Ask Paul: February 5 (Premium)

Happy Friday, and welcome to the first Ask Paul of February! Here’s another great set of reader questions to kick off the weekend.

Online communities

j5 asks:

What are your thoughts about how the web has changed as far as online communities are concerned? I feel like we had more tech communities online in the ’90s to early 2000s. But with the advent of the smartphone and social media apps, it now feels like they’ve all gone there. And even then they’re not long-term communities with archives of information like forums were back in the day or even further IRC chat rooms. As someone that’s been reporting on tech for a long time and knows a lot of inside tech baseball, I’m sure you have a unique perspective on this.

I used to participate in all kinds of online communities (for lack of a better term) across IRC, USENET newsgroups, and even FTP (which I know sounds impossible). And then CompuServe, AOL, and so on as things moved forward. But there must be many, many more online communities now than there were 20 years ago. Must be.

I think what’s changed is that these solutions have evolved, and in every way. Social media has happened since then, so that’s sucked up a lot of it. Facebook, for all its problems, hosts a lot of different groups that I’d call communities, including one I actually joined recently called “Buy Nothing,” so that I can give away items locally that I can’t sell. (Nextdoor is another example of something similar.)

The other thing to consider here is that we’re all 20 years older, too, and our needs/wants have changed. So the younger folks that are coming along now and looking for virtual communities don’t just have different (and more) choices, they are living in a more technically sophisticated world in which they will likely access things on a phone and not a traditional PC. It’s just a different world.

He who shall not be named

OldITPro2000 asks:

I read earlier this week that Steven Sinofsky has changed his book plans and has started to publish Hardcore Software over a series of emails through Substack.

Yeah, I saw that.

Let me clear here. I f#$%ing hate that guy.

I hate what he did to Microsoft and Windows, how he took Microsoft’s most important product and reduced it to a rubble we’re still rebuilding from. But mostly what I hate is how he continuously rewrote history, and you just know that this book, or whatever it is now, will be full of lies and misinformation. It makes me nuts.

That he then takes his nonsense and exploding it out to 1000x times the number of words needed to make a point is another frustration. It’s literally a strategy on his part to overwhelm the reader and make it seem like he must be on to something if he’s using so many words. He’s not. He never was.

Are you going to subscribe and read along and if so, are you going to subscribe at one of the paid “premium” levels?

I looked at it. I have a deep moral imperative to debunk his nonsense, as I tried to do when he was running the show at Windows. But subscribing to—or God help me, paying for—something he makes runs contrary to everything I stand for. So it’s something I’m still struggling with. I don’t think I will be able to avoid it. I can’t allow him to make new claims unchallenged.

xCloud for PC

MartinusV2 asks:

It’s been sometimes since we heard news about xCloud. Do you know when they will start the beta for PC?

Simple answer, No.

Longer answer, I have no idea why this is taking so long. But Microsoft is internally accessing this capability through a new version of the Xbox app, so it has to happen eventually.

When will then be now

wright_is asks:

Teams does on-the-fly captioning, in US English. Any word on when it will be available in other languages? I’ve done around 100 Teams training sessions now and everybody has a good laugh at the feature, because it just shows gobbeldygook on the screen, because no-one in the company speaks English.

Likewise, there was a mention of new Cortana features coming to iOS and Office apps running thereon. Any news on when Cortana for iOS and Android will be made available for iOS and Android outside the US/UK?

The argument, from the second biggest cloud provider in the world, 2 years ago was that they didn’t have the backend server infrastructure for Cortana for Android and iOS – although Cortana for Windows was available in other languages…

So this basically boils down to when certain Microsoft 365 features related to language will be made available beyond US/English, and … yeah, this is a huge problem, and probably not just at Microsoft, though that’s obviously the focus here. And I don’t know, sorry.

That said. I will be speaking with those folks soon, with Ignite coming up, and I will ask about this. It’s not exactly a new problem, but it is absolutely a problem, and one that in some ways that gets worse as Microsoft expands its language capabilities but only in US/English (or first in US/English and then slowly to other languages/regions).

The problem is Miracast

matsan asks:

Just bought a new Samsung QLED 2020 75″ TV and are very happy with it – nice picture and the built-in apps work well … Yesterday my significant other tried to use her brand-new HP zBook 15 G7 running latest Windows 10 Pro for a meeting using “Wireless display”. Windows connects to the TV and it works nice but suddenly in the middle of the meeting (after ~15 min) the connection with the TV drops without any reason. Repeated tries gives the same result – connection established and after 10-30 minutes it drops again. The meeting is not affected, it runs just fine on the laptop. She eventually gave up on trying to use the TV as a monitor.

Wireless Display on Windows 10 – why is it so hard and why can’t a PC simply “just work”(TM)???

Because Miracast is terrible. I’ve had much better success using Chromecast for this type of thing, and if you think back to when I had a stupid little podcast backdrop when we still lived in Dedham, I used a Chromecast dongle instead of Miracast for this very reason. (You may notice that Brad still struggles with Miracast as well. It just doesn’t work well.)

I’m not being facetious here, but what works best, literally, is a wire. If you’re on an important meeting and want to use the laptop with the TV, I strongly recommend just running an HDMI cable (or whatever). I don’t really do this anymore, since the kids go off on their own devices now, but when they were little, I used to always bring an HDMI cable on home swaps so that we could watch content easily (and reliably) on whatever screen was available in the house.

Who to blame for this disappointing experience? Microsoft, HP’s BIOS, NVIDIA for the GPU driver or Samsung? What a mess!! (My personal idea why this doesn’t work is the graphics switching between built-in and discrete graphics cards).

At a high level, I guess the blame is really the double-edged sword of Microsoft and Samsung both supporting the same open standard, of sorts, instead of creating something proprietary—like Chromecast/Google Cast or AirPlay 2—that just works. The sheer number of different setups possible with Miracast makes it less reliable, I bet.

But whatever the reason, Miracast is terrible. The problem is Miracast. (Which isn’t always identified by that name, including on Samsung products, but that’s what it is.)

Wake from sleep issues

crunchyfrog asks:

Hi Paul, I recently bought my wife a new Surface Pro 7 to replace an aging Chromebook and she really enjoys the Surface. The problem is that recently it has an issue where it does not wake from sleep even fully charged. The keyboard lights up but no screen. I have to force shut down and reboot everyday now.

Looking into this, it seems that this is a known issue going back to SP4 and somehow has not been resolved. I guess my question is what your take is on this and if I should get another SP7 or exchange it for some other product. Also, is this issue only with Surface Pro devices or does it affect other Surface devices?

Ah boy. Obviously, this is not normal behavior.

Most Windows users have probably experienced some weird power management issue at least once over the years. I have a 25th anniversary edition ThinkPad that I use for the book screenshots that never powers on normally when I open the lid, for example, and one of its two batteries is dead, triggering a non-stoppable warning dialog from time-to-time. But you’re dealing with a new computer, and this shouldn’t be happening.

On that note, I’ve not had that experience with Surface Pro 7 myself, but I also don’t use it every day anymore, or all that much, really. And while Surface certainly has its share of reliability issues, I do feel like more recent Surfaces have generally been more reliable than not.

So I guess I just have some general troubleshooting ideas. The first being to determine whether your wife likes the Surface Pro because of its tablet/pen versatility. If not, maybe a more mainstream Ultrabook or convertible design would be a better choice. If so, perhaps a Surface Pro-like tablet PC from HP, Lenovo, or Dell is the better choice.

If she’s dead-set on sticking with Surface Pro and you’re within the return window, I’d try resetting it and seeing whether that helps. Or returning/exchanging it. (I also wonder if this could be caused by some hardware peripheral, but I’m guessing not.)

This is a tough one.

Windows Weekly cohosts

helix2301 asks:

On Windows Weekly is there any chance of getting Ant Pruit to host with you guys at some point when Leo is off? I know it happened once. He works at Twit and he is on TWIG. I only ask cause he is the only Windows 10 user at Twit and he is always doing stuff on MSI laptops which are a personal favorite of mine. Maybe we can get him to review one for Thurrott or you could get one to review I really like MSI computers they are a personal favorite of mine.

This isn’t really our choice, it’s up to TWiT. And to be clear, I’ve been happy with just about everyone who has subbed for Leo on the show over the years, and both Ant and Micah are great, from my perspective. And to be fair, one thing I do like about Micah is that he’s not as immersed in Windows and so he has a unique take on things that Windows people just find normal and don’t ever question.

Getting Ant to post on Thurrott.com would be a bit more complicated still. We’d have to pay him, of course, and figure out what that would look, and of course there’s the issue of where a review might appear and what that means for him. Etc.

Xbox Game Pass family plan

GeekWithKids asks:

Do you know if there is plans for a Family plan for game pass ultimate? I have an XBox One and a Series X and I want my kids to be able to play all the games without me having to be logged in. I seem to be able to do it on a single XBox but not both.

This is a great idea and, go figure, yes, Microsoft has discussed this internally.

In response to a tweet about such a thing, Phil Spencer responded that “it’s something we’d like to do. There is Home console feature for one console household but for multiple family members with consoles a family plan would help.” This leads me to think that it could happen.