Ask Paul: March 15 (Premium)

Well, we’re back in Pennsylvania and feeling lost. Hopefully, another great set of reader questions can get me back on track. Also, happy Ides of March.

It was a super site

gg1 asks:

I distinctly remember you sharing that you tried to find a way to keep your old content from Penton in a win-win and they wanted to charge you an exorbitant amount.

Yeah, the story there is that Penton had layoffs throughout 2014 and that Fall it finally laid off everyone in Windows IT Pro aside from me and Rod Trent. And while I was told that my job was secure, and that I could just continue doing what I did, there was no way I was going to stay at that company. On their way out the door, one of the accountants secretly forwarded me some internal documentation that showed, among other things, that my referrals and links to the main Windows IT Pro website from the SuperSite for Windows, in particular my weekly UPDATE column, generated some incommensurate amount of its traffic—this sounds impossible now, and maybe I’m misremembering, but I think it was north of 70 percent—and that gave me my first idea for a post-Penton future: Perhaps the company could just give me the SuperSite back—I had sold it to Penton’s predecessor in 1999—and I would just continue sending them traffic as a form of payment.

My boss at the time thought this was a fantastic idea—I still recall slowly walking on the treadmill I then I had in my home office as I described this to her—as did her boss. But by the time it got up to the same VP who had laid off all my coworkers, I was told that the SuperSite was “a corporate asset,” and that there was no way I could just have it. He told me I would need to pay the company “$1 million” to acquire the site. And so I gave them my two-week notice. After a few meetings with other publishers, I linked up with George at BWW Media Group thanks to Jeff James, a friend and former Penton coworker who had left before the pogroms. And we started Thurrott.com, going live in January 2015.

I was wondering: have you tried broaching the subject again since? It’s been almost a decade and they may be more flexible on the subject. For us it’d be great to have all your content in a single place, where it deserves to be.

No, and I won’t, sorry. I wouldn’t—and couldn’t—pay for that content, no matter the price, and I’m sure they’re not interested in that kind of divestiture. Nor would it be feasible: What used to be called Windows IT Pro—what started as Windows NT Magazine—is long gone and the resulting site, IT Pro Today, is an amalgam of content from many previous sites that would be impossible to separate out accurately. After all, the content I wrote wasn’t just in the SuperSite, a ton of it was in Windows IT Pro proper, and some was in other publications like SQL Server Magazine, Connected Home Magazine, and others that I never owned. There’s no way to separate it out.

Most of it is horribly out of date, of course, but from a historical perspective, I at least have most if not all of my original documents and notes, and I’ve used that as reference material over the years, and have published re-edited versions of key posts as makes sense. And with the advent of AI, I started thinking about how I could use Copilot (or something like Copilot) to surface this content, or at least summaries of this content, in ways that are more meaningful and useful to me than just searching OneDrive (or Google Drive, where it’s all replicated). By the time I started testing building my own custom Copilot GPT this past week, it occurred to me that maybe there’s a way to surface that content publicly as well. I wrote about that in Some Thoughts About Copilot Pro Custom GPT Builder and the Future (Premium).

That, to me, is the more feasible outcome here.

Smartphone addiction

thewarragulman asks:

Do you ever find yourself suffering from symptoms of smartphone addition? I’ve noticed it a lot more in people these days including myself finding it difficult to not pull my phone out just to check social media for the sake of checking it. It’s even gotten to the point of a distraction for me when listening to podcasts. I’ll be listening to Windows Weekly or another podcast and I’ll often find myself rewinding the podcast multiple times since I got distracted by something else while listening.

All the time. Though I guess I think of this more as a general decline in attention span that’s due to technology of all kinds. Not just smartphones, but the web and the Internet. But smartphones are particularly pernicious because they’re with you all the time.

Related to this, we went to the Instituto Nacional de Migración (National Institute of Migration) in Mexico City on our recent trip to renew our temporary residency cards for three more years, after which we can get permanent residency and never need to deal with this place again. Our first visit to this place, a year ago, was an hours-long slog during which time seemed to stand still as the bureaucracy of this place slowly snuffed the life out of us. But we were told that this time would be much quicker, and since we didn’t need to prove our financial viability, as we did last year, we were hopeful.

It was not any quicker. Indeed, it was worse: We sat in a line, slowly shuffling one chair closer to the end as people at the front of the line were processed, unable to use electronics of any kind, for almost two hours, and we ended up being in that building for over three and a half hours, during my crucial morning work time, though it felt like an eternity and cost me the day. I understand not being able to use a laptop, and though I argued for just reading a book offline on my phone, the Glock-toting guard overseeing our group had no interest in that. So that was just lost time. And it passed very slowly.

It also felt more than a bit like what I imagine going Cold Turkey from a drug must feel like. Itchy and terrible. Not just a punishment, but a torture. No bueno, as we say.

I notice people walking down busy city streets just buried in their phones, walking super slowly in the middle of the sidewalk blankly staring at their phone, not allowing people to overtake them in some cases, as well as sometimes almost getting hit by traffic when crossing roads and they don’t seem bothered by it as they’ll look up at the vehicle that almost hit them, get out of the way and then go back to their phone as if nothing happened.

All the time. My big pet peeve is the family of four, or any group of four, sitting in a restaurant together but really apart because their heads are all buried in their respective phones. The central success of the modern smartphone is that it is the truly personal device, as opposed to the PC, which I think most would agree is not so much “personal” as it is just a tool they use for work. But our whole lives are in the phone, as is the entire planet, and we can cycle from feed to feed, like listless bodies in a pod like those in The Matrix, unaware of our surroundings and the people we’re with. The only interactions we have is when we see a video clip we think is funny enough we want to share it with those around us.

My bigger pet peeve is when I’m standing in line at a fast food restaurant or similar and the person in front of me doesn’t get off the phone to order, virtually ignoring the human being standing in front of them. These people are so self-important that the inanity they’re engaged in on this device, a conversation that by its very nature could wait—otherwise they would not be ordering food right then—takes precedent over an in-person interaction with a human being. It’s not just disrespectful, it’s ridiculous. I should be legally allowed to knock the phone out of their hand when I see this happening.

My biggest pet peeve is when I’m standing at a urinal in a men’s room and the guy next to me is holding his phone to his head with one hand while he engages in the activity for which this room was designed. In these cases, I can’t help myself. And with apologies all around, I am not embarrassed to tell you that I lean over and yell, “his other hand is on his d#$k” when I see this happening. Screw these people. Unbelievable.

I’m currently trying a solution to this by turning off my mobile data when out and about, and only getting online via Wi-Fi, or turning on my data if I need it for things like Maps or if I need to communicate with someone for a thing I may be doing at that moment, however I have my doubts this will work in the long run as I can just turn the mobile data back on at any time which defeats the purpose.

This kind of thing came up a few months ago when someone asked about video games and addiction, and I feel like this is a personal thing, and that some people can handle it and some can’t. Well, most can’t, I guess. I’m surprised we’ve not reached a maturity moment with smartphones, but we haven’t. My wife sometimes gets a bit miffed with me when we’re watching TV and I pick up my phone and start mindlessly scrolling through my email or whatever, and while I can justify this by noting that I own a business and my job doesn’t really have a 9-to-5 element to it, she’s not buying it. And … she’s right. Setting limits is hard.

This is semi-related, but one thing I do do is try to limit the interruptions caused by notifications on all my devices, but especially smartphones. That’s maybe 50 percent or less of the problem, but removing this Pavlovian classical conditioning response—where the notification ding is like a deep-brain imperative to pick up the phone—is a big part of it. Preventing yourself from just picking the damn thing up and shutting out the world around you is, however, a bigger part of it. And that’s difficult. There, I do turn on “Do not disturb” a lot. Or, if you have an iPhone with that side switch, you can put the phone in silent mode. Same idea.

Put more simply, I don’t have an easy solution that works for me let alone anyone else. But identifying the problem is a big step, as is finding that thing that works for you. It’s worth working on.

It’s a noose, not a cable

jrzoomer asks:

Paul like me, you have multiple devices. Is there a set of USB C cables you’ve standardized on? Do you stick with basic Anker or Amazon Basics charging cables? Or do you buy Thunderbolt (or USB 4) cables or is data transfer not a thing for you?

I don’t have a single cable maker that I standardize on per se, but I do very much prefer Anker products in general, and I’ve purchased Amazon Basics and Apple cables in different situations too. There are two key goals here, depending on the device: Data transfer speeds (storage, obviously, but also for that one-cable dock or hub connectivity, you don’t want that to be the choke point) and charging speeds. So it depends.

If you look back at when I first purchased an Anker USB-C hub (and I’ve since purchased two more and will likely get yet another one) as part of my More Mobile setup, one of the few issues with that device is that the USB-C connector cable, which is hard-wired, is too short. My solution was to get a USB-C extension cable, but of course I had to be sure that this cable wasn’t going to slow down everything and could handle the 100-watt power pass-through. What I ended up getting was a UGREEN USB-C 3.2 extension cable that matched or exceeded the characteristics of the USB-C hub (and I later bought this exact cable each time I bought another of these hubs). That it, the hub is actually USB 3.1, which supports up to 10 Gbps data transfer. The cable (USB 3.2 Gen 1) is good for that.

I have two Samsung T7 external SSDs, which support up to USB 3.2 Gen 2, so 20 Gbps data transfer speeds, and I just make sure to use the cables that came with them. For Thunderbolt 3 and 4 docks, ditto (and the one we have in Mexico is hard-wired, so no worries there). Phones are a bit more complicated: I try to pair the optimal cable and charger with each. So with the most recent iPhones, for example, I got Apple’s faster/better braided charging cable and a 30-watt Anker 511 GAN charger that’s both smaller and less expensive than Apple’s version. (I have one for me and one for each of the kids.)

The bigger problem with cables is that you can’t usually pick one up and tell what it’s characteristics and capabilities are just by looking it. There are exceptions, but as we move forward, I usually end up just getting a new cable when needed for whatever devices(s). I still have a bin full of USB cables of all kinds, organized into labeled baggies, but you can’t always tell. You can plug in a phone and see something like “Charging” with some of them, but “Charging quickly” (or whatever) with others. It’s difficult to be sure.

Anyway, I do typically look to Anker first, and I see a lot of Anker equipment in my Amazon orders list (not just power adapters and cables, but hubs, power strips, portable power banks, and more). But I trust UGREEN as well and, as noted, Apple and Amazon Basics are usually worth looking at too when it comes to cables.

Can AI save Windows?

yb asks:

Given the experience we have with Windows 11, do you think that there is a reasonable chance that Microsoft would do a better job with the new Windows+AI Op system in 2025? in terms of functionality, presentation and testing? or would they rush a product to the market in a state of ‘incompleteness’ as they did with W11? I have my doubts! what are your thoughts, expectations on this?

I don’t do this on purpose, and in this case, very explicitly did not plan to go down this path, but in the most recent Windows Weekly, I wandered into my despair over the disrespectful treatment that Windows 11 and its users get from Microsoft, for what must be the 100th time. I’m sure this is tedious for listeners, and I don’t feel good about it. But this is difficult for me. I don’t just come from an era in which Windows was the most important and central product for Microsoft, I still live it that way: Windows is the most important and central product that I use every day. And what’s happening to Windows these days is triggering to me. I can’t deal with it.

In Windows 11 is About to Get Its AI Moment (Premium), which you referenced in your original question, I wrote about how AI is the wave that will lift all ships at Microsoft, and that, unlike with cloud computing, this was a wave in which Windows could participate. Indeed, given Windows’ role as an orchestrator of apps and services today, there is a natural role for this platform to play in this AI future, one that will be made all the more important with the introduction of NPU silicon and what we still hope will be a growing collection of on-device AI capabilities that can take advantage of that hardware.

To your question, I am all over the map.

On the one hand, and cynically, though I believe this to be deserved, Microsoft could only do better when it comes to Windows. The bar here is low.

But there are questions.

Will Microsoft do better with Windows, do right by this platform in a way it hasn’t since it announced Windows 10 (but then screwed that up, too, so perhaps we have to go back to Windows 7)? I would like to think so. But there is no evidence that this will be the case. And much evidence to the contrary.

That said, hope spring eternal. And while Windows is just one of many groups scrambling to make sure that they are part of this wave now lifting Microsoft, we can start thinking about how or why Windows might be worth betting on internally. Are there more or less opportunities for AI with Windows compared to, say, Microsoft 365? Maybe not directly. After all, Microsoft 365 is both broad and deep, with multiple apps and services. But Windows, again, is unique. It sits between those apps and services and the hardware on which they run. We could see a return to the “better on Windows” era, even though many of these capabilities will also work in the cloud or on mobile (or the Mac).

Right now is early days. The first so-called AI PCs are here, and we will see more and more PCs with NPUs and integrated CPU/GPU/NPU architectures that are ideal for a variety of AI workloads. We will see more in-Windows AI capabilities that will take advantage of that, and either require it or work better with it. And if these experiences are compelling enough, we could see a bump in PC sales and upgrades. A virtuous cycle.

Unfortunately, it’s more likely that AI won’t lead to much in the way of PC excitement or sales, and that users and businesses will just continue upgrading at whatever slow pace they always have. And that there will be AI haves and have-nots when it comes to the hardware. You can sort of see this today with Copilot on the web: You get “more” by paying for it, but I think most would agree that the free Copilot is good enough. Convincing people to pay—either for services or literally new PC hardware—is difficult and will remain so.

What that means to this conversation is that Microsoft 365 may pull ahead (or, really, remain ahead) from an investment and revenues perspective because it’s already on the subscription train in a way that Windows can’t be. That even though much of its AI advances will run against the cloud, that will still make more sense. Plus, Microsoft 365 runs everywhere. Not just Windows, but Macs, the web, and mobile. The very nature of it makes it a better fit. (And you know it’s only a matter of time before Office for Mac starts running AI workloads against the Neural Engine in modern Macs, and we can’t act surprised when that setup ends up being the “best” or most efficient, or whatever.)

So there are many possible outcomes. What bothers me, what nags at the back of my brain, is those years of bad behavior in Windows. How do we reverse this? And is it even rational to believe that someone at Microsoft, anyone, will actually step in and put a stop to this? God, I’d be happy to pay to fix the problems at this point: Give me Windows Enterprise with no tracking, no crapware, and DMA-like rights. I would pay for that every year. That’s how bad it is. Maybe that’s the plan.

So I don’t know. I have hope. But I also have years of experience telling me otherwise.

It’s the little things…

Anlong08 asks:

Set as featured

Report

Surprising tech features. I use the photos backup to onedrive feature on our phones for backup only, no albums and such. There is a feature that sends you a “memories from this day” email that shows you the pictures from that day over the years. That email contains a link that launches the Onedrive app with a search for pictures on that day loaded. Now I’m far to curmudgeonly to ever have signed up for such a notification and would never have seen the value in such a thing, but I absolutely love it, and it’s one of my favorite parts of the day. Do you have any similar experiences where there was some cute feature you’ve been surprised to enjoy?

We have a similar experience with the smart display in our kitchen, which is nice because it’s in it a public space, so my wife and I both enjoy seeing photos of the kids pop-up or whatever. Oddly, I usually turn off the memories feature in OneDrive (and Google Photos) on mobile as part of my effort to minimize notifications, but Google Photos will notify me just about every day about something that’s kind of fun, like a photo to which it added a filter, and I usually end up saving those to the collection. (When I did my photo collection consolidation project recently, I rolled all those into the final collection, and it was kind of fun seeing them again.)

(Not to keep complaining, but these little delighters are exactly what’s missing from Windows 11 today. Instead, we get constant nagging, interruptions, and aggravations.)

Aside from photos, the images I create with Copilot often delight me, and I’m still a bit surprised by this. I like discovering new music, and the integration between YouTube Music and YouTube is always nice, as YouTube Music’s “New albums & singles” section in Explore, which I check at least once or twice each week. This isn’t tech per se, but hearing new music out in the world, whether it’s in a bar, restaurant, Uber, or anywhere else, that’s good enough to add to our own playlist is always a delight. Thanks to our trips to Mexico City, we’ve dramatically expanded our playlists in just the past year, I love that.

(One example. I heard Café Tacvba’s song Volver a Comenzar for the first time last summer in one of our favorite Mexico City restaurants and instantly knew that it would be the first song in a new playlist, and it’s since become my favorite song, possibly of all time. But just recently, YouTube recommended a live version of this song, with a complete orchestra, that elevates it even further, and I am blown away by this performance. It’s magical, and I doubt I’d have ever even heard it, or the group, had we never gone to Mexico City.)

I love putting on noise-canceling earbuds on a plane and having the noise just suck away to silence, allowing me to listen to whatever podcast, audiobook, or music playlist in peace. And I love finding a good show on Netflix or whatever and knowing we’re set for that duration (which then makes it harder to find something as good when it ends, sadly). That’s true of all content: Books, audiobooks (with the perfect combination of narrator and content), podcasts, whatever. For example, Richard records a lot of RunAs Radio and .NET Rocks episodes with people I know and love, and hearing two (or more) people I care about discussing topics that matter to me is always delightful. I listened to his recent show with Jeff Woolsey, who I miss terribly, twice.

I guess a lot of it is just content related at this point.

Defender

iAlrakis asks:

Not a complicated tech question. Was reading about your macbook air order and got curious if you would ever consider to put MS Defender on it?

No. I uninstall Defender from my PCs every time I see that it was installed without asking me first. I don’t see any reason to run this thing locally.

I have the subscription and used the ‘better safe than sorry approach’ but maybe you can offer some better advice for a broader range of people.

I do get Microsoft Defender with my Microsoft 365 subscription, and I assume that’s how you get it as well. There’s a lot there, honestly, from identity and credit monitoring to a limited VPN and other services. What this feels like to me is what the McAfee/Norton/whatever security suites have evolved into now that Windows features built-in pervasive anti-malware and anti-spyware functionality. Whether you find value in all that will vary by person, I guess.

I did go to the trouble of setting up the identity/dark web and credit monitoring stuff, but Dashlane (and, I assume, most password managers) offers the former, and I think centralizing my online identity management there makes sense. I did just get a few credit monitoring emails from Defender, tied to the MacBook Air purchase, interestingly, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But as we move further down the stack, I either just don’t need it or want it, or use other services already.

For example, the VPN thing is very limited and only works on Android (and only in the U.S.), and I already have VPNs I prefer. (TunnelBear is a great choice if you don’t want to pay and only need to use it from time-to-time, or ExpressVPN otherwise.) I don’t need to monitor my entire family, nor would any of them be interested if I suggested it. And Wi-Fi protection? Most PCs ship with something like this (on Lenovo devices, it’s enabled in Vantage), but I don’t see the need.

I don’t know. There’s nothing wrong with Defender. But I guess I’ve just settled on some combination of services I prefer and common sense.

Windows Weekly

helix2301 asks:

Paul if you don’t mind me asking why does Mika need to run the show if leo off why cant you and Richard just do the show. I noticed TWIG and Macbreak weekly when leo gone they handle the show themselves. Just wondering I know security now just Steve so he needs co host there just wondering.

I’ve never really thought about this, honestly. Obviously, Richard and I could handle the show by ourselves. But I’ve always enjoyed Mikah in particular, and the other co-hosts we’ve had over the years. And Mikah brings a fascinating injection of outside experience that can really help. We get lost in our own little bubbles sometimes, and it’s nice getting that perspective. If they asked me about us just doing it, that would be fine, but I love Mikah, and love doing the show with him, and would never ask for anything different. I don’t usually watch the other shows, so I’m not sure how it works elsewhere. I could imagine some other hosts feeling strongly about this. But I’m good with the way things are. (I suspect Richard feels the same, we’ve talked privately about how much we like Mikah.)