Ask Paul: July 19 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Hopefully, you’re not bogged down by the CrowdStrike screwup too much and can enjoy an early start to the weekend.

Crowdstruck

cloxter asks:

CrowdStrike lol, how the media was quick to jump all over Microsoft, granted there were M365 outages, but M$ copping the global media outrage….hmm.

Sure. What can do you? When the world runs on your infrastructure, they turn to you when it goes down. Plus, Microsoft has lost a lot of security credibility this year thanks to its mishandling of the late 2023 security breach and its subsequent misreporting of what happened.

We all laugh and make fun of Microsoft when we see a Blue screen in a subway station or whatever, but those incidents also highlight how widespread Windows (and related software) is. It’s honestly not that common.

Anyway. We’ll see how this shakes out. CrowdStrike originated the update that caused the outrage. But it’s not clear what role, if any, Microsoft played in deploying it without any oversight.

Specs

ken_loewen asks:

As I consider my next laptop, I’ve got a couple of qualifiers – running sizeable data models (though not “big data”) in Power BI and driving two external 28″ monitors. Is there any way to squeeze the information out of specs to enable me to know what the maximum RAM is and the max number of external monitors that can be driven?

Not easily. When I review laptops, I try to document what the specification possibilities are, but when it comes to this sort of thing, what you need isn’t so much whatever ports but what the capabilities are. This morning, for example, I was writing part of the coming Surface Laptop 7 review, and I was trying to figure out a few of the component capabilities and noticed that Microsoft doesn’t document certain things I need to know in the information it sent me, including the size (in Whr) of the battery. And while the Type-C ports get a lot of information, the Type-A port is just listed as “USB-A 3.1,” which could be two different speeds and may or may not have always-on capabilities. Unfortunately, you often have to do some homework. And with needs like yours, it can be more difficult to get specific answers, depending on the hardware you’re looking at and how good the documentation is.

Scripting updates

ianceicys asks:

I have a question regarding maintaining up-to-date software on multiple devices.

I’ve been using a script that runs UniGetUI (formerly WingetUI) once a day while I’m sleeping to keep my software current. I’ve noticed that applications like Zoom, GitHub, Elgato, and Teams are updated frequently, sometimes multiple times a week, and they genuinely run better with the latest updates.

However, I’m curious about how you handle this for your setup, especially if you also manage other family members’ computers and phones. Do you have a specific strategy or scripts you use to ensure everything stays updated smoothly across different devices including your kids and wife’s machines?

I’m sure I mentioned this somewhere in my writings about the Windows Package Manager (winget), but this tool is great for installing multiple apps in a single operation, which is ideal for me since I review so many laptops and doing all that manually is time-consuming. But it falls flat in other areas. For example, it’s up to you to determine where each app install comes from (Store or web), and if you prefer one over the other (as I do), there’s no way to specify “always get from Store first but if not available get the other version” (or whatever). If one of the apps I get from the web suddenly appears in the Store, I have no way of knowing that. Updating with winget is a manual process, which is silly. And there’s no app configuration capability, which you’d think might be possible with either or both install locations. So it’s good at the first bit, but then it kinds of falls on its face.

I would like it to be more sophisticated. But I’m OK with it mostly as-is, and because I move between PCs so often, I don’t really worry about this too much. Manually managing app updates isn’t interesting to me or a good use of time, and while automating it sounds nice, I found in using WingetUI (now UniGetUI) that it would start to introduce errors with certain apps, and so I stopped using it. Maybe this has gotten better, maybe it’s just some of the apps I use and/or the locations I get them from, it’s hard to say. But this is just about time: It makes more sense to me to not worry about it. So all I do is use the apps and let them update as they (or the Store) requires. The times I have looked for updates via winget, there are always some, sometimes a lot. I’m not sure why these things don’t seem to update regularly. But it hasn’t impacted me.

I don’t manage anyone else’s PCs or devices. My kids are not interested, and they’re independent and out of the house now anyway. My wife will very occasionally come to me with a tech question. And sometimes I will look over at her laptop (on a plane, the couch, whatever), see some weird configuration and be like, “Why do you … [whatever she’s doing]?” and offer a better way. But she’s so different from me: She doesn’t know or use any keyboard shortcuts at all, Windows, Word, whatever, where I find these to be indispensable. She will literally mouse up to the File menu, click it, and then click Save. I don’t get it. But I guess it works for her.

Thanks for your insights!

I assume that was disappointing, sorry. But this is one of those things where my particular situation is different from the norm. If I just had a few computers I always used, I may have spent more time on this kind of thing. I could image just running an automated winget update script with no interaction every time I sign in, for example, or after ever Patch Tuesday update. But on the flip side, I also force myself to try and experience what people experience normally, even though I often want to configure things differently. And dealing with updates, whether from Windows or apps, is part of that normal experience. It’s a weird situation. Sometimes I’ll be complaining about whatever to someone I know personally, and they just ask why I don’t turn it off. And I would, but … I can’t. Otherwise, how would I know what everyone out in the real world is experiencing? Being the canary in this coal mine is part of the job, I guess.

I wish I had a better answer to this. It would be nice to recommend something that just worked that anyone could use. I don’t think that exists.

We’re all creators now

Markld asks:

I recently completed a move in mid-June, and it took considerable time to unpack and organize everything, particularly setting up the technology, which I’ve recently managed to complete. Working with a 14-inch laptop proved challenging during this process, and relying on my smartphone was ineffective. For productivity, smartphones and business simply don’t mix well for me.

This may be a generational thing or just an age thing, I guess we’ll find out soon enough, but I can’t and won’t do real work on a phone. If it’s something serious or expensive (or both), I have to use a real computer. (Buying a plane ticket, for example, or a PC or tablet.) I need more room. This is why I prefer 15/16-inch laptops over 13.3/14-inch laptops (and that’s likely just age/eyes).

I’m eager to use AI to create visually captivating labels for my new plant nursery. While I’ve admired your ability to produce unique images for your posts, my needs are more practical—individual plant images for labels on plastic sticks or containers. Many current plant labels lack the excitement that should accompany a new plant purchase, often appearing dull or dry. Additionally, I’m enthusiastic about exploring the image creation process myself.

Since settling back in, I’ve tried to locate your discussions on image creation methods and tools, but my search has been overwhelmed with posts since I dismantled my home office. I couldn’t find the specific information I needed despite doing a site search.

Could you provide guidance or a list of posts that might assist me in this endeavor? Any other relevant information would be greatly appreciated.

If I understand correctly, what you want is something like Canva, Adobe Express, or Microsoft Designer. These are all traditional (maybe post-desktop publishing) solutions that are now starting to add generative AI capabilities because everyone’s doing it. That is, you could use the image creation capabilities provided by Copilot (as I do), ChatGPT, or Gemini, but these tools help you create complete designs for digital and print purposes. In your case (I think), the end game would be printed labels, so you might use whatever templates or design wizards each has to create a style and branding of your own that might include a logo, a specific font, and so on.

When my wife and I started Eternal Spring, I tried using Canva and Adobe Express to create a logo. This was pre-Designer (I think) and before the GenAI stuff went crazy, and the capabilities are better now. I didn’t find anything truly compelling at the time, though I went down a few different paths. The little “ES” logo that looks like it’s in a bubble came out of that work, though I stylized it outside those apps and have since updated it. This is a rough progression, with the first three coming out of Adobe Express and the last two being the ones I hand-edited.

But looking at these services now, and having just looked at Designer again, there’s a lot more going on in all of them, including lots of GenAI features to help you write and design. I would take a look at each of these services and see which you prefer. There are probably others I’m not familiar with, as everything is changing so fast these days.

Congrats on the move. 🙂

Travel

Dell5050 asks:

Do you travel anywhere else now besides Mexico City? Ever come to Michigan haha Did you ever consider south FL? Ocean or Gulf side?

I used to travel so much before the pandemic, I find it hard to even remember and sometimes even hard to believe. Solo, or with my wife and/or kids, for work or pleasure, there were times I was just gone a lot. For several years, I was out of the country for 4-8 weeks a year, and there was one year I went on over 30 different trips (many by train to New York or Washington D.C.).

But the pandemic was a big reset on many levels. And had we been able to get to Europe in 2021, it’s possible I’d have never discovered Mexico. But here we are, three years into traveling semi-exclusively there and two years into owning an apartment there. Life is incredible.

From a work travel perspective, I recently realized that I’d only flown for work three times since the pandemic, and each of those times—July 2022 for the TWiT cruise, November 2023 for Ignite, and May 2024 for Build—I went to Seattle, which is interesting. I’ve also been to New York for work several times, but by car/train. This is much less work travel than I’d done in previous years. And it’s been so slow I’d kind of gotten used to it. (I have turned down some work trips as well, including two to Palo Alto and one to San Francisco.)

A lot of our personal travel pre-pandemic was about visiting new places or revisiting favorite places, but in some ways, it was always about research, too: My wife and I had long wanted to find a second place, an international place, so we could split our time with the U.S. It was never clear how that was going to work, but getting a place in Mexico was both good, in that we realized that dream, and bad, in that we own a place there now and feel obligated to take advantage of it. For most of the past two year, we were never going to go anywhere else: We had to furnish the place and so on. But we’re pretty much done with that now, and one thing we do discuss is where else we can go just for visiting/revisiting other places. In Mexico, of course, but also elsewhere. We’ve discussed trips to Europe with the kids and some friends, trips to places like Japan and Vietnam, and so on. What it might be like to travel from Mexico, to places like Cuba, Colombia, or Argentina. Or whatever.

But this year has taken a curious turn. We went to Mexico twice in the first half of the year, nothing new there. We went to the Finger Lakes in upstate New York with my sister and brother-in-law (as we do every Memorial Day and Labor Day), we visited Boston a few times (also usual, but not as frequently as pre-pandemic), and then we had the Seattle trip for work. And a lot of that was back-to-back, and an unusual reminder of how pre-pandemic travel often was. Looking ahead, we’re going to D.C. in August to visit with a friend, we have our Finger Lakes trip over Labor Day, and Lenovo invited me to come to Berlin for IFA. Then I have a work trip at the start of October—I’m speaking at Tech 2024 in Dallas—and we’re going to fly from there to Mexico. And then fly home in mid-November in time to go to Chicago for Ignite. So this year is getting busier, travel-wise, for the first time in a while.

Regarding the place you mention, I’ve only passed through Michigan a few times, but have never really visited. But I’ve discussed doing so with Brad Wardell (of Stardock), who lives there, and would like to make that happen. I’ve been all over Florida, top to bottom, both coasts, my sister lives there (Jupiter, on the east coast), and my brother lived there for several years (Tampa Bay, west coast), though he’s since moved back to the Boston area. We’ve been many times, we were in Miami in 2019 before the pandemic, extending a work trip. And I’ve always thought about it, of course. But the humidity is always too much for me: Every time I came back, I thought maybe I would finally be old enough that it would appeal to me, but the humidity always killed that for me.

But you never know. Life will keep screwing around with things. My daughter recently took our cats with her back to North Carolina, but she’ll graduate in late 2024 (hopefully), at which point she’ll continue her education at a new school. She might have ended up in this area, but that didn’t work out, and a school near D.C. was another option, and if that had happened, we might have considered moving as D.C. is my favorite city in the U.S. (despite the weather and the cost) and I’ve always wanted to spend more time there. But that’s also not happening, so she will likely end up in Virginia (not near DC). What the kids do could drive future changes. We’ll see.

Laptop vs. desktop

Dell5050 asks:

How much time do you spend with your main laptop vs a desktop now days?

I spend most of my time with laptops now. And I’m having a difficult time remembering when this shifted exactly, but I had a home office in our house in Dedham, MA (2001 to 2017) and then in Pennsylvania (2017 to 2023), and I feel like when I was home, I mostly worked from a desk, mostly using desktop computers. I switched to a more mobile setup at home (laptop + docking station, etc.) for a while, but have since moved back to a desktop PC at home. But when we moved into an apartment in early 2023, I didn’t have a home office, and I found myself working from elsewhere, on a laptop, a lot. And I do the same in Mexico. The weird thing is, I have an office again in the condo we’re living in now, but I rarely use it. Other than podcasts, I’m usually somewhere else. Either a chair in the living room, where I’m writing this now, or on the bed, where I typically move in the afternoons.

Maybe it’s all the review laptops and needing to spend time with them. I’m honestly not sure what drove this. But I do spend 90+ percent of my time on laptops now. I’m writing something about PC gaming, and one of the interesting shifts in the past year or two is that even entry-level laptops are often pretty capable of paying games well, and that’s helped too. Having to sit in a room to play a game on a particular machine—Xbox console or PC—seems unappealing to me now.

To the moon!

kshsystems asks:

What do you think of Lunar lake as Intel’s answer to Snapdragon X Elite?

I need to know more, and, of course, we need to spend real time with real Lunar Lake-based PCs before we can fully form reasonable opinions. But it’s clear to me that Intel, after years of ignoring warnings about the way the industry is going, has gotten the memo and is working to pull off a magic trick in which it doesn’t sacrifice performance or compatibility while delivering real-world efficiency gains. It’s not clear how this will end: On the one hand, Intel is Intel, and it has the engineering expertise and capability to pull this off. But on the other hand, Intel is Intel, and it has made so many mistakes, over so long, that it may never get there. The 12th and 13th Gen Core chips had many issues (and some I’d not seen are suddenly coming to forefront now too). The Core Ultra (Meteor Lake) generation has huge issues, in my experience, with both reliability and battery life. And now we know it’s an orphan because Lunar Lake (and the related Arrow Lake chips for desktops) is such a big change again. It’s chaotic, but I think that says a lot about how important this suddenly is to Intel. It’s going to be interesting either way.

I am very interested to see what the next-gen Intel- and AMD-based PCs look like. The question to me isn’t whether they make big improvements, that will happen. It’s whether they can do so without sacrificing expectations around performance and compatibility, and to what degree they catch up to Qualcomm with efficiency (power management, instant on, battery life, etc.)

The EliteBook 1040 G11 I’ve been using lately is interesting. This is Meteor Lake-based, but with lots of HP customization to address the reliability issues. It’s supposed to work much like a Snapdragon X-based PC from an instant-on perspective, and for that to work, you have to enable Windows Hello facial recognition: That works in tandem with its presence sensing capabilities and other sensors to sense you approaching (or opening the lid, or taking it out of a bag) so that it can come out of a hybrid hibernation mode without you needing to press a key or whatever. And … it works sometimes. I’ve never really had the perfect Snapdragon X-like instant on experience. But it’s better than the otherwise similar ZBook Firefly 14 I just reviewed. (Meaning, faster and more reliable, I guess.) It’s … partway there. So far. Will it ever get there? Will Lunar Lake just be better? Maybe. And part of the problem here may be Windows, for all I know. The facial recognition bit seems to take some time to wake up itself. I’m still trying to figure it out.

Anyway. I have high hopes for Lunar Lake. But past experience obviously makes me a bit worried too.

Passwords

eeisner asks:

My fiance, despite being a younger millennial, is very poorly educated when it comes to technology. I want her to learn the importance of password managers and 2FA for her day-to-day; she doesn’t trust managers because she doesn’t want all of her passwords stored in one place. How do you approach helping the tech illiterate and skeptics in your life buy into security practices and how do you encourage them to educate themselves?

Ah boy.

There is possibly nothing less safe than having all your passwords in multiple places, but I guess you need to take baby steps. Coincidentally, I recorded the first of what I think will be two Hands-On Windows episodes about password managers yesterday—I’d been using Dashlane, but I am currently testing Proton Pass and 1Password too—and it’s impossible to overstate how important it is to not only use a password manager, but to use a good password manager, something that offers more than the basics, and to use 2FA everywhere possible. These things are related: A good password manager will tell you which accounts you have that could use 2FA (and/or passkeys) and isn’t, so you can get that set up.

Convincing someone of this, especially someone who isn’t interested or is even somewhat hostile to the idea, will be difficult. I can’t imagine anything I’ve written would help, though I try to make these things as approachable as possible. The problem, obviously, is that security is complicated and difficult. Properly implementing security means some inconvenience. And the payoff is ephemeral: Your accounts are secure, so nothing bad happened, but you rarely know that it was your safeguarding of this information that did the trick.

I’m going to write about password managers soon. I usually write first and then create a podcast after, but the schedule is a bit mixed up. I feel like some kind of online account protection guide is in order, but there are many moving pieces. But I hope to tie this all together—2FA, passkeys, password managers, etc.—in a way that makes sense. I guess that’s always the goal. But this stuff is important. I don’t know anything about this relationship and how you two interact, but I assume she’d respect your more knowledgeable viewpoint from the tech side and at least listen to reason. The ramifications of screwing this up can be debilitating.

Surface v. Luddite

My mother is looking for a new laptop to replace an older Surface Laptop. Is there any reason you would not recommend a Snapdragon computer to someone who is not technical, when emulation should run everything they need?

Surface has obviously had its reliability issues over the years, and this has made it difficult to recommend when there are so many better and more reliable PCs out there. But I’ve also not reviewed a Surface PC in quite a while, and my experiences with Surface Laptop 7 are overwhelmingly positive. As are my experiences with Windows 11 on Arm on Snapdragon X-based PCs in general. But she’s owned a Surface Laptop. And so I guess I’d factor that into the equation.

One of my big takeaways with Snapdragon X is that it seems that the more technical you are, the more likely you’re going to run into software or hardware issues. To date, I’ve only found one device that doesn’t work at all—the Focusrite audio interface I use for my podcasting microphone—and two apps—Google Drive and OBS Studio, which I use for screen recording—that don’t work at all. When I look at everything my wife uses, she’s not technical at all, she’s looking at a 100 percent success rate. She doesn’t use anything that wouldn’t work with Windows 11 on Arm and Snapdragon X. So in that sense, your mother would probably be fine: It’s unlikely she uses anything that wouldn’t work.

Unlikely, but not impossible. And the nice thing you can probably do for her is a bit of research by finding out what software and hardware she relies on and making sure it all works. I suspect it does. But you don’t want to run into a situation where something she needs doesn’t work. In my case, I have workarounds for each issue. None are “ideal” but I can get by. I could use my portable microphone setup, that works fine. I use OneDrive instead of Google Drive, as I’m paying for both regardless. And I’ve found that Camtasia works fine in Arm for some reason even though it’s not native; I’ll be writing about that soon.

I can’t be sure, of course. But I think it will work out fine. And I’ve had nothing but good experiences with the Surface Laptop.

Good luck!