Ask Paul: July 18 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Let’s kick off the weekend with a diverse range of thought-provoking reader questions. This one ended up being longer than expected, so settle in.

?️ Mommy, why is there a server in the house?

spacecamel asks:

Is Synology what Windows Home Server was suppose to be when they finished it?

Conceptually, yes. Of course, that was a different time, and in the sense that everything is a nail when you’re a hammer, Windows Home Server (WHS) was very much a Microsoft-centric view of what that kind of product could be in that era. Given the complexity of products like Windows Small Business Server, it’s rather astonishing that Microsoft did something like this, and made it relatively simple to set up, configure, and use. But it’s perhaps also not surprising, retrospectively, to see that this product line failed and had a major technical issue with Drive Extender that sunk that product’s usefulness, an issue that was later paralleled with OneDrive and what became Files on Demand.

And … it’s been a while.

Looking through my archives, it occurs to me that I should probably revisit this product somehow, as I was arguably one of its more prolific users and writers. But there were hints that Microsoft was working on this product during the Longhorn era with projects like “Q” and then “Quatro,” and I had good friends on that team who kept me in the loop. And then Microsoft finally announced the product in 2007, with the first devices arriving later that year. There were various Power Pack updates to the software, multiple hardware releases from HP and others, and then finally a major platform update with Windows Home Server 2011, sans Drive Extender. And from there, Microsoft dropped WHS and offered sort-of replacements through offerings like Windows Server Essentials. And then it kind of drifted off.

But looking back at the initial release, it’s fair to compare what Microsoft was trying to do with what mainstream-ish NAS devices like Synology offer. It’s also fair to point out that there are multiple examples of Microsoft having to choose between a computer and device for various solutions–Xbox, Media Center, etc.–and that simpler, device-type solutions always win out in the end. Simpler is always better for mainstream audiences.

Anyway, the core goals of this product were initially:

• Automate PC backups for an audience that knows it should do so but rarely does because it’s too difficult or time-consuming. Move backup from a PC to a household using a Connector app that would back up all the PCs in a house overnight automatically.
• Content sharing through Windows Media Connect. This would work with Windows PCs and Xbox consoles.
• Make the storage needed for backups and content easy to add, manage, and use.
• Remote access so you can get to the content on the server from anywhere using a Windows Live Domains-provided domain.

This is pretty much what a NAS does today. It’s a simpler platform, I guess. It uses standard RAID technologies (or Synology alternatives) for storage redundancy, where WHS did not, and that became an Achilles Heel. But backup, remote access, media streaming/sharing, it’s all there. Today’s NASes also address the modern era with web-based user interfaces, phone backups, and other integrations, and so on. And they can vastly exceed what one might do with WHS through technologies like Docker, virtual machines (VMs), and whatever else.

But those are just details. Fundamentally, yes, WHS was an early NAS implementation, based on Windows Server, for the home.

✍️ Journalisms

train_wreck asks:

Kind of 2 journalism related questions. Do you ever have companies ask you to alter your reviews to better fit their narratives?

Not recently. These days, you can only see this influence in which products a company offers me to review. For laptops, for example, they tend to be premium models, whether it’s a consumer or business PC, and they tend to send the highest-end configuration. Not always, to be fair. And to be even fairer, I should point out that I’ve known some of these people for many years or even decades, and there is definitely an honest vibe to the whole thing with most of the companies I deal with. Meaning, they’re good people trying to offer good products that meet real customer needs, not charlatans trying to fool reviewers or customers with garbage. The transparency there is usually solid.

I have referenced this in the past, but I’ve been friends with Mike Nash for decades; he was an early member of the NT team and moved into Windows as that whole transition happened, and he went on to Amazon, briefly, and then HP for a long time. And he was a key part of their review process before moving further upstream, and he only recently left the company. He played a big role in improving HP’s products and communicating those improvements publicly, and I could probably write a book about all I’ve learned from him. But he once told me that every product was a compromise between the needs of customers, the components that would meet those needs, and their costs. And that every time HP or any other company assembled a computer (or whatever else) that it had to balance those needs. It’s not always successful, sometimes because what a customer says they want isn’t really the biggest need or whatever, sometimes for other reasons. But the most successful products are those where they stick the landing on those compromises. I think about this every time I review any product.

But with hardware reviews, no, no company in recent years has ever asked me to change a review or tried to guide how I cover something, beyond having an in-person or virtual workshop to discuss the product and providing me with a reviewer’s guide. Very occasionally, someone I know well will contact me privately to ask about why my battery life observations–it’s almost always battery life–vary so wildly from what they report. That’s a good example of conflicting needs. If you think about how an HP or Lenovo presents this, they’re concerned with comparing apples to apples, so using whatever benchmarks gives them this known good comparable. I’m concerned with real world results and don’t care about that.

One time, a person I consider a friend asked what apps I might be running that caused my battery life numbers to be less. So I started listing the apps, and when I got to Adobe Photoshop Elements, he interrupted and said, yeah, that’s it, that app is horrible on battery. So what? That’s what I use. That’s what real people used, at the time. Sorry. I’m not here to do PR for your company, I’m here to be honest about this product. It was fine.

I have had bad experiences over the years, of course.

Back in the late 1990s, I recall that working with Palm was particularly difficult, and they were weird about getting their stupid little $120 devices back within less than two weeks, whereas companies like Dell would send me expensive laptops and let me hold on to them for months or even indefinitely.

The very first review I ever wrote for Windows 2000 Magazine was for a roundup of disk defragmentation tools and the big player in that market, Executive Software Diskeeper, did come out ahead, but only because it was automated, and the version in Windows 2000, which was otherwise just as good, was not (initially, that changed). They were a big advertiser and they complained about this. They even cornered me on a boat off New York City during a trade show event to badger me about my methodology (which was sound and had been handed to me by our labs). But the publisher stood behind me and we never changed it.

But I do have one recent example that is worth discussing.

What’s the craziest thing a company has ever asked you to edit?

On the hardware review side, I can’t really think of anything, and certainly nothing recent. Most of this is hands off.

But last year, I wrote a review of Jason Schreier’s book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment. And to date, no one has noticed that this review is no longer on the site. The reason is that ex-Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby K’s lawyers threatened to sue me, as they have countless other reviewers, because K is engaged in a reputation rehabilitation campaign that only the truly rich could afford. I pulled the review, expecting to edit it to meet their needs, but then decided those needs were too egregious. So I left it down.

What was the issue?

The lawyers described themselves to me as “defamation counsel to Bobby K.” They demanded that I correct “false and defamatory claims” in my review. I wrote that California filed a sexual discrimination and misconduct lawsuit against Activision Blizzard that was eventually settled for $54 million, noting that it was an uncomfortable chapter in the company’s history and that K played a major role in its cover-up. I was told there is no truth to these claims, which are from the book I was reviewing. Instead, the allegations of sexual misconduct were “fabricated” by state of California attorneys, which settled with Activision in December 2023 for “unsubstantiated claims” relating only to gender pay inequity. Prior to a settlement for that, the California civil rights department (CRD) filed an amended complaint in which it voluntarily dismissed all claims and allegations of systemic workplace harassment. I was told.

“Thurrott could not have had any factual basis to report that California filed a sexual discrimination and misconduct lawsuit without also alerting readers to the fact that the CRD dismissed all claims and allegations relating to harassment after admitting that those claims were unsubstantiated. Thurrott’s failure to acknowledge this crucial exculpatory information exposes Thurrott to legal liability.”

You see the unreasonable nature of the threat there. You might also see that I did not ‘report’ on these issues, but rather that I was reviewing a book that described these issues, and that I was simply repeating what I had read. But it goes on.

“Nor could Thurrott have had any basis to claim that Mr. K covered up purported workplace issues. The fact that the Wall Street Journal previously published these now disproven allegations does not absolve Thurrott of liability for repeating and republishing these claims which have been publicly refuted, including by the CRD in its court-approved consent decree.”

On and on it goes. In my opinion, which I’m still allowed to have, this is a classic billionaire vs. ordinary human legal threat, where someone with infinite funds can spend whatever he wishes–thanks, Microsoft–to ensure that his reputation is whitewashed online as much as possible.

But more to the point, these were the demands.

• Thurrott must update its article to remove the false claims identified above.
• Thurrott must append to the article an editor’s note that alerts readers to the correction and sets the record straight.
• Such steps would be in line with steps taken by other media organizations that recently published, and then retracted, similar libelous claims. Notably, even the electronic edition of Mr. Schreier’s book has been updated to acknowledge that the CRD admitted its harassment claims were unsubstantiated.
• Failure to update the article would be evidence of actual malice.
• We trust that Thurrott will treat the issues raised in this letter with the seriousness and diligence that Thurrott owes to its readers.

So, I had two responsibilities here. One, that this billionaire not sue me and my family into the financial stone ages. And two, to my self respect and credibility with readers. And in the end, I decided that meeting those demands was not possible. So I just removed the review.

Cowardly? Yeah, maybe. But I didn’t make false claims which assumes both knowledge and intent. I reviewed a book that made claims. And there is a history out there, what we might call the truth, that I feel is somewhere between what they claim and what really happened, and that the book is likely closer to that truth. Just my opinion. Which I am legally entitled to. And is what a review is, by the way. But whatever.

My opinion of Bobby K is negative. I am allowed that. And looking this episode up now, I can see that someone wrote about the threats that I and other reviewers received. It notes that Gizmodo edited its review as demanded by K’s lawyers and that what the did wasn’t enough, so “K seeks damages to be determined at trial.” Maybe appeasing these people wasn’t a good choice either.

Also this. I mean, for crying out loud.

? Windows 12, modern architectures, more

louiem3 asks:

Hi Paul, do you know when we will start heading about Windows 12? I’m thought it would be when 10 goes out of support but I am not sure.

No. I mean, this is sort of the million-dollar question. Having just written something that touched on this, I was reminded that, two years ago, and ahead of Microsoft’s initial Bing AI (Copilot) announcement, I had written an article about AI maybe being the next wave, and that it seemed to me that perhaps AI capabilities would be how Microsoft moved to a Windows 12. This still makes sense, logically. But it’s interesting to note that my description of Windows 12 here parallels what did happen, 18 months later, with Copilot+ PC:

“But like Windows 11, it is possible that Microsoft will limit the availability of Windows 12 to those PCs that include dedicated NPUs. This would much more dramatically reduce the number of devices on which users could upgrade. But perhaps there is a middle ground in which those on older PCs simply don’t get newer AI-based features, or some subset of them, or they just run much, much slower.”

But here’s the thing. It sort of doesn’t matter. When I wrote that, we had just come out of an era that we didn’t know had ended. The ways that Microsoft develops and markets have changed over the years. Windows 8 was kind of the last traditional Windows release, in that it was a big bang version upgrade with a public launch event. As soon as that landed (with a thud, but whatever), Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer talked up “rapid release” and how Windows would get quicker updates. At first, this was about fixing Windows 8, though the 8.1 and other post-RTM updates. But Windows 10 arrived with “Windows as a Service,” the end of the traditional 10-year support lifecycle and what was, at first, two “feature updates”–major version upgrades–every year. We thought the version numbers were over.

But this new rapid release cadence was also about mobile and how Apple and Google were revving their platforms each year. And that Microsoft needed to do the same. So Windows upgrades became free, too, matching mobile (and too late to save Windows Phone). No one cared about big releases every three years, so we got new features over time. Windows 11 is still, in many ways, a curiosity, in that it was not a big platform upgrade, but just a UI update. But that, too, was influenced by mobile.

Microsoft could have renamed Windows 11 version 23H2 to Windows 12, as it could with any subsequent release, and it’s worth pointing out that 24H2 was the big foundational upgrade that previous Windows 11 versions were not. But in addition to the end of big updates–an issue Google suffers from, as does Apple, though to a lesser degree–Microsoft is hamstrung somewhat by the legal agreements associated with enterprise licensing. And switching the name of the product, though it’s literally just branding, triggers a host of support requirements for businesses. And it does not do that lightly.

When you say that the end of support for Windows 10 is the expected time for a Windows 12, you’re right in a logical sense. I think so too. But things have changed. And I have a difficult time dealing with this, even though it’s right there in my face. This is maybe unfair in that it’s too broad, but I think we just need to give in to the chaos and uncertainty because no one at Microsoft seems to care. Consider the stupidity around Microsoft not saying in March that the Dev channel was moving to 25H2 when its changed its build series, even though that’s what happened, and it only came clean in late June. Why?

Because maybe it doesn’t matter. That shift to AI in Windows 11 was a major change to the platform, one that a decade or two earlier would have triggered a naming change. But there are two qualifiers there. One, the Microsoft of 10 or 20 years ago would have released this new Windows version only when all those features were done, whereas today it dribbles them out over time. And two, major versions don’t matter anymore. No one cares. So it will just keep changing Windows over and over and over again.

I can’t stand this. I really struggle with it.

Also, when buying a new pc Laptop these days if I wanted to continue down the route of x86 for now is it best to just focus on AMD instead of Intel? Seems like they are pulling ahead as fast as performance.

After literally decades of stagnation, the PC as a platform is finally changing in important ways that will benefit all users. This is because of Arm, of course, but as Terry Myerson once told me, it sort of doesn’t matter if Arm “wins,” what matters is that the platform improves for everyone. So Intel could have improved its chips to meet the Arm threat and, if that worked out, great, we all get better efficiency, battery life, reliability, and whatever else. Or Arm wins. Whatever.

But life is interesting. Intel resisted change for too long and may have set the stage for its own extinction. The x86 architecture is never going away, the installed base, collective understanding of this platform, inertia, and whatever else will ensure that. It can outlast Intel, like a cockroach surviving the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. Whatever. But it’s also improving. AMD more so than Intel, in my experience. And worse, Lunar Lake was actually the right design change to meet this threat, and as soon as Intel released it, it promised to never do it again. Lunar Lake is a one-off, and its subsequent chips are a step back in some ways. Future chips may make up ground again, we’ll see.

I brought two very similar laptops to Mexico, one based on Lunar Lake and one based on AMD Ryzen 5. They’re both very good, really. Intel has finally gotten on top of the performance issues that dogged Lunar Lake at first. But the AMD version is better in every way. Snapdragon X (Arm) is better still, in every way, except for gaming performance and compatibility. But the way I think of this today is that all three are fine, they’re all at least good enough. And it just depends on what matters to you.

For example, if you care about reliability, battery life, and performance, and you do not need to play modern AAA games on that PC, ever, then Snapdragon X is absolutely the best choice. It’s not even close. If games do matter, AMD and Intel are both fine, but because AMD offers better reliability, performance, graphics, and battery life, I recommend that over Intel. But if you do end up with Intel, perhaps because the laptop you like is only offered with that option, you’re good. It will be fine. Not perfect, none of this is perfect. But nothing worth spiraling over.

I use so many different laptops that I see the issues more acutely, I guess. When I get up in the morning and open a laptop that I was just using the night before, and it goes into a lengthy cold boot-like process instead of just coming on, I know it’s because it’s an x86 chip and not Snapdragon, and it bothers me. But if this is your day-to-day experience, you maybe don’t notice or care. I just see a lot more consistency from Arm and prefer that. But I also do play games. So AMD is fine. So is Intel, really. But it would be my third choice if I had options.

Our world will be in a better place when Arm wins. I say it that way because I don’t think it’s possible to truly fix x86. I think that Intel and AMD can improve matters. But that x86 will never catch up. Conversely, Snapdragon/Arm will catch up in gaming. Microsoft knows this. It’s why it pushes Arm so strongly, why it wants to use Arm everywhere, including in Xbox. But these things happen at their own pace. Arm is inevitable, but we all have work to do. So don’t worry about it and just get the PC that best matches your needs. It will work fine for years to come, most likely.

And things will change. Maybe the next-gen Intel chips will nail it, maybe the company will dig out of this hole it created. Maybe maybe maybe. We’ll see.

Lastly curious if there was any way to support thurrott.com besides being a member? I subscribe to twit.tv as well since I’ve been a listener of WW since 2006. It’s harder to find solid tech/it content from experienced professionals like yourself.

Thanks for thinking of that. For now, no, not really. This hits on a sort of business side of things that I’m not good at and don’t pay enough attention to. And maybe something I should figure out. In my ideal world, I just get to write and not worry about money. But that’s not realistic, and I am behind on that side of things.

I don’t know what to say here beyond I love doing what I do, I appreciate the support, and I hope that what I do has meaning to those I’m interacting with. And I need to do better in so many ways. That being one of them.

But thank you. Seriously.

?Local AI, Windows, and the future

owllicks asks:

I recently bought an Asus Zenbook A14 with the Snapdragon X Plus. I was curious if you have any tips or recommendations for applications that take advantage of the AI capabilities of the Snapdragon chip. I’m fairly new to AI and would love a good starting point to explore and enjoy the many AI features available. Thanks for all you do, I have been a lurker for many years now and just recently joined with a Premium account.

Thank you for that.

So this is tied to a few of the discussions above. In early 2023, Microsoft hinted at how AI would transform Windows, and then it announced what we now call Copilot and spread it throughout the ecosystem. The two years since then have been confusing and chaotic, with constant change. And with Windows in particular.

For a long time, we would describe Windows features as being specific to whatever product editions (Home, Pro, etc.) or requiring specific hardware. For example, Windows 11 may support Windows Hello facial recognition, but it’s only going to work if the PC you use has compatible sensors. It doesn’t matter in that case if you’re using Home or Pro.

AI has messed with this formula a bit. There are AI features in Windows 11 that will work on any PC because they are cloud-based. Some of these features are just “free,” but some require you to spend “AI credits” that are tied to a Microsoft 365 account. And then there are features that require local AI that typically runs on an NPU. For several years, this was unusual and limited, pretty much to Windows Studio Effects. But with Copilot+ PCs, which can run Windows 11 Home or Pro, there are many local AI features that depend on their more powerful NPUs. These features do not work on other Windows 11 PCs, and don’t even appear there. And then there is AI that can run against dedicated GPUs. There are no Windows 11 features that currently require this or can even use a GPU. But there are third-party creator apps that work better with GPUs, just as games do.

Ignoring the GPU bit since that’s not something Windows 11 currently supports in any meaningful way, this means that you have a confusing matrix of features to consider.

• Cloud-based AI features that include the Copilot app and many features across apps like Paint, Photos, Snipping Tool, and more.
• Local AI features that require the NPU in a Copilot+ PC like yours. This does not include the Copilot app, oddly, but there are system-level features (Recall, Click to Do, Windows Search with semantic search, more) and individual features in apps, too.
• Third-party apps and external Microsoft apps that can be cloud-based, which is more typical, or can use an NPU (or, yes, a GPU) and are workflow specific. For example, Grammarly is an AI-based spell and grammar checker than is cloud-based and works on any PC, but many creator tools (video editors, photo editors, etc.) and developer tools have isolated, individual features that only work, or work better, with NPUs.

It’s confusing. And it’s changing all the time. Literally every month, in Microsoft’s case with Windows 11.

Recommending what to try is a little difficult because it depends on what you want/need. But there is an AI Hub in the Microsoft Store that’s worth looking at; it doesn’t do a good job of differentiating between local and cloud AI, but it has a good list of AI-capable Windows apps. And it does highlight new Copilot+ PC features, too.

Sticking to what’s in Windows 11, to me, the biggest Copilot+-specific features are:

• Recall. This is the infamous feature that Microsoft used to sell Copilot+ PCs, and it’s unnecessarily controversial. But it’s also gotten better, functionally. You just need to leave it enabled over time and then try to use it to find things you did in the past. This is one of those things you’ll either love or just don’t care for. I don’t use it personally.
• Click to Do. This is perhaps my favorite Copilot+ PC feature. It’s much more useful, to me, than Recall. And it is getting better all the time. Long story short, it lets you interact with what you see on screen anywhere using a growing set of text and image actions. If you’re looking at text, you can use it to get a summary, rewrite it, push it into Copilot, and so on.
• Windows Search with semantic search. Microsoft needs a name for this, but if you configure Search to index your entire drive and/or use OneDrive extensively, Windows Search is suddenly excellent at finding things. For example, when I open File Explorer on a normal PC and search for “Windows Home Server” from the root of OneDrive, I get “No items match your search.” When I do that from a Copilot+ PC, I immediately get over 400 results.
• Paint features. Paint supports Image Creator, Generative erase, and Remove background features on all PCs. But if you have a Copilot+ PC, you also get Cocreator, Generative fill, Sticker generator, and Object select features.
• Photos features. The Photos app offers Generative erase and Background blur, remove, and replace on all PCs, but it also offers Restyle image and Super Resolution on Copilot+ PCs, which I often play around with.

If this seems fairly short and uninteresting, yeah, I hear you. But it’s getting better over time, and there are other minor things, like Click to Do integration in Snipping Tool, or major things if you need it, like live translation in Live Captions, too. There are interesting Copilot features worth exploring, though none are specific to Copilot+ PCs, like Copilot Vision. Even Notepad has some excellent AI-based writing tools, again not tied to Copilot+ PC. And if you use Edge, there’s a Copilot sidebar that can be useful though, again, not specific to Copilot+ PC.

I cover these things in the Hands-On Windows podcast, if you’ve not seen that. I have recent episodes about recent Copilot+ PC features, free AI tools in Windows 11, Copilot Vision, recent AI advances in Windows 11, and so on. It’s kind of a rolling thing since it keeps changing.

Depending on how technical you want to get, you can also use Visual Studio Code with its AI Toolkit extension. This lets you find AI models, and you can filter to those that run locally against the NPU, download one or more, and then interact with them as you would any cloud-based chatbot, like Copilot or ChatGPT. This is interesting because you can compare how a local (small) AI model handles queries compared to a (large) model in the cloud. The latter is much better, but small, local models are improving quickly too.

If you’re not into that, you can see this difference graphically by trying the same prompt in Cocreator in Paint, which runs locally, and a cloud-based AI tool like Microsoft Designer. The latter will always provide more impressive images.

With third-party apps, you’re going to run into the same issues in that it depends on your needs and many of these things are just individual features and so it’s hard to know what’s what. In my case, I use Affinity Photo 2, and in addition to running natively on Snapdragon X, it has individual features, like Object Selection, that can run against local AI models. There’s a video editor called CapCut that uses the NPU for features like Auto Cutout and background removal. DaVinci Resolve is a very complex video editor that has even more NPU-based features. Or Luminar Neo, a photo editor with Supersharp AI and Upscale AI features that run 200x faster on Copilot+ PCs because of the NPU. I’m not sure how up-to-date this, but Qualcomm has a site that lists NPU-powered apps, and that might be a good starting point.

It’s still early days, of course. The primary advantages of a Copilot+ PC remain performance, reliability, efficiency, and battery life.