you can configure this feature. I froze, confused.

“Is everything OK?”

Benito’s voice shook me out of my funk. I had been staring at the screen, no doubt with dead eyes and an open mouth. Had he left me long enough, I might have started drooling.

No. Everything was not OK.

What I saw on this PC was the old Widgets interface, the previous version. Despite having the new Widgets on all the PCs I have here, this version, in this account, was the old one. For some reason. We couldn’t record the episode.

Externally, I tried to remain calm. Inside, I spiraled. This is the type of thing I complain about a lot these days, where Microsoft’s haphazard if not completely random and diabolical way of rolling out new features in Windows is so stupidly inconsistent that I never know what I’m going to see where and when. Every week on Windows Weekly, I try to reconcile this nonsense with how things should work, how they used to work, and as I update the book, I keep having to use ever-vaguer language to describe things. And here it was, biting me in the ass yet again.

Heat. Anger. Confusion. Irritation. It was all there.

But all I could do was apologize. I had wasted enough of Benito’s time. We just couldn’t record the episode. Sweetheart that he is, this didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest. But I was losing it. Looking out at how many episodes we have in the can and the necessary lead time, we agreed to record again two days after I fly home to Pennsylvania in March. Surely, I’ll have the updated Widgets ready to go by then.

We hung up. I was dying inside and could feel this terrible despair creeping up in me. I stared at all the equipment on the table, and at the Pixel and ThinkPad that were tossed to the side when they failed me. I rebooted the PC. When it came back up, I checked on Widgets.

Infuriatingly, it was the new version now. Of course it was.

I also absently tested this PC with the three cameras—the Dell, its integrated webcam, and the Pixel—and was confused yet again. It refused to connect to the Pixel webcam for whatever reason. And it could only see the Dell webcam. It was like its internal webcam didn’t exist. I experimented with a few things—yes, the shutter was open—and finally ended up in Device Manager. The internal webcam and the IR camera that enables Windows Hello facial recognition were both there but not enabled. And it would not let me enable them. (I ended up resetting that PC on Friday afternoon after failing to fix it. Everything seems fine.)

Finally, I got up from the table. I needed to lie down, and as I walked over to the bedroom, I saw that the door to my wife’s office was closed because I had been recording. So I cracked it open to let in some air, and turned back to the bedroom.

“How did it go?” she asked.

I stopped and stared up at the ceiling.

How much time do you have?