Ask Paul: October 1 (Premium)

Good morning from a very chilly Lehigh Valley. Let’s kick off the weekend a bit early with another great set of reader questions.
Background processes
erichk asks:

Paul, are you ever overwhelmed at the sheer number of background services and processes that are running on a typical Windows install? Sometimes it frightens me, and I can only hope that each one of them is doing something necessary to keep the system afloat.

This reminds me of the joke:

Man: Doctor, it hurts when I do this.

Doctor: Then don’t do that.

And on that note, no, I don’t obsess over background processes per se, though I do regularly take a look at the Startup tab in Task Manager to make sure there aren’t any applications starting up at boot time without my knowledge. This is important on new PCs, of course---I review a lot of laptops---but also on PCs where you’ve just installed software, especially Adobe’s. The problem is that some of these things are beneficial. But knowing too much about something can be as bad as knowing too little: the more technical will be more inclined to aggressively disable/kill processes that may actually make the PC run more efficiently overall.
Surface vs. ThinkPad
alejandro asks:

I am, what the kids would call a "knowledge worker." I work a full time job and have a side hustle. I currently have an old MacBook Pro as my personal device (I'm not a huge fan of MacOS...but it was a way to separate work on Windows from pleasure when using computers). Now my side hustle is growing and I encounter issues from time to time with MacOs compatibility that costs me time and money and would like to buy a new laptop dedicated solely for use in my side business.

I am teetering between the Surface and Lenovo ThinkPad line of laptops. Between the two, do you have a preference?

Yeah, I do.

Before getting to that, we had a conversation about Surface overall on the week-ago episode of Windows Weekly that basically boiled down to Mary Jo and both agreeing that we really like Surface PCs for ourselves but that we can’t recommend them to others because of ongoing reliability issues. That Mary Jo’s Surface Laptop 4 overheated while we were recording that episode is both kismet and perfect.

So the way I will answer that question now is that there are things about Surface PCs that I very much prefer over ThinkPads, including the design style and typing experience; ThinkPad is incorrectly still thought to have the best keyboards in the market, that hasn’t been true for years. But that ThinkPad is the better brand, with the better overall PCs, and that’s based on a broad range of criteria that includes, among other things, quality and reliability. It’s the safer bet, for sure.

There’s a lot that goes into what makes a particular PC right/better for any individual. And there are a lot of different ThinkPad models with different attributes/costs/etc. But overall, you would be better off with a ThinkPad. And...