Ask Paul: December 30 (Premium)

Happy Friday, and welcome to the final installment of Ask Paul of 2022. So let’s kick off the weekend, and the New Year, with some great reader questions.

How old is too old?

andrew b. asks:

A videographer friend of mine has a mostly base model Mac Pro 5,1 that is still his one and only machine. He does have a day job with a much newer computer, but he freelances often and despite that still has no interest in replacing his ancient Mac. It works for him, even if we tech lovers might find editing on it to be abysmally slow.

For those who are also curious, the Mac Pro 5,1 is the huge Intel Xeon-based tower Mac that debuted in 2012. (I had to look it up.) This was a very powerful computer at the time, obviously, but is quite old for day-to-day use by any standards, especially given the audience that would have bought such a thing when it was new. I assume it’s on an older version of macOS now too as well. Very interesting.

Which brings me to my questions: Of all the computers you have owned, which is the oldest one you believe you could still get your work done with? Do those of us in tech tend to overestimate the time we’d save if we just bought newer, faster hardware, or do we overestimate the value of that time, or both? Or, is there a very legitimate case to be made for switching out computers every three to four years as we seem do?

I’ve been thinking about this topic all week, go figure, based on my recent experience of resuscitating a NUC8, which dates back to 2018. So it’s four years old. As I noted, More Mobile: Minimal Mobile (Premium), this PC, which is based on an 8th-Gen Intel Core chipset, feels a bit slow to me compared to the 11th- and 12th-Gen Intel laptops I’ve been using for the past year or more. But there’s a lot that goes into this, of course: it has whatever storage and RAM, and neither is likely the fastest-possible option. So some combination of CPU, storage, and RAM speed is likely to blame, not just the CPU. Which, frankly, is probably fine: 8th-Gen is when Intel made the leap from dual-core to quad-core in its U-series designs, and it was basically a performance gift for no additional cost and, for laptops, no battery life hit either.

I should also add that it’s worked fine in day-to-day use. The performance difference was noticeable at first, but it isn’t a major difference and it hasn’t impacted my work in any way. You see it in things like launching apps: when I bring up Adobe Photoshop Elements 2020 from scratch, for example, a silly front-end app with links to Organizer and Photo Editor appears first. (You can’t disable this, and I hate it.) When I click the Photo Editor link that I really want, it appears in about one second on a new-generation PC. But when I click it on the NUC8, it takes about 2, maybe 3, seconds. Then you use it, and it works normally. No biggie.

But this is an interesting question. On the one hand, it’s clear that modern PCs—PCs that were new in the past one to three years, I guess—are dramatically overpowered for most needs, assuming they were configured correctly, and in my opinion, the minimums are a Core i5 processor with integrated graphics, 16 GB of RAM, and 256 GB of SSD storage. But everyone’s needs differ, too. Someone who edits video will stress that system a lot more than a casual user who runs a web browser and a few other productivity apps. That said, I’ve done a lot of video editing on that type of machine this past year. Where you see the biggest differences as you move up to faster processors, dedicated graphics, more/faster RAM, and more/faster storage is in the rendering. For most tasks, there’s little to no difference.

But that’s me, and I’m not a professional videographer, nor do I spend a lot of time on that activity. And that’s the trick here, you have to know what your workloads look like. I often cart out the phrase “optimize for the everyday,” which in my case means a PC that can handle the standard productivity tasks I perform all day, every day, but has the headroom to handle brief stints in occasional activities like software development (Visual Studio Community) or video editing (Adobe Premiere Elements 2021).

And I would say that the NUC8 clears that bar, for me.

But how low could I go? I don’t have a lot of older PCs around—I give them away when I’m done with them, usually—but my other surviving NUC is quite a bit older, from early 2016, is based on a 6th-Gen Intel Core processor, 16 GB of RAM, and 250 GB of SSD storage, and is thus not officially supported by Windows 11. I last used it to see what it was like to use Windows 7 while unsupported, and I don’t think I would want to use this PC now, but I’m sure it would be OK for the day-to-day productivity stuff.

That’s interesting because Microsoft’s artificial and arbitrary hardware requirements would require me to stick on Windows 10, which would be fine for most people. But given what I do for a living, that won’t work for me. But would it work? Yeah. I’m sure it would. 6th-Gen Intel Core processors were what Microsoft used in Surface Pro 4 and the original Surface Book (and were the source of Surfacegate, though that didn’t impact more experienced PC makers).

I guess what I’m trying to say is that it depends. This sounds like a cop-out, but it really does: we all have different needs and expectations. And though I dab in a few high-end tasks, the truth is that most of my work is pretty pedestrian from a technology needs perspective. I could probably make do with less.

Windows 11 upgrade on well-used Windows 10 PCs

ChrisG101 asks:

Hi Paul, I’ve been reading the Windows 11 Field Guide (thanks for the complimentary copy for premium members!).

You bet, thanks.

Do you have any insights on performing Windows 10 to 11 upgrades on PCs that have been running Windows 10 for a while? I have been holding out, given previous Win OS upgrades have never gone well and always warranted the PC to be wiped and reloaded. This is despite Apple Mac devices that seem to work well upgrade after upgrade since Apple went to an annual upgrade cycle.

No, not really: though I did, for example, upgrade the NUC8 noted above from Windows 10 version 21H1 to Windows 11 22H2, I also then did a PC Reset to have a clean install experience. And I do a lot of clean installs and resets. I don’t bring a lot of older PCs up and just use them.

But Windows 11 is designed to operate like any Windows 10 feature update, and so it should theoretically work as well as any Windows 10 upgrade. It’s clear from using it for the past 18 months or so that little has changed under the covers, and those who do perform that upgrade can access features that are no longer included in Windows 11 and won’t appear in a clean install, like Skype, 3D Viewer, OneNote for Windows 10 and so on.

I always prefer the clean install approach, but there’s no reason to think that upgrading to Windows 11 will work any less well on the same PC than upgrading from one version of Windows 10 to another. I’m going to write an article in early 2023 that touches on this notion that a properly configured PC—with all data synced to OneDrive or some other cloud storage solution—can be safely wiped out and brought back up within an hour or two at any time, and that everyone who uses Windows should embrace this way of working. It’s just so much better when you clean install/reset from time to time.

Windows 12

brettscoast asks:

What do we know about the next version of Windows? (be it 12 or whatever) could we possibly see a version of Windows for enthusiasts\power users that contains an OOBE with no ads in other words a premium Windows experience?

We don’t know anything concrete about a Windows 12, though we do know that Microsoft is working on lots of new features that will appear in Windows 11 over time. But there are expectations that Microsoft will release a Windows 12, possibly in 2024, and that it is moving back to a traditional three-year new release schedule. I hope that this is true.

As for a slicker version of Windows for enthusiasts or power users, no, I don’t expect anything like that. I do feel very strongly that Microsoft should give users a paid option to opt-out of ads, suggestions, telemetry tracking, and other horribleness in Windows, and that the best solution there is to simply give that away as part of Microsoft 365 Family and Personal. But I would pay above that to obtain the clean Windows configuration I really want.

I guess the issue here is two-fold: one, what is the real market size for such a thing, and does it justify the engineering effort that Microsoft would need to undergo to achieve it? And, two, how can Microsoft square the fact that it is charging customers to make its own product suck less? This is something that came up in the Windows Live OneCare days: Microsoft was charging extra for a product that fixes problems of its own making. The successor to that product is now built into Windows for free.

Chris Cap

AnOldAmigaUser asks:

If Chris Capossela had been available for Windows Weekly this year, what questions would you have wanted to ask? What questions would you want to ask that diplomacy would prevent asking? What do you think he might have listed as hidden gems?

For those unfamiliar, we’ve had Microsoft chief marketing officer Chris Capossela has appeared on Windows Weekly in December each of the past three years or so, and it was always a highlight thanks to his candor and transparency. But we found out in October that he would likely not be able to make it this year—this was before Mary Jo left, if you’re curious if that was the reason—and while no one will say why, I’m guessing that his appearance was nixed because of the ongoing Activision Blizzard drama.

And on that note, my big question for him this year would have been about that: I’d love to have an in-depth conversation about Microsoft’s goals and plans for this acquisition. And I would of course continue the conversation about Microsoft and consumers more generally: other than Xbox and gaming, what if anything can Microsoft do to make inroads into this important market? And how has the post-pandemic PC buying disaster impacted its plans for Windows? As I’ve written and spoken about in the past, I was blown away (in a bad way) when Microsoft CFO Amy Hood blurted out during the pandemic that the PC-buying boom at the time had reminded the company how important Windows still was. That just boggles the mind.

I can’t really guess on the hidden gem thing: those were almost always unexpected surprises and, as important, hints at some focus for the firm in the near-term future. But I have to think that Power Platform would be in there in some capacity—another topic I need to focus more on myself—and perhaps some unloved part of Microsoft 365, like Viva.

From desktop to laptop

SherlockHolmes asks:

I was actually thinking about replacing my old Desktop PC permanently with my HP ZBook Power G8 workstation. Since you have a lot of experience with laptops, are there any reliability issues when you use your laptop for a long period of time for 10 hours or more a day? Do you use your battery or do you mostly use it wired? And did you ever had to replace a battery because it was permanently charged? Thanks 🙂

This is an excellent question and something worth exploring. We do know that portable electronic devices—smartphones, tablets, whatever—that are always fully charged overnight lose battery capacity much more quickly over time, and there’s every reason to believe that this is the case with PCs as well. If you were to just dock a laptop and use it that way exclusively, surely you would experience this issue over time. And one could measure that—and overall battery health—with Windows’ built-in battery report (command line) tool.

My personal experience won’t help much here, sorry. As with the Windows 10 upgrade question above, I don’t just use the same PC over long periods of time. I move from PC to PC for review purposes.

But Microsoft recommends that you regularly drain the battery of a portable PC to below 50 percent to reduce deterioration. I’ve seen more aggressive advice for phones and tablets, with some suggesting that you should literally run the battery down to zero every so often so that it fully recharges to its maximum capacity. And some modern PCs, like Surface Pro, support a Smart Charging feature that prevents batteries from being charged above 80 percent (for Surface Pro, it may vary by PC) when plugged in to help with this issue.

I’m not sure if your HP ZBook supports Smart Charging, but it’s something to look into. Beyond that, you may want to just make sure the battery discharges from time to time to maintain its health.

Happy New Year!