More Mobile: Minimal Mobile (Premium)

In 2022, my More Mobile setup helped me discover a problem with 12th-Gen Intel Core chipsets and USB-C hubs or Thunderbolt docks. Several months into this fiasco, this very real problem has otherwise gone unreported elsewhere, still, and PC makers are apparently trying to quietly fix it via firmware updates; perhaps the 13th-Gen or future Core chipsets will also fix this issue, we’ll see.

But my problem remains: for now, at least, unless I use a PC based on AMD chipsets, my More Mobile setup—which relies on a USB-C hub or a Thunderbolt dock—is untenable. It makes day-to-day work difficult and makes recording podcasts particularly problematic. I “solved” this problem temporarily by using an AMD-based EliteBook 865, which is a review unit. But I obviously need a longer-term solution, assuming, of course, that future laptops I use and review aren’t fixed with firmware updates.

The end of year holiday period is a quiet time, with no podcast recordings this week between Christmas and New Year’s, and so it’s a good time to experiment. I had two ideas I wanted to test.

The first was to cut out the hub/dock middleman and just hardwire all the peripherals I need to whatever laptop I wanted to use. The problem here, of course, is that I can’t just use any laptop: for this to work, the laptop would need enough ports to handle the webcam, the display, the keyboard and mouse (which use a dongle), and the USB interface to my podcast microphone. That’s four USB ports (three USB-A, one USB-C) or three USB ports and one HDMI port. At a minimum: it’s nice to have an extra USB port free when you need to connect a phone or whatever as well.

I do have a few decently powerful laptops that could probably work. It would be a mess of cables. But it would probably work. Of course, I would never unplug all those cables and just use that laptop as a laptop, it would be stuck on the desk.

Which led me to the next idea. Why not just use a desktop PC again? After all, I’ve proven that the More Mobile configuration works, at least when Intel’s chipsets are working normally. And I’ve got a More Mobile setup in our apartment in Mexico City to use when we’re there.

The problem is that I don’t really have any desktop PCs. And I prefer the minimalism of the one-cable More Mobile setup, and like keeping my desk clean of cables of other clutter.

I can’t afford to buy a new computer. But this is still interesting to me, and I do have one PC that might work and meets my minimalism goals: my old NUC8, which is based on an 8th-Gen Intel Core i7 processor, 16 GB of RAM, and 256 GB of SSD storage. And therein lies a tale.

I’ve owned three NUCs, and I love the little PCs. My favorite and last NUC was a NUC10, so based on a 10th-Gen Intel Core chipset, and I wish I still had it. Unfortunately, it’s dead. Oddly, I can’t remember what happened to it, but perhaps it was a victim of that lightning strike from a few years ago that took out our Internet connection, my Sonos Beam soundbar, and some other technology. (Weird that I can’t remember this or find anything I wrote about it.) What I do still have, however, is my second NUC, that NUC8.

It was sitting out in the garage with some other old tech to sell or giveaway, so I brought it inside this past week, fired it up into Windows 10 version 21H1, the horrors, and proceeded to upgrade it. Interestingly, I was offered the Windows 11 upgrade, so I did that. And basically just brought it up to speed.

I was quickly reminded of the handful of big issues I had with this device previously: the fan noise is noticeable and pretty constant, it won’t deliver audio over USB-C or HDMI to my HP Z27n G2 display, and it has trouble with sleep. So I set out to see whether I could solve these problems.

The fan noise is what it is: I’d already gone into the firmware in the past and configured the fan the way I wanted it, and it is what it is.

I won’t bore you with the troubleshooting steps I took on the audio front, but, yes, I did examine the firmware settings, download the latest drivers from Intel, and scour the Internet for help. No dice. Finally, I did the obvious and tested it with a different display, the more recent HP E27m G4 Conferencing Monitor. And … the sound works fine. (I’m not sure what’s up with the other display, but audio-out does work, as I’ve used it with various laptops in a More Mobile configuration. In the past, I used external speakers with the NUC8 and this display to work around this. Those speakers were decluttered out of the house since then.)

And the sleep issues remain, which is interesting since Windows 11 has appeared since I last used this device and that changed nothing. I’ve gotten it to the point where it at least turns off the display, but I’m not sure it ever actually goes to sleep. The real oddity is that it never signs me out either: if I leave this thing overnight and wake it up, I’m still signed in. I can work around this by manually locking the PC. But it’s weird.

In using the NUC8, I’ve also noticed something I’d not seen in many years: compared to the more recent PCs I’ve used this past year, the NUC8 is clearly slower overall. The question is whether it’s too slow, in particular for podcasting. That test will need to wait until next week when I’ll use it with Brad to record First Ring Daily and then Wednesday for Windows Weekly if all goes well. (I’ll have a laptop on standby just in case.)

I will say this. I love the minimalist nature of this setup: the NUC8 is small enough to fit under the display and all of the cables go out the back, of course, with only the keyboard/mouse dongle sticking out the front. And because the display is on a metal shelving unit behind the desk, my desk is mostly clear, with just an Xbox Series S on one side and the Focusrite Scarlett Solo (the USB interface for the microphone) on the other. I like it.

Ideally, this would be a more recent and powerful NUC based on an 11th- or 12th-Gen Intel processor. But I can’t afford to buy such a thing right now, as noted. Still, it’s a great little setup for the same reason it’s always been a great little setup. And if I can make this work for now, I will.

And if I can’t, I guess I’ll stick with AMD laptops as long as I can or hope for fixes.