More Mobile: A Lot Less Mobile (Premium)

Back in December, I wrote about the possibility of using a desktop PC at home again instead of the More Mobile setup I successfully adopted about a year and a half ago. To clear, this has nothing to do with the efficacy of a More Mobile configuration, which in my case involves using a docked laptop with an external display, a keyboard and mouse, and my podcast hardware, which includes a webcam and a professional microphone with a swing arm and a USB adapter. Indeed, I’m a big fan of this setup and had adopted slightly different versions of it for home and for traveling. It works for me.

The problem I voiced in December is that most of the laptops I’ve used in this configuration aren’t mine, they’re review laptops that I have to return to their makers. That’s not a big deal to me personally, but a secondary problem I didn’t voice is that this constant switching of hardware has been problematic for TWiT, for which I record two podcasts, Windows Weekly and Hands-On Windows. Each time I switch PCs, it resets my audio settings in Zoom, which we use for recording. And on the second podcast, I have to record the screen in addition to doing whatever it is that I’m demonstrating. And that requires a slightly beefier PC than what I’d normally use, plus a very specific configuration for OBS Studio.

Anyway, in December, I experimented with an Intel NUC. I’m a big fan of this line of mini-PCs, as you may know, but I don’t really have a recent model on hand: my most recent NUC purchase, a NUC10, was based on a 10th Gen Intel Core chipset but it was destroyed by a lightning strike a few years back. And so I had to use an older NUC based on an 8th Gen Intel Core chipset. It was … OK. But it has a few issues it’s always had—the biggest being sleep and fan noise—and it’s gotten a bit long in the tooth. It’s noticeably slower than the modern 11th, 12th, and 13th Gen PCs I’ve used in the past year or so.

So over the New Year’s holiday, I switched my home setup, once again, to a previous-generation HP Z2 Small Form Factor (SFF) workstation PC. This is a standard desktop PC that can optionally be stood up as a sort of mini-tower, and it has a really curious selection of ports that makes it less than ideal in some ways. For example, there’s only a single USB-C port on the entire computer, and it’s on the front and doesn’t support displays: I need a second display for Hands-on Windows and I was hoping to use a smallish USB-C display for that, but I have to use a bigger desktop display instead.

Yes, the Z2 does have slots for add-ins cards and I could add USB-C ports that way. Indeed, I tried to over the holidays: the Z2 also supports little proprietary add-in cards, and I bought one on Amazon that HP’s website said was compatible with this PC. But it wasn’t, and without getting into the nitty gritty of that, suffice to say that the connections I needed just weren’t there. So I sent it back.

I mentioned a curious selection of ports. There’s more to that.

Aside from the USB-C weirdness, there is an ample number of other USB ports. There are two USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports (10 Mbps) ports, one USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 1 port, and three USB 2.0 Type-A (480 Mbps) ports on the rear, plus two USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports and two USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports (and that USB Type-C SuperSpeed 20 Gbps port) on the front.

And then it gets weird.

The integrated video can be output via one of two DisplayPort 1.4 ports, which are the newer, larger DP ports.

But there’s also an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 3000 graphics card, and that card has four DisplayPort Mini ports. These are physically identical (I believe) to the old Thunderbolt ports you used to see on MacBooks and, from what I can tell, they’re not super-common these days.

So I had to find a cable with DisplayPort Mini on one end and full-sized DP on the other so I could use it with the HP Conferencing Monitor I use. I also had to figure out something for that second display: right now, I’m using full-sized DP to an HP Z27n display off of the integrated graphics. It all works, but it feels weird.

Also weird: there’s no integrated Wi-Fi, so I’m using Ethernet for Internet access. This is fine, of course, but it means I need to be near the router, or I would have to fish the cable under the carpet here in the new apartment.

In short, this setup is the polar opposite of the More Mobile setup I prefer, but it does get the job done. And the PC is powerful enough to handle anything, from screen recording to video editing to even some game playing, not that I do much of that. And it’s normally quiet enough, though I leave it below the surface of the table for obvious reasons. Aside from our three weeks in Mexico in March, I’ve used it straight through for three months now, and haven’t had any issues.

And … I don’t know. It’s not what I’m looking for. But there it is.