Windows Weekly Episode 805 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word.
Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott is here and as usual there's very little talk about, but we're gonna make it a really long show. No, I'm just kidding. He is gonna talk about the new Beatles album, believe it or not. We'll also talk about why software is getting worse, not better. What's new in Microsoft 365? And are you ready for the Surface Duo Insiders program? That and a whole lot more. Coming up next on Windows Weekly podcasts you love from

TWiT Intro (00:00:27):
People you trust. This is TWIT.

Leo Laporte (00:00:37):
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott. Episode 805 recorded Wednesday, November 30th, 2022. Week E is a lie. This episode of Windows Weekly is brought to you by IT Pro tv. Join a community of IT learners who access 5,800 plus hours of IT skills and training courses and interact with each other and subject matter experts to better themselves. Their organizations and their careers Get 30% off when you sign up at IT pro.tv/windows. Don't forget to use the code WW 30 at checkout and by MIMO monitors and their award-winning small format displays, touch screens and tablets. And don't forget to try unify meeting for all your video conferencing needs. Visit unify meeting.com. Enter the code WW 50 for 50% off a year's subscription. Or use the code WW and get 25% off any of mi mo's displays. Limited time offer and buy, nor layer, nor Layer is a secure network access solution for your business. Join more than 7,000 fully protected organizations by going to nor layer.com/TWITt to get your first month free. When purchasing an annual subscription, it's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we cover the latest news from Microsoft with thro from thro.com. Hello? Hello Thurrott.

Paul Thurrott (00:02:04):
I clicked my volume mic on my entire system paused for a

Leo Laporte (00:02:06):
Moment. Oh dear. Never ever click <laugh> the volume mic on. You

Paul Thurrott (00:02:11):
Know, what,

Leo Laporte (00:02:11):
What's going on? What, what the heck are you see? One of the things you do, Paul, which is I think troubling to be honest.

Paul Thurrott (00:02:18):
I, I'm sure. Okay. Only one thing.

Leo Laporte (00:02:20):
Only one thing. But the one thing is you're always using a different computer for this show. Like you don't have a dedicated computer because you're always trying out laptops. So every week it's a new thing. What are you using today?

Paul Thurrott (00:02:34):
Actually I, this one I've had for a few weeks now, it's an hbn V 16. Nice. Yeah, it's got a gpu. Lots of ram should be great. 

Leo Laporte (00:02:43):
Just don't press the, the volume icon.

Paul Thurrott (00:02:46):
Listen, I, this is come, we're gonna talk about this later today because I, this is, this goes into my whole 12th gen intel thing. I've been uhoh the lone, the lone voice and the wilderness about, but we'll get there. We will get there. Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:03:01):
First of all, I wanna welcome you into the tutor verse. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you have finally

Paul Thurrott (00:03:07):
<Laugh>. Yeah, I know. Signed

Leo Laporte (00:03:09):
Up and I forgot what,

Paul Thurrott (00:03:10):
I think I missed a step like two weeks ago, and then I, I redo

Leo Laporte (00:03:13):
It. And then you wrote like, as cuz because what we're doing now with Tweet, that social arm master instance is saying you have to be a TWIT listener to do it. Of course. I recognized your name, so that wasn't a problem. But I think you wrote something that would normally have completely gotten you booted off

Paul Thurrott (00:03:30):
<Laugh>. Oh, what did I write? I can't remember. I wrote something.

Leo Laporte (00:03:32):
I'll have to, I'll have to look and see. But your excuse. It's like I have to, or something like that. Do

Paul Thurrott (00:03:38):
Son of a, but

Leo Laporte (00:03:40):
Remember I can, I can find that I have the, I have the power to see what people wrote. I do, I should mention, if anybody wants to be in TWITt Social, it's a great place. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> we're really, I, I don't know if you've noticed yet since you're so new, but it's a really completely friendly, nice conversational area. But I in order to keep it that way at at minimum expense, I I kind of, I only I have, you have to apply. Right. And then when you do apply you have to write a reason. And you wrote the reason that I generally reject, which is I'm looking to move off of TWITtter. Right. That's the one, you know, fine move off TWITtter, but not, not to to social. That's for us.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:31):
I see. I

Leo Laporte (00:04:31):
See. That's okay. Because I did recognize the name

Paul Thurrott (00:04:34):
<Laugh>. Okay. Actually, I, I saw the, so, because I had gone through this process a week or two earlier. Yeah. I guess I didn't complete the final step, so Right.

Leo Laporte (00:04:41):
You got the email and all that. I

Paul Thurrott (00:04:43):
Yep. And I thought, I'm already in what's going on here? So I just did it again and it seemed to go through. Yeah. Then I had to, you know, it said, look, you're gonna be on a waiting list. And I thought, well, I don't know how often he looks at this, so I'll just, I might be,

Leo Laporte (00:04:54):
I tried to do it TWITce a day, you know. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:04:57):
Right. But I don't, you know, I had no expectations. No,

Leo Laporte (00:04:59):
No. Sometimes it's longer of light. I've been doing it TWITce a day cuz there's, you know, quite a few people. And I have to moderate, I'm aggressively moderating as we welcome all these new people in to make sure that we don't let in any bad apples.

Paul Thurrott (00:05:12):
<Laugh>. I

Leo Laporte (00:05:15):
Somebody, somebody mentioned Hunter Biden's laptop and that was like, mom, you're gone. <Laugh>. Yeah. And then he said, what, what did I do? And I said there's plenty of places you can hang. Not a year. So don't go in there and talk about Hunter Biden's laptop. Okay. I

Paul Thurrott (00:05:29):
Don't that I can guarantee

Leo Laporte (00:05:31):
<Laugh>. Okay. I figured you were safe on that. Yeah. I'm

Paul Thurrott (00:05:35):
Not, yeah. I'm not there for political stuff. Not

Leo Laporte (00:05:37):
Nothing wrong with Hunter's Biden's laptop, just not here. There's plenty of places like TWITtter. You can, you

Paul Thurrott (00:05:43):
Can do that. I'll listen. My week has been a three week disaster of Elon Musk posts, and then I know the people who love him.

Leo Laporte (00:05:50):
Oh,

Paul Thurrott (00:05:51):
I know. It's showing up in comments and it's like, guys, this is not the topic. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:05:56):
The thing that makes it, it fascinating. And of course, one of the things that's great about the ma on now TWITt social is mm-hmm. We've kind of gotten over that. So we've moved on. So there's not a lot of conversation like that. I can't say that for the shows yet. <Laugh>, it's still newsworthy. You know, Elon has now declared war on Apple. What, what could possibly go wrong? But I think people are missing the point of that now. And now I'm kind of, you know, really the real question is what is he, what's going on? What's he thinking? What is he, what did he spend 44 billion of other people's money for to acquire TWITtter? And I now think I understand because he knows that it's not Yeah. He knows. It's not politic to say, you know, apple is against freedom of speech. And he deleted the tweet that said, I'm going to war with Apple. But sure. Nothing he should know. He owns the thing. Nothing has ever deleted from TWITtter. Tweet it once and it lives forever. Tweet

Paul Thurrott (00:06:56):
It once. Shame on me.

Leo Laporte (00:06:57):
No way. Exactly. Yes. Yep. I figured it out. I think this is all about political power. That, and because immediately Ron DeSantis, the governor Florida, who is probably, you know, he's currently the front runner for the Republican nomination for 2024, immediately jumped in and said, yes, Elon, you're right. And we're gonna go after Apple. We're gonna start an investigation. I'm sure members of Congress will do the same. And now I understand what Elon's up to. This is all, it's a lot of money to pay. Sure. But I guess if you're a billionaire, it's nice to kind of especially a billionaire that lives on government subsidies to some degree. It's nice to have the ear of Congress and the White House. And I suspect that that's, that's his, now I'm starting to think that's his motivation, which means bottom line TWITtter's only gonna get more political and more device, you know, more fight, fight, fight. You

Paul Thurrott (00:07:55):
Know what? And I have to say thank God because it wasn't too bad before. And seriously, are you kidding me? <Laugh>? What,

Leo Laporte (00:08:01):
What is,

Paul Thurrott (00:08:02):
What was TWITtter before?

Leo Laporte (00:08:04):
It's still like a, well, it's good for TWITtter. This is what TWITtter knew. This is what Jack Dorsey knew. Yep. Outrage is good for engagement. It's what every tech company knows. Outrage, good for engagement. And that's why it's kind of nice to be somewhere where there is no commercial interest. In fact, it's costing me money. <Laugh>. Oh, I with no possible way of recouping. There's no commercial interest. It's just pub a public space. And same thing with our, our forums. Your forums I'm sure is the same. Your comment section you know this is the old fashioned web where you had a blog and you'd post your ideas and you'd have a conversation and you know, trolls,

Paul Thurrott (00:08:43):
Trolls, my comment section is a disaster. But I, you know, you can only do what you can do. We have a, we use open web. They have pretty good moderation Yeah. Capabilities. 

Leo Laporte (00:08:53):
No, I see the silliness in your, your comments, but that's also part, somebody posted this too. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, the internet didn't suddenly get bad <laugh>. It's always been, you know what, remember the flame wars on used net? I mean, it's always been this way. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:07):
The, the right. I I, I don't know if I wanna go too far down this path. The internet has amplified the stupid and people who are in fact a minority, are seen as being a majority because they're so loud and they're always there <laugh>, you know, and it's just it's a little depressing. Just how much stupid there is in the world. I I, and then I have to beeding

Leo Laporte (00:09:32):
That you worked at a bank, you know how much stupid there is in the world, <laugh>. Have you never dealt with the public before,

Paul Thurrott (00:09:39):
<Laugh>? No, no. I, I

Leo Laporte (00:09:41):
Mean,

Paul Thurrott (00:09:42):
Like, so in, in the, in the mid 1990s, I lived in Phoenix and I went down to a flea market and there was this it was like a video game store. And they had, they had stuff at a flea market and they had all these classic video games, new un un unopened in boxes Atari 2,600 in television, Clicko Vision stuff. It was all brand new. In fact, I was so into, I had it in television. So I knew that some of the things that they had, I had never seen in stores before when the stuff was new. So I, and they were selling it for nothing. A couple bucks a piece. So I started buying it and I would sell it on, I guess it was Usenet, which I accessed through America online, because this was in the pre broadband days. Right. And what this did was it opened me up to an audience that was much bigger than what was available locally, which was a good thing. Right. And I, people would buy these things for $25 a piece. It was an incredible business. And of course the, the store that was selling me this for, for one to $2 figured it out <laugh> because I kept buying more and more. And they said,

Leo Laporte (00:10:40):
How were they getting it? I mean, it sounds like it was hot merchandise.

Paul Thurrott (00:10:44):
Yeah, no, what they had done was they had bought at an auction, cuz I talked to the guy in the store a, a supply of it was literally boxes. You opened the box. It was all the video games inside of a store that had gone outta business in California in the 1980s. And I think this stuff had sat in a warehouse. I

Leo Laporte (00:10:59):
Think I used to go to that store. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:01):
<Laugh>. So, I mean, it was, anyway, I, my point of, the point of the story is there's a good side of the internet where it does open you up to this. You, you find people of a like mind who don't live near you. Right?

Leo Laporte (00:11:12):
Yes. Which is wonderful also. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:14):
But it's also terrible because after a while you only seek out those people. And everyone else is an idiot. <Laugh>, everyone else is, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:11:24):
Whatever. That's a bad tendency. I agree. I agree.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:26):
Yeah. So I think what we're seeing is the dark side of that. Yeah. And

Leo Laporte (00:11:30):
So you're saying I should probably let people talk about, I should be less ac aggressively moderating, moderating our forums and our, our mess, do you

Paul Thurrott (00:11:39):
Think? No, I'm not saying that. Okay. I, no, I don't know what I'm saying. I guess it's hypocritical. I I,

Leo Laporte (00:11:45):
I don't, here's our rule, our rule in the TWIT social is you can bring up controversial topics. Yeah. But, but it has to be to be civil discourse.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:53):
I just, I just had, I didn't type this in, but I just had this thought today. I was, you know, going back and forth in a comment section on my site with some guy, it doesn't matter. And what I wanted to write was, can we, can we just discuss this reasonably? Yes. You know, does it have to be so antagonistic? Right. You know, and my problem is if I'm someone's being antagonistic to me, I'll just bring, I just, I'll, I'll escalate it. I can't, I don't like to be talked to like that <laugh>, you know, not because I'm anyone important, but I just, I find it disrespectful and I just, but I'm also just disturbed by this isn't too, I sides of an idea. This is like objective truth versus what you think is insane. And I I I, I have a hard time with it. I have a hard time with.

Leo Laporte (00:12:41):
But we're in, this is the problem. We're in a post-truth era and we can't seem to agree on what, what's true, what's true.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:48):
And that

Leo Laporte (00:12:49):
Becomes

Paul Thurrott (00:12:49):
Obvious

Leo Laporte (00:12:50):
If people adamantly aver that the earth is flat.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:54):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:12:55):
The conversation sort of stops.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:57):
You must have seen the, just the unbelievable photo, the selfie, you know, they called it of Artemis out as far beyond the moon as any incredible Yeah. Thing has gone and taken a picture back of the moon in the earth. And if that, aside from the fact that the earth is not flat <laugh>, you know I I I that's I don't understand how that doesn't inspire you to love science. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:13:20):
Yeah. Exactly. And space, space. Explor. And, and this is my always been, my thought is if you love technology Yeah. You love science. Cuz technology is science applied. It's just, it's just the applied version of all the, the sci without science, technology, witchcraft. So, right.

Paul Thurrott (00:13:37):
Right. Which actually we'll talk about later in my, our troubleshooting section <laugh>. But yes, it is

Leo Laporte (00:13:42):
There is some voodoo involved in, in troubleshooting. I do agree <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:13:46):
We're gonna talk about that because I, I have, I have, well, we'll talk, actually we're gonna talk about it up front one of the first topics too. But yeah, this is yeah, you go into computers because knowing that everything is ones and zeros.

Leo Laporte (00:13:58):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:13:59):
It's determin software code. Yeah. Should be perfect. Yeah. It should always work. Yeah. And I don't think software code ever works. And I think we need to think, we need to figure that out. It's kind of an interesting problem.

Leo Laporte (00:14:09):
We're gonna, Alex Stamos is gonna join us next show on this week in Google. He's of course well known, famous security guy was at Yahoo, then at Facebook, left over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. He was the person Zoom called when they were getting heat for not being, you're not doing a good job of encryption. He's really widely respected. And this is gonna be the, I think one of the things I wanna talk about with him, which is we expect everything to be software. Now every, every company has to have a website, has to have an app. But there are a limited number of people can do that competently.

Paul Thurrott (00:14:47):
All right. So this is going down a weird path

Leo Laporte (00:14:49):
And it costs money to do it. And I can't tell you how much crap software this came up cuz our son Michael is now working a union job and he at a big grocery company. Sure. And neither the union's website, Northern Grocery Company's website work at all. I mean, they're, they're just broken in dumb ways. And I see this all the time. And I think it's because people are cheap. They don't wanna pay for good. I mean, unfortunately good engineering is very expensive these days. I know. Yeah. And so they don't wanna pay for it. We had, we shut down one of our sites, the tech eyesight because it would've cost $250,000 to update it.

Paul Thurrott (00:15:30):
Yikes. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:15:32):
Well, we're paying almost that much to update TWIT because we used an old version of Duple which is now outta service, or soon gonna be outta service and a security problem. And it costs, you know, mid six figures to fix it. So well, like it's low six figures. We, we, we, we negotiated it down, but okay, this is expensive. I understand. But we've kind of put pressure on everybody has to be computerized and yet we don't have the horses to do it properly, which means it's a world of crap.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:06):
Yeah. A world of crap. That's pretty much exactly what it is. <Laugh> <laugh>, I don't know. I, we, I, years, I don't even remember the exact context. There's something with a smart TV probably. I remember someone talking about smart TVs and how you could, you know, and you can update it over the internet. You can have apps on it. I'm like, why would you want any of that stuff? <Laugh>? What are you talking about? Have you ever used a computer? Why would you want something like that? We have this device that turns on instantly. And what you're saying is it's gonna have a boot process. Software's gonna be involved, it's gonna connect to the internet, and then you're gonna update it over time. <Laugh>, here's an idea. How about a screen that just turns on? There you

Leo Laporte (00:16:44):
Go. I don't, nobody makes it. I

Paul Thurrott (00:16:45):
Don't want that stuff. I don't understand. I, I feel like, like I'm not a Luddite, I'm, I'm surrounded by technology. It's my whole life in many ways. But, you know, you have to have some kind of a balance there too, right? I mean, get outside for crying out loud. I mean, go for a walk, you know, and maybe get your, leave your ears off. And this sounds, if

Leo Laporte (00:17:03):
You go for a walk, you know, at least one ear put in headphones so you can listen to the show. So please. Okay. Okay.

Paul Thurrott (00:17:08):
<Laugh>. Sure. Well balance, I mean, this is the challenge. This sometimes this

Leo Laporte (00:17:12):
For technologists, and I often wonder this because a lot of what I've done in my entire career is talk about the next shiny thing everybody should buy.

Paul Thurrott (00:17:20):
I know. And thats not good for the world. That's not good. You have, you must have moments of doubt because I have the same problem. You know, where every once in a while it's like, look, I want my net influence here to be positive. And I, you know, it's, my mother called one time and you know, she was probably in her late sixties at the time and she said, you know, I, I, I really want to figure out computers. Like I really don't understand them. I said, mom, listen, you've lived long enough. Don't, don't do it. <Laugh>. You, you have enough heartbreak in life there. Why would you, you've gotten along fine without computers. Don't, don't. I

Leo Laporte (00:17:51):
Used to tell people that on the radio show all the time, it's okay at this point. Yep.

Paul Thurrott (00:17:55):
Don't, don't worry about it. Don't worry

Leo Laporte (00:17:57):
About it. But I wanna know what everybody's doing and talking about. Yeah. It's just a world of pain. Now, meanwhile sure is we'd really, this is why we needed Mary Jo, cuz she would've slapped us around 10 minutes ago. We are waxing philosophical, but I think it's good. I

Paul Thurrott (00:18:13):
Think it's good. Yeah, I did. So

Leo Laporte (00:18:14):
This is this is you and I would talk half talk like this all the time in the past.

Paul Thurrott (00:18:18):
I had a, so just to finalize this thought, perhaps, you know, one of the things I've thought about a lot is before there was an internet, I was always into computers. So I had a combiner four in the early 1980s at Migas. You know, whatever. And I say this all the time, but I think back to these days, and I can't for the life of me remember what I was doing because none of it was online. Not really there, there was some early BBS type stuff and that kind of thing. But you can't use a computer and not be online. I, I know that's not technically true, but I mean, most people associate the computer with what happens online, right? So if you unplug the internet and were staring at your computer, I think a lot of people, like, I, I guess I'm not using this thing today and that's kind of weird, but I actually, my wife and I read newspapers in the morning, not paper form cuz it's, you know, the 21st century, but on devices.

(00:19:09):
And we usually, we'll talk back and forth like, you know, this headline or this, did you know what this word means? Cuz we're both writers and we're horrifically boring. And today I just went off on this thing. It was sort of like that, you know, I don't remember what we did. Like, I was trying to remember what life was like, just in general. Like, we had, it wasn't just like I was into computers. Like everything in life was not online. Right? So like, new, some human being would bring a newspaper to our door. We had the paper delivered for

(00:19:38):
A long time, like a really long time. Even past the beginning of the internet. Like, these are things I don't know that my kids or other, you know, anyone growing up today would even understand what this, it would look like. It's like seeing a picture of colonial days and be like, yeah, those are people and everything, but they're walking around with horses and there's no electricity. I don't understand this world. And I feel like the internet has been such a huge change. It makes the first half of my life or whatever feel like that, you know, like olden days, you know? Yeah. I can hardly remember it. <Laugh>, I, sorry, one, sorry, sorry to keep going on it, but sound

Leo Laporte (00:20:18):
I remember old guy sitting on the porch. So

Paul Thurrott (00:20:21):
In some, sometime between 1990 and 1993, I was driving to work. I worked at a bank and the car in front of me was weaving all over the road. Oh yeah. And I thought this guy was drunk. And so there was a point where you cross over the highway and there were now two lanes you could go on the highway or cross over and I was gonna cross over. He was going to the right. So I pulled up next to him on purpose to take a good look at this guy because if he was drunk, I was gonna call the police some, you know, even I'll follow him, I guess. I don't know what I was thinking, but, you know, anyway, he was on a phone and no one was on a phone in 1990. In 1990, except unless you were a doctor, maybe or something like that. So I guess he was a doctor. But this was my first experience with someone trying to talk and drive at the same time. And he was weaving over the line the whole, like, he was, he could not drive. Oh, not good. And he was very clearly a professional. Like, he was not a, like, he wasn't drunk. He was, you know, 7 30, 8 o'clock in

Leo Laporte (00:21:13):
The morning, seven, but a stroke or something.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:16):
He was just talking on the phone. That's all he was doing. And that was my first, I was like, wow, that's this is gonna be a problem. That's not, that's not something one should do. <Laugh>. 

Leo Laporte (00:21:25):
He was, I didn't even

Paul Thurrott (00:21:26):
Own a, I didn't, I didn't own a phone of my own like a

Leo Laporte (00:21:29):
No. That was a

Paul Thurrott (00:21:30):
Fancy front for many years

Leo Laporte (00:21:32):
Then. Yeah. Yep. You saw the future. That was the future in a little little droplet

Paul Thurrott (00:21:39):
Of, so someone in the chat, bejo is you were making pretty ky art pictures. Actually, one thing I was doing was making fractal drawings with my Amiga. Really cool. And the way you would do that is you would set it up and turn it on and you would go to bed and you'd wake up in the morning and it would just be finishing. Cause Yeah. And you'd have a fractal.

Leo Laporte (00:21:56):
It was like watch a paint dry. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:21:59):
Yeah. Yep. Yeah, it was, sometimes it would be like a fractal landscape. That was the big thing. You could have trees and, you know, whatever.

Leo Laporte (00:22:07):
And I just just last year started writing Zinsky Triangle code and lis and you press a button and it draws a, you know, as big a one as as giant, you know,

Paul Thurrott (00:22:19):
Forever. Back in the day that would have to render

Leo Laporte (00:22:21):
Rent. Yeah. Now it's like, boom. So we're just stupid at speed now. Really is the difference. <Laugh>, we've, we've, we've made it even faster.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:34):
I just listen, we, we were given superpowers and we have used them for dumb.

Leo Laporte (00:22:39):
And that's exactly,

Paul Thurrott (00:22:41):
That

Leo Laporte (00:22:41):
Is, that's what you would've predicted.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:43):
Yeah. But it's still depressing. You know, you wanna see things like the Artemis thing or something, something inspiring, something.

Leo Laporte (00:22:49):
Well, it's both Paul. Let's face it. It's both. And that's the good news. Yeah. There is amazing inspiring stuff being done. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> they just, they just announced an Alzheimer's drug that's actually effective, which is mind, mind boggling. Right. so there is amazing stuff being done. Look, let's not forget we have a vaccine that has saved us from a plague.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:13):
Yeah. We also live in a country where universal healthcare is not a Right. Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:23:18):
<Laugh>. There's pros and

Paul Thurrott (00:23:19):
Cons, you know, so, and it's,

Leo Laporte (00:23:20):
We now have to pay for the vaccine. We

Paul Thurrott (00:23:22):
Bang up job fixing one problem. Everybody. Is cancer still a thing? Oh, it is. How are we paying for that? Oh, I'm paying for that. This

Leo Laporte (00:23:28):
Is the thing. You look at a glass, you say it's half empty.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:32):
No, Leo,

Leo Laporte (00:23:33):
I look at the glass, I say it's half full. You know what happens though? An engineer looks at the glass, he says it's poorly designed.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:39):
I look at the glass and I see a crack. And I think to myself, that's gonna look. When does the internal bleeding start? <Laugh>? It's a, it's a way worse than happen. It's way worse than happened. Yeah. There's a chip in the glass and I know it's inside me somewhere. And yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:23:52):
That's, let's talk about Windows 11. <Laugh>. Yes. On that note, what's the latest Mr. Thurrott? <laugh>?

Paul Thurrott (00:24:00):
Well, before getting to the actual news of which there is little <laugh>, I wanted to that

Leo Laporte (00:24:05):
By the way, just for people a little inside baseball. That's why I'm stalling.

Paul Thurrott (00:24:10):
Yeah. Yeah. We're

Leo Laporte (00:24:11):
Filling the podcast. Yes. And you know what we just did 24 minutes.

Paul Thurrott (00:24:15):
Sure. Solid content, solid charge for this. We should, for this. Should, we really should. So <laugh> listed to my insane rantings about nothing <laugh>. So I, I think it's worth kind of taking a step back and thinking about how Microsoft has presented the way they're gonna update Windows going forward and maybe assess the reality of that situation. Right. when Windows ten first came out low all those years ago was a seven, seven and a half years ago, so they would've announced it about, you know, a little over eight years ago, they introduced this concept of Windows as a service. And this was a way to get windows on the train that was the rest of Microsoft, right? We know that this thing is a legacy software product, but let's see if we can't update it like an online service and just keep it fresh. And, and there's so many things that have to happen for that to work.

(00:25:07):
 We want every version, we want every person or as many people as possible to be on the same version of Windows, which was a dream that was never realized and we now know will never be realized because that will make it easier to deploy software patches. Right. Rather than having to do them across many multiple versions, which, you know, as we've talked is what actually happened. They also had to you know, just update the sta the updating stack. Right. You know, make it more modern. And that means lots of different things. We see this on mo mobile as well. You have apps that are updated through the store. You have this kind of monolithic thing that is the operating system that's updated through Windows update and those feature updates, you know, at the time were TWITce a year kind of a big process.

(00:25:48):
It's a version upgrade. But then in the interim, they've developed these other ways of updating the operating system and doing pieces of it at a time and doing it in non dangerous ways, you know, allegedly, or hopefully where they can update more and more of the system as if it were an online service. You know, that kind of thing. So that was largely unsuccessful, I'd say for most of Windows ten's active lifetime. But actually today I think they've done a pretty good job with it. In fact, the way you can tell they've done a pretty good job with it is they've moved Windows to a once a year feature update cycle, which is okay good. And they've said, well, you know, we're not gonna, we're not gonna interrupt you so much, which sounds great, but actually what they're gonna do is deliver all these tiny updates things that would have waited for the next feature update, like all the time.

(00:26:37):
You know. And so when pressed on this, Microsoft has said, well, we're not gonna do it that much. We don't, don't know what the exact schedule is, but there'll be like maybe two times a year, maybe three, you know, whatever Windows 1122 H two debuted in the beginning of October. And we have already seen two. And technically the beginning of, well actually by the end of the year, I can say three of these updates. So just in the not quite two months, <laugh>, right. There will be three things that would qualify as what Microsoft calls internally A moment. A a moment to update, right? Little updates to Windows that just add kind of little improvements, right? The big one was the October slash November update that added the missing features from 22 H two. Tied into that was a, a surprise bonus feature that right click on the task bar, get to task manager thing, which had never been announced and as a feature coming in that release.

(00:27:32):
And so that was kind of neat. And we'll talk in a bit about a preview update that is a preview of a coming moment that some of the features will arrive in December as part of the normal patch Tuesday. And some of them might kind of creep in over time. Like the, the code is in there for additional features. They're not enabled, but they can be very easily with a quick switch. And, you know, look, it's not a lot of time. I mean it, as I say this, it's what the very end of November. So yeah, it's been about two months. I guess it'll be three months by the end of the year. So in this very short period of time, they've actually updated Windows a lot. Not in major ways, right? But in minor ways since 22 H two came out.

(00:28:19):
 That's kind of astonishing. And you know, for the people who were freaking out over the really aggressive schedule of Windows 10 and then celebrated that they were stepping back from that cliff and only updating once a year with Windows 11 is a little bit of a wake up call. You know it it's, it's really interesting because, you know, technically what they said was true, we're only gonna have one feature updated a year. Nice asterisk, but we reserve the right to update windows at any time. And as I wrote it, you know, when they, whatever they said that quote I wrote, and they will, and because they have like, that's, you know, like it's the whistle in Mexico City thing we talked about, you know, you don't give these guys a whistle not to blow it. You <laugh>, we're gonna blow the whistle, we're gonna blow the whistle a lot.

(00:29:07):
And that's kind of what they're doing with these moment updates. So with that as kind of a background Microsoft yesterday released what <laugh>, this is also funny, kind of funny cuz I, a stupid sense of humor, what would be called typically a week C update. Now if you look at a calendar, you'll discover that yesterday and this week is what, what we might call week e <laugh>, you know it's the, the, the mythical fourth week of it's the week of the last. Yeah. How does it be c I don't know know. So I guess they missed the

Leo Laporte (00:29:42):
Patch Tuesday's the second Tuesday. So that

Paul Thurrott (00:29:45):
Would Tuesday would've been the, that's, well that's actually Patch Tuesday's week B.

Leo Laporte (00:29:50):
Oh, so they do it by the calendar, not by

Paul Thurrott (00:29:52):
Their own. Yeah, it's, and it's by the Tuesday, right? So the eighth was the second Tuesday of the month. That would've been patch Tuesday the 15th was just week C. Nothing happened. The 22nd was right before Thanksgiving. I guess you can understand why they wouldn't wanna do this before a holiday, but for some reason <laugh>, well probably cuz they wanna ship the non preview version of this. They shipped what is normally, in fact they describe it as a week c update in, in what is in week. It doesn't exist Weaky, which is not a thing. It's, there's no such thing as wey. But, but

Leo Laporte (00:30:21):
Well, there is though, some weeks, there are some months, there are five Tuesdays, aren't

Paul Thurrott (00:30:25):
There? I I mean, in Microsoft's up their world, they don't, they don't talk about week. There's no week. So there's always an ABC and I, you know, technically there's a D but there's nothing scheduled for week D Week. Week D is a is a week of free.

Leo Laporte (00:30:36):
You're saying week is a lie. Is that what you're saying?

Paul Thurrott (00:30:39):
Week <laugh>, it's like the 29th of February. It's, it exists. It doesn't happen all the time, you know, that's all. So this happened very, you know, this happened late in the day yesterday, and I looked at <laugh>, am I side eye watching the Mexico versus Saudi Arabia game? No, I cannot stand soccer. I'm side outing, side side eyeing discord. So, which

Leo Laporte (00:31:01):
Is probably joking about Windows. Weaky.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:04):
Weaky

Leo Laporte (00:31:04):
Weaky.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:05):
Yeah. so anyway,

Leo Laporte (00:31:08):
Actually you side eyed the SY court asking you if you side eye the game. Yes. That's crazy.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:15):
Oh, I couldn't,

Leo Laporte (00:31:16):
You'd have to be, yeah, let's not even start, let's not even go to the, the disgrace that is FIFA

Paul Thurrott (00:31:24):
<Laugh>. They have an ethics committee. Did you know this?

Leo Laporte (00:31:27):
That must be a really frustrating job.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:30):
That's so good. No,

Leo Laporte (00:31:32):
You can't take that Bri. That's the best.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:33):
I'm gonna take that Bri,

Leo Laporte (00:31:34):
But you can't Yeah. Have some of this Bri Okay.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:38):
The FIFA ethics Committee. It's like define oxymoron. Yeah, fifa. FIFA Committee. It's, it's beautiful. Anyway, sorry, so <laugh>. Anyway, yesterday Microsoft released, this is how the, the official name is the November 20, 20, 20 22 non-security preview release, right? So it's a preview release. It, it appears in Windows update. You have to go to Windows update, you have to click it to get it. And if you install this, what you're getting is a preview of what everyone's gonna see in December on Patch Tuesday, whatever the second Tuesday of December is, it looks like it's the 14th, which is actually pretty late in the month. Actually as late in the month as it could be. In fact December. Oh damn. Yeah, four weeks. So whatever. They also said, look, this is gonna be, that's

Leo Laporte (00:32:24):
Another thing that happens when you get over 50. You start doing a calendar math

Paul Thurrott (00:32:28):
<Laugh>. Oh, listen, we're gonna do a lot of math today. I get some, I get some Call of Duty math. Oh, uhoh. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I, yeah, I do a lot of math. And I'm terrible at math, so it's usually comical. They also said this will be the last preview for non-security updates for Windows 10 and Windows 11 of the year. So there, there won't be any of these previews in December for January, which might be a good sign for January. It might mean we're not getting any little hiddens, you know, sneaked in moments or whatever. So there are three new features that for users, this is actually a fourth feature for it, but let's just say there are, there are three new features for users in this preview release. So we know that these three new features will go public in December for everybody.

(00:33:16):
But like I said, this actually some other features that are hidden in this release that if you use a VI tool, which is software product somebody wrote for this purpose is to take, you know, if you type in the right code, you can expose features that are hidden in Windows 11. There are actually a couple of additional features. So it's possible that those will arrive publicly in December on Patch Tuesday, or maybe they'll come out over time. Like so many things do. Most of 'em are not particularly interesting. But the, the one that is kind of obvious that you'll, that anyone will see is they've integrated Windows Spotlight into the theme section in personalization settings. So if you open settings, go to personalization. That's nice. That's a nice, yeah, it is nice. Yeah, it was a little hidden before you could, you could in fact use the Windows Spotlight as a theme of sorts.

(00:34:01):
 Now it's, it's listed with the themes and it's right there. You can see it. It's nice. The other two things to me are very much related and one of them is so misworded you can't actually tell what it means, but basically further one, drive integration into the system where you get storage alerts if you're close to your storage limit and one drive. And then if you're paying for OneDrive subscriptions, which could probably happen in two different ways. There, there's a paid, I think it's a 100 gig or maybe a 200 gig subscription you can pay for. I think that's about it. Or you can get Microsoft 365 personal or family, right. And get the additional terabyte. You'll see the total if you have multiple subscriptions. So I guess it, I think what they're trying to say is previously it would only show one of the two, but if you had both, in other words you were paying for Microsoft 365 plus you were paying for a OneDrive subscription, it would only show one of them.

(00:34:52):
So I guess it's gonna show both. It's worded so poorly. I can't <laugh> I can't even actually tell, can't tell them. I don't even understand what they're trying to say. Right. it fixes some bugs. There's some two big two semi-important ones. One is there was a bug with a lot of modern apps. You'd double click on where they wouldn't run, which is hilarious. And the other one was that gaming performance problem that we, I think we talked about earlier where there was something about Windows 11 that just made games run slower and they fixed that. So you don't have to, you can uninstall Windows 10 and come, come running back to Windows 11. Everything's fixed. So this is just kind of interesting because we just had 2022 in October. We just had the November update, for lack of a better term in November.

(00:35:37):
And now in December we're gonna get this thing, which doesn't really have a name, it has a kb it will have a different KB in in December. But there's a KB article associated with it and they're gonna add three to four new features in this thing. Actually, there is possibly as many as six depending on what they enable. And this has all happened just the last three months of the year. Nothing, you know, revolutionary or whatever. But this thing is not something that is set in stone and you know, look, maybe this is just a me problem, but I'm writing a book about this damn thing and I have to say the rate at which they're updating, it could make this very difficult for me depending on what they do. So the Windows Spotlight issue, sometime in the next three weeks, two weeks, I guess two weeks, I'm gonna have to go switch up a couple screenshots and maybe alter some texts.

(00:36:25):
That's not a big deal. It's not a big deal. The one drive thing, I don't think I need to worry about that. But, you know, there might be changes coming that will require bigger changes for me. And actually we'll get to that in a minute. Looking further down the road with you know, moment moment updates. So, you know, we have talked about how the Windows Insider dev and beta channels no longer represent actual versions of Windows. Wait. And I think this moment thing kind helps explain, wait a minute. It doesn't make it, wait, what? <Laugh>? Well, in other words, if you're, if you're test so used back in the day, if you were testing like on the beta channel Yeah. You were testing the next version of Windows, right? Yeah, yeah. If you were testing just whatever they'd throw down at you, it's, yeah, it's a little closer to release, like dev channel.

(00:37:14):
We may or may not put this to Windows Beta channel. We're probably gonna put it in Windows if it makes it to release preview. Yeah. It's coming to Windows, you know, so, so this actually, this is critical. This changes what it means to be a beta tester. That's right. Right. This, this is something I've really struggled with because I like things to be a little more concrete than this. But I will say, when you think about it in terms of these moment releases where everything is just a rolling set of updates that may or may not happen at whatever time. I don't mean to say this makes sense. I wanna be clear about this. This makes no sense. But it makes more, it makes, well, how do I say this? It makes more sense if what you're doing is having a rolling series of updates, right?

(00:38:00):
Moments. So in other words, they, they, there's some set of features they want to add over time. They're plugging them into the, hopefully the dev channel first, by the way. They don't always, but let's not get bogged down in that. They test it with a certain group. They move it to the beta channel, the beta channels where they have the AB type testing where some people get the new features, some don't. This has to do with enablement packages and testing this process where they can deliver the update to a computer, but not display it in the UI and then flip a switch and have it come on later. That's what they're really testing there. They're really testing moments. That's what this really is.

Leo Laporte (00:38:35):
But is it, so is it, has it always been the case that if you're on the insider ring, you're there to trial new features and to kind of give them feedback like going to a sneak preview of a movie before it's done?

Paul Thurrott (00:38:46):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:38:47):
Or are you there to bug test what will be released to make sure it's rock solid when it comes out? I feel like it used to be the, the ladder, but maybe I'm wrong. Was it always about testing?

Paul Thurrott (00:38:58):
Most people would tell you that changing a contract after it's signed is illegal. So I, I guess what I would say is, for most people who signed up to the Windows Insider program, the the, the system has changed. It's not what it was. Yeah. When they probably signed up, right? Yeah. Okay. So, so it's okay if they describe it accurately. I don't feel that they've described it well, but they, they're kind of stuttering stepping toward what this thing I just said, which is, it used to be that each channel was tied to a specific version of Windows, right? Over time that change so that, well, two of them are tied to a specific version of Windows, and now really only one of them is tied to it's messy. It

Leo Laporte (00:39:34):
Does, it, it feels messy and actually

Paul Thurrott (00:39:36):
It is messy. So at some point there'll be some testing, well, I can't even get into this. There'll be a 23 H two at some point, right? Yeah. Is there gonna be a, a, a channel or, you know, that is that thing. No, that's not how they do things. That it's, they have these three channels. They're in different phases with regards to some new features. Some are closer to release, some aren't. Some will come before that release, some will come with that release, some will come after that release. It's what happened with 22 H two. I'm sure it's gonna happen with 23 H two. But I think the big difference between this year and last year is that last year we only had one or two minor kind of moment type updates. There was the, there was the one they really promoted, but I think it was back in February which actually wasn't that big of a deal. But whatever, I think this year is based on the past two months and, and what's coming in December, I think we're gonna see more of it. I think this is gonna be a lot more of it. So it might help to make the Windows Insider Program make sense.

Leo Laporte (00:40:38):
I guess it doesn't, it doesn't, I understand why there are people, people at Microsoft who say, well, we're thinking about this feature. Let's, instead of having a focus group, let's just throw it out to the insiders and see how they use it. Because they get telemetry right. About what you click on, how you use it. I understand though, I didn't want that data, but I would argue that the most important role of the insider program is beta testing features that are gonna come out to make sure they're rock solid before they come out. And I do feel like of late, Microsoft hasn't done a great job in that regard. So maybe that's a mistake. I agree to do, to do the, you know, the feature testing,

Paul Thurrott (00:41:14):
Maybe somebody actually knows this, right? There, there should be a list somewhere based through the feedback hub of what are the most upvoted, you know, feature requests kind of thing. You can make a list. Here are the top 10 feature requests for Windows 10 11. Does that in any way map to the changes they're making in the actual product, right? No, it doesn't <laugh>. So I mean, I, but someone could check on that. It's gonna, I, my assertion is that it doesn't, but whatever, I don't, I don't really think, and this is the problem, I, I, I think people who go into the insider program do so with the intention of tr helping to make the product better and, and having some influence over that, whatever that might be, and being part of this thing where I'm testing a pre-release version of Windows, and I like doing that, you know, then that's fine.

(00:42:02):
And I, I unfortunately, I feel like the program has changed so much that there are people who latched onto the Beta pro, the beta channel because that's what they wanted the next version of Windows. And now there's some percentage of them that aren't even getting the new features. And it's like, that's why I'm here, <laugh>, you know? And it's like, well, we need you to test this other thing. It's like, that's fine. But I, that's not what I agreed to test. I, I, you told me I was gonna do this thing, but now I'm doing this other thing. So over time this will probably become less problematic because time will go by and people will just kind of understand what's happening. And but there are people like you, like we keep talking about this. You're kind of stuck in the beta channel and you've checked the box.

(00:42:42):
I want to dis-enroll this thing whenever this version of Windows comes out, this version of Windows is never coming out. So there's that <laugh>, you know, and there's silent on this issue, right? There are probably ways to get out of this thing without destroying everything on the computer or whatever. But this is something I feel like is their responsibility, Microsoft. So the insider programs to explain what's happening and, and say, look, we know some of you are here for two weeks or something. We're gonna give you the a way out or something. You know, I I, I'm surprised this has never happened. So that's a, that's a troubling aspect of it. But, but okay. Move past that, whatever. We, not every week, but almost every week we get new builds in dev and beta. There are often new features. We just got one this week, or, well, it was probably last week actually Last week.

(00:43:33):
No, it was this week. It was yesterday, sorry. And they're testing all kinds of, you know, they're testing all kinds of things. And so these are features that may appear in a future moment. I think as, as these features move into the beta channel and then release preview, they become more certain, I can tell you that, you know, one of them is pretty innocuous. It's a a little VPN overlay on the network icon and the system tray to indicate when you are protected by a vpn, right? No big deal. This is a common sense edition. This is probably something that existed in previous versions of Windows. It's, if, if so it's missing because this is a new town. Okay, that's fine. But the thing is like, they're also testing different designs for the search box in the task bar. And this is where I feel like we're losing the script a little bit here, because there's already several ways to access search in Windows.

(00:44:28):
I don't feel that it's a hidden feature that people, people can't find. There's a magnifying glass right in the task bar. Some people are now seeing a search pill thing we talked about and we're actually gonna talk about it again. They're talking about bringing a search box back, like in Windows 10, that search box would have that search highlights little graphic which is whatever <laugh>, you know, I don't need that, but I dunno, it's a little bit of color I guess. And then you have all the other ways to, to access this thing, right? The keyboard shortcuts, the link, the start menu, et cetera. So I, this is, to me, this is the disconnect. I, this is not, to me, is not what anyone should be working on, right? And I'm not, I don't mean to fall into a trap, like the guys working on search could be fixing this other thing that I think is important.

(00:45:17):
I realize not everyone works on the same team and has the same expertise or whatever, but putting effort into this part of Windows 11 shows a, a huge disconnect between what people are really doing and what a real need is and what they're doing. And I just don't understand why they would waste time on that. But they are <laugh>. So there you go. There you have it <laugh>. But here's the thing not done. Cause that reminds me of what's happening out in stable. So we, we have this Windows Insider program, which we can agree or disagree on how it's done. And some people may like it, I guess. I don't know. I don't, whatever. And obviously they get to do what they want, right? Yep. And I'm, I'll make the case given that we are like, I don't like it, but given that we're gonna have these moment updates, which might be every month, every quarter, whatever it is, yeah, okay, this system makes a little bit of sense.

(00:46:08):
The features will pass through each of the three channels, like a piece of meat going through your colon or whatever and, and fine. And then maybe it appears unstable. But the thing is, there are huge inconsistencies in stable, which I'm calling, I'm using this name, that's not what anyone calls it, but the, the version of Windows 11 that's out in the world, right? So when my wife is using her computer, my daughter, my, you know, brother, whatever, they're using Windows 11, right? They're, I think they're all on 22 H two. But we could all be on the same build number. Literally. Like in fact, it's 22 6 21, oh it's 900 now. Well it's 900 cuz I updated with the preview update. So most people I think are on like 8 91, 8 92, something like that. When you're on this build today here at the very end of November, you should have all of the features that are in 22 H two, right?

(00:46:57):
Including those November update features, right? So when you right click on the task bar, you should see task manager as an option. Across my PCs I have, I would say most have that task manager, but some do not. This PC did not until I installed that preview update I've been talking about weird. Now when I right click it, task managers is there, this has not been there before. So this, this only happened because I guess because I installed it something, it's like it shook something loose in there. I don't know <laugh>, but the, the more, the more troubling one to me is this search box thing, right? We talked yes, yes, yes. Most of my computers have a, have the icon. That's it, just the magnifying glass and, and the mouse over capability. Actually I should check it here cuz that changed. Let's see if this changed.

(00:47:47):
 When you months over the, the icon, if you have the traditional, the original icon, right? You get something very useful. Yeah. You get a little flyover, a flyout or whatever you wanna call it. And let me, I'm sorry, with you search. No, I got the pill. I got the pill here. So you got the pill, you got the pill to date. I would say if of any given 10 computers, I might use seven of them had. That's so weird. I've, I have the, the little icon and three of them had this, what I'm gonna call the search pill. Yeah. Which by the way, according to this post from yesterday, they're still testing in the dev channel, but it's out in the world. They never said it was coming. They never announced it, they never said we're shipping this. It's it, it's <laugh>. It doesn't work.

(00:48:29):
It doesn't have the flyout. Yeah. So I mean you click on it and search comes up and that's fine. Yeah. But I love the flyout cuz it's recent searches and it makes it of course to go where I want to go right now. Look, if we're gonna do this, if we're gonna play this game with search, right? Which I think is a waste of resources and time, but whatever, if we are gonna do this, here's the thing, have a controlling settings that says you can have an icon, right? You can have the pill thing, you can have a search box. Make it your choice. Their choice. You could have, if you have the search box, you can have search highlights or not the little graphic that appears in it, right? Just give it all the options. I don't care. Just do that. But it is very strange to me that I see inconsistent results on stable versions of Windows 11, that these are on PCs that have never been anywhere near the Insider program.

(00:49:19):
 This is troubling. And actually, I will say, just for the purposes of me writing a book, the fact that they're still working on this, right. They're not sure where they want to go with this means imagine they did the search pill thing. I'm like, oh, I guess I'm gonna have to change all the screenshots in the book that have a picture of the task box. See, that's why I really bother bothers you <laugh>. No, but no, but that would be one thing, right? Yeah. We redesigned the search box. You know, I, I, I talked in the past about how there have been three designs, visual designs Yeah. Layouts of the File Explorer application in Windows 11 since it first came out, when I wrote the book, and I started this back in July when I actually started taking shots. I had a pre-release version of the thing that was gonna be 22 H two, and I went with the third one, <laugh>.

(00:50:04):
Right. Knowing that if some people got the book early and had an, like, the initial release of 20 H two file Explorer would look different. But knowing that it would eventually look like the thing that was in the book, which is what happened, by the way. Right. So I was, I got that one. Right. But imagine if it's like, you, so here it is, it's November. I'm like, man, I guess they're changing to the search pill. I better go fix all the screenshots. I could waste a week doing this. Right? Yeah. I have to fix this, their

Leo Laporte (00:50:28):
Screenshot. Then of course, you know, they'll change it

Paul Thurrott (00:50:30):
Back. They're gonna change it again. That's the thing. The, the fact that they don't know Yeah. Which one they're gonna, they literally,

Leo Laporte (00:50:37):
They're AB testing though, right? I mean, right.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:40):
They've never said that they're doing this. That's,

Leo Laporte (00:50:43):
We don't know what they're doing.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:44):
Yeah. They've never explained it. So it looks like they're up in the air about search. So I'm gonna pray to God this becomes an option that people can select. Not just because it will make my life easier. It's not just about me, but literally. Because if you care about this feature, I just turn it off. I don't want this thing. But if you care about it as a user, what you should want is the choice for you. You have these different experiences, that's fine. Just let me have the choice. But what we have now is a system. There's a risk.

Leo Laporte (00:51:16):
What's going on. There's, there's a risk to that. Cause you don't wanna add so many settings that it becomes, you know, a dense pop, you know, like a bramble

Paul Thurrott (00:51:26):
Bush. Except, here's the thing. In Windows 10, those settings all exist. Everything I

Leo Laporte (00:51:31):
Just described.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:31):
Okay. You could have there, they're already there. This is a regression from Windows 10. And it's a regression because like I said, the task bar in Windows 11 at the time was brand new. It was, it was not based on the old code. You know, the Windows 10 task bar had kind of a, I'll call it a win eye kind of look and feel. But the code had been there for a while. Like this. There's all this, this ancient stuff built into it. Related, you know, things like toolbar and all the different things you could do with the task bar back in the day. The Windows 11 task bars unencumbered by that stuff, which is fun in a way, <laugh>, but it's, you know, for people who are used to those features, it's it's a regression. You know, it's a, that could be a problem. So, yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:52:13):
That, that's the world. The negative on it is it takes up more space and it doesn't have that search history popup feature. Right. the, the search bar from Microsoft's point of view, and I'm sure that what they're doing is testing and looking at the telemetry. They're hoping more people will click on it now. Cause it says search.

Paul Thurrott (00:52:31):
That's exactly

Leo Laporte (00:52:32):
Right. And they want people to click on it because there's some advertising in it. You know, I get my Bing rewards points. That's

Paul Thurrott (00:52:38):
Right. Yeah. The, the one thing I see, I would personally never use the, a search button in an operating system to do a web search. But that is one of its functions. And no matter what you set as your default browser or it's default search engine, it's edge, those searches will go through Edge and we'll use microsofting and will be promoting their advertising.

Leo Laporte (00:53:00):
That's what it's really, that's really what it's all, of course.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:01):
Yeah. Which is its own form of terribleness. Because this is not done to make the experience better for users. It's done to make it more lucrative for

Leo Laporte (00:53:11):
Microsoft. They may say, well, but people like you are gonna hit the Windows key and start typing. You're never gonna use that. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So this is for the naive user.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:23):
They're, listen if this is, if this works, they'll probably turn what you just described off, right? Cause they don't want me doing that. They want me hitting this thing

Leo Laporte (00:53:30):
That would make me really mad. Although there are we third party tools that do it, but that, that really power users live on that feature. Right?

Paul Thurrott (00:53:40):
I made that up. Right. So I'm, they're not saying this happening. I, well, but you could, you could, you could picture them. Well, we'll disable it by default, and then you have to turn it on. Right? And it's not one of those settings that sink, it confuses,

Leo Laporte (00:53:49):
Honestly, they don't, people accidentally hit it and things pop up and they don't know what to do. So we're just gonna put as a nice pill, right? On the task bar that everybody knows what it does.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:59):
I mean, if you're OCD enough, like I am, they got to this point where task bar is centered, but not really. Cuz there's like all the system tray stuff and now you're gonna introduce one icon that's a different width and the other icons, what are you doing? Makes, that's the real problem. That makes me insane. But that's, you know, whatever. Like I said, I don't care that other people want it. Or even that Microsoft would make it the default. As long as I could change it.

Leo Laporte (00:54:21):
You can turn it off. Right? I mean, let's face it, you're, you can turn it off. Stuck with it.

Paul Thurrott (00:54:26):
You can turn it off. You can turn it off. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm not in the, I'm not in the, I don't have a, well no, that's not true. I haven't, I haven't updated my one dev channel pc. So I, I haven't looked at this thing. Someone is saying that there are controls in there. For something I, for

Leo Laporte (00:54:40):
Whatever, well, you can turn, I'm looking at personalization in the task bar. You can turn it off along with task. You, you

Paul Thurrott (00:54:45):
Turn it off. Right? But, you know, if you had windows at 10, what you would see is that you could also decide what it looks like.

Leo Laporte (00:54:51):
Yeah. I don't, right? I don't see that.

Paul Thurrott (00:54:54):
No, there's nothing. Cuz this, this is brand new. There's nothing like that.

Leo Laporte (00:54:57):
Right. Nothing. Maybe someday that'll be there.

Paul Thurrott (00:54:59):
On or off. That's what you get. Yeah. It's simple. Which by the way, a part of me appreciates. I, I, that's, I like the simplicity thing, you know, minimalism, whatever.

Leo Laporte (00:55:07):
Yeah. But did you use the, the hover over the search thing ever? I mean, was that, is that something you're legitimately in the

Paul Thurrott (00:55:14):
Missing? No, because I turned it off.

Leo Laporte (00:55:15):
I turned it off, right. Yeah. I just turned it

Paul Thurrott (00:55:17):
Off to No, but I, this is not for me. I don't, I don't just think about me. I mean, I, you know. Yeah. No, no, no. I'm supporting people who read what I write. But

Leo Laporte (00:55:24):
Ultimately we have to look at our behavior as a to understand how people use it. It's hard to see into the souls of other people.

Paul Thurrott (00:55:30):
Well, what I try to tell people is like, look, if you're not gonna use this stuff, turn it off. Turn it off. If you are gonna use it, depending on what it is, still turn it off. Because you can save space on the task bar for application icons. And you can still get to the stuff with a keyboard shortcut. Right. We talked about the example of well actually this one's a good example too. So with the search box, search pill, whatever it is, our search button, yeah. That little fly out is kind of nice, I guess. Cuz you could mouse over it. Select the thing, you want to go back to the same search, it's a little quicker, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it's nice. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So if you do that kind of thing a lot, yeah. Leave it, then leave it on, you know, or the, the big one is the task view button, right?

(00:56:09):
Because if you use the desktops feature, which is virtual desktops that comes out with a mouse over interface, which is really nice. So even if you don't use task view, per se, if you do use desktops, leave the button there. Because that's a really quick way to access that stuff. Otherwise you have to click or well al what do you call it? Windows key plus tab to open that environment. And then you get your desktop interface. Like, it's nice to just have it there, you know? Yeah. It depends. It depends on you need. So you just wanna, my deal is I have to kind of figure out all the angles and what, you know, if you want this, do this. If you want this, do this. The problem is the way it is right now, it's, I don't know what you're gonna see on your task bar. It depends. It depends, you know, we could be on the same build and you see a, a task, a start pill, and I see an icon. I don't, I don't know. I don't know why. Magic. This is the magic thing is this ones and zeros, this should, did they release that by mistake? Here's, by the way, think of the, think of the implications to this. There's only two ways this could have happened, right? There's secretly AB testing out in public, which I, I I think we can all agree is not

Leo Laporte (00:57:15):
Cool. Yeah. This is not just insider people. Others

Paul Thurrott (00:57:17):
Are great. That's evil. Yeah. That's evil is what that is. It's evil. It's not Right.

Leo Laporte (00:57:22):
So didn't do that. Right? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:57:23):
Or it's a mistake, in which case they're inept. So, which you want it to be <laugh>. Like, which, which is better.

Leo Laporte (00:57:29):
It's like when I got pulled over by a cop <laugh> who said you're either dumb or reckless <laugh>. Which, which is

Paul Thurrott (00:57:39):
Your choice. You're

Leo Laporte (00:57:40):
Choice.

Paul Thurrott (00:57:41):
I will take dumb for 100, your honor. Dumb

Leo Laporte (00:57:44):
Your Honor. <Laugh>, I think that's probably what I said.

Paul Thurrott (00:57:48):
Of course. What else you can, I mean, what do you need to

Leo Laporte (00:57:50):
Do? I'm dumb, your honor. <Laugh>, he was in a bad mood. It was all I had done is pull, pull up, drop off my daughter at elementary school and lights flashing.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:02):
But you had, you had to do like a Tokyo drift into the parking

Leo Laporte (00:58:05):
Spot just to prove your call. Well, yeah. I like to do a little <laugh>. So now it's our arrival. It just

Paul Thurrott (00:58:10):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:58:10):
Hey, let's take a little, little break and more to come more of this fine chatter to come. We still have much more to talk about, believe it or not. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But I do wanna mention this episode of Windows Weekly is brought to you by IT pro tv because I love these guys. And gals. I love what they do and I feel honestly a little responsible for it. Pro tv it all started back in 2013. I was doing an NA panel. Adam Carola was there a bunch of, a bunch of podcasts are talking about video podcasting. And in the audience Tim Broom and Don Ette, who were at the time, IT trainers in a traditional classroom setting. And they, a light bulb went off Bing over their head and IT Pro TV was born. They are taking the best IT trainers in the world and doing the best IT training you can imagine.

(00:59:08):
And if you like a classroom, you know, real time environment, they do it live just like we do. There's a chat room just like we have. So you can't interact. But then everything they record is within 24 hours, move to the library. So they always have up to date content on every area of IT. Training, whether you're new to it, you know, you want to get that first job, whether you're just an enthusiast who wants to learn this stuff, or you're a professional already in the biz trying to re-certify, get new skills, get a better job. IT training at it. Pro TV is the best. It can change your life. They offer virtual learning solutions that work for everyone. The, the videos cover every vendor, every skill you need to advance your IT career, even if you're just getting started or you're a very advanced professional because they're in a talk show format, you know, it's entertaining, it's engaging.

(01:00:03):
But I have to say, I really give them credit for bringing in the best trainers. These are people working professionals. They're not, it's not academic. They are in the field doing this stuff every day. So when they teach you, they're communicating real world experience. Even more important, maybe they have a passion, they love their work. And that passion communicates in two ways. One, it's going, it's going to, it's catching, it's going to rub off on you. But also because they're passionate and engaging. It's fun to watch. It's, it's, it's, it's engaging content. They have 5,800 hours now of IT training. And it's al as I said, always current. Cuz they're always adding daily all the courses. They do a really smart thing. They divide the courses into 20 to 30 minutes chunks. So it's never too much to absorb. You know, I, I recently learned that your brain can only absorb three new ideas at any given time.

(01:01:01):
So that's why they kind of, they chunk it up so you get okay, absorb it. They have ways that you can further absorb it. They have transcripts of every course. They have TE practice tests. So if you're going to be taking a certification exam, you can practice it first. Always a good idea, practice it, see if you're ready for it. And also just get used to the format and all that stuff. They have virtual labs, which are a great way to take what you just learned and put it into practice. I think it's, you know, learning is and they know this so well. They're really experts in learning a multi-step process. You get it, absorb it, but then you have to put it out through the fingers, right? So that you know it those, those those virtual labs are done in any browser.

(01:01:43):
So you don't have to have a Windows machine even, you know, you can do a Windows server set up, configure it, configure clients, all that stuff. That really is one of the things that sets it pro tv apart. It's hands on learning with our hosted virtual labs. And you get OnDemand access to virtual machine environments. So you can safely <laugh> test all the skills you're learning, again, in the eyes out, the fingers in that process, you're really learning. I love that. Their online community is another great reason. And I, a lot of them are people who come from our shows. 220,000 active IT learners. That's a huge number. And when we've gone out there or we've talked to people or we talked to people in our audience, I know a lot of you already IT pro TV community members, that's great. It's a great place to go.

(01:02:34):
If you're getting into it. You, you know, you join those forums, you engage with instructors your classmates. It's another big part. Peer learning is huge. It's huge. And, and they've got it. You can learn wherever you want, whenever you want. On your computer, on your tablet, on your Roku, your Apple tv. Look, it'd be silly to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a technical college or a university degree. If you wanna work in it. Focus on the stuff you need to know that'll make you a better employee with an affordable certification based training program at IT Pro tv. Tim, Tim Broom, one of the founders I just mentioned is great. He says IT best himself. We wanna make life easier for people who want an IT career. And they do. They do. They've done so well in the nine years, almost 10 now since they started.

(01:03:28):
 We're just big fans. And I think if you are interested in this, if you're an IT professional, you wanna get more skills. If you wanna just join an IT community, there's a lot to be said for that. You'll get 30% off right now when you sign up at IT pro.tv/windows it pro.tv/windows. And please use the offer code WW 30 for that 30% off. It's really important because then they know you saw it on Windows Weekly, 30% off IT pro.tv/windows offer code WW 30 IT pro TV build or expand your IT career and enjoy the journey. There is no better way to learn this stuff at IT pro tv. And we love partnering with them. In fact, we've got a big announcement coming up. We'll tell you all about it. And not just a little bit, but meanwhile, let's continue mm-hmm. <Affirmative> mm-hmm. <Affirmative> with Windows Weekly and the now Sated. Paul Thu.

Paul Thurrott (01:04:24):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:04:27):
I don't know if you're sated. Did you have a nice Thanksgiving?

Paul Thurrott (01:04:29):
Yeah, it was great.

Leo Laporte (01:04:30):
Did the, you had Mark and Kelly were there and Yep. I saw the pictures actually. It was great. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:04:37):
My wife cooks the Turkey perfectly. So every, all of my family in the area is like, we're doing it. Your house

Leo Laporte (01:04:43):
<Laugh>. We're coming over. Yeah, we're coming over. We went to Lisa's sisters and we found out that just before we left, that they have cut the court. They don't have TV and they have no way to watch the football games.

Paul Thurrott (01:04:56):
Oh. So same with us. And so I thought ahead and went to my brother who uses some crazy Russian service for TV that cost nothing. I said, Hey, can you bring over something for the tv? So he dropped off a fire TV stick. Cause I knew people were gonna wanna watch football.

Leo Laporte (01:05:13):
Yeah. You know, we brought, I brought over. I love the Google the, it's the new Chromecast with Google TV in it. And it, I always thought, well, I hope this works. It plugged it in. It knew all my accounts. It was ready. We joined the wifi. It was, it was great. Picture was fantastic.

Paul Thurrott (01:05:28):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:05:29):
Worked beautifully. So we got to, we got to either

Paul Thurrott (01:05:32):
That or it was gonna be spent 85 bucks or whatever on YouTube tv.

Leo Laporte (01:05:36):
Well, I, unlike you, I don't use that Russian TV Fire Stick

Paul Thurrott (01:05:41):
<Laugh>. No, I don't either. This is my brother-in-law. I'm just saying like, you know,

Leo Laporte (01:05:44):
You must know Octa <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:05:47):
I don't have, I have no tv. I mean, I've No, you

Leo Laporte (01:05:49):
Don't have cable, huh? Wow. No, no. So but you wa and you don't have YouTube TV or anything like that. You just don't watch it. You have music night, you read books, you sit on

Paul Thurrott (01:06:01):
Fire. We watch, we watch things on Netflix or whatever. Yeah. We do that kind of stuff stream.

Leo Laporte (01:06:05):
I am rapidly getting there. I just saw a story that says cable TV lost 785,000 subscribers.

Paul Thurrott (01:06:11):
Every time I watch live tv it reminds me why I don't have live tv. I cannot stand it. It's

Leo Laporte (01:06:18):
Awful. I agree.

Paul Thurrott (01:06:20):
I I don't, it's crazy.

Leo Laporte (01:06:22):
I'm with you. We, we have to cut the kick cord. We haven't done it yet. I think this is the year. 

Paul Thurrott (01:06:28):
So much noise in life. Yeah. You know, just cut as much of it out as

Leo Laporte (01:06:31):
We can. Yep. on we go with the program. Let's see. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, did you finish the whole Windows 11 thing? 

Paul Thurrott (01:06:41):
Yes. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:06:42):
There's always more. I know, but so we can move on to Microsoft 365. Okay.

Paul Thurrott (01:06:48):
Yeah. So I've, I've talked in the past about how once a month Microsoft will come up with this end of month post and say, Hey, this is what we added to Microsoft 365 this month, most months. And I mean, going back, you know, five years, whatever, this has been a disaster. Like 10,000 words, you know, this crazy collection of stuff. This month it was actually manageable. And we've talked about most of this. In fact, I bet we talked about all of this at one point or another. But I thought it might be interesting just to kinda recap this cuz there's some pretty good stuff. So most of it is teams related. I would say, actually, I'm not gonna cover every single new feature. Right. But the things I think that are kind of interesting, so if you're an education or enterprise customer or of teams you've gotten a pilot version of Games for Work, which is a new teams app, which is literally what it sounds like. Casual games like solitaire mind sweeper, things like that. Built into teams, which you know, maybe I don't understand what work is all about, but that's seems like kinda weird thing to do. I, I don't know. I mean, I, I've worked for home for 25 years. That's the difference.

Leo Laporte (01:07:58):
You have not worked in an office where really the whole game is to how little work can you do? And one of the things you can do while you're there

Paul Thurrott (01:08:06):
Is you're about to discover I play a lot of Call of Duty, but I also get a lot of writing done. Yeah. so, well, you

Leo Laporte (01:08:12):
Work for yourself. You don't have a choice and you have to produce a product. I talked to my son, my son for briefly about a year was in our sales department here at TWITt. Yeah. And I had dinner with him last week. And he said, yeah, I mostly it was a question of what to do for that eight hours. <Laugh> just sit there bored. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:08:32):
This was part of the conversation. So I used to, the thing I came, cuz I've been working from home for so long, I, I very early on came to this notion that working from home in some ways was a little more honest because you weren't kind of dicking around about, you know, talking to people in a doorway. There's

Leo Laporte (01:08:48):
A lot of wasted time snack.

Paul Thurrott (01:08:50):
Yeah. Yeah. So, but when you work from home, of course you, you feel guilty at first. Like, well, I'm spending time doing things like the laundry or little bit of housework or whatever. It's, or I have to go on an errand or something. And but the, the truth is, I mean, at least for me, I mean, the type of job I have, type of work I do, I mean, I sit here for hours and hours and I work seven days a week. I mean, in some ways you never stop.

Paul Thurrott (01:09:12):
Is

Leo Laporte (01:09:12):
There a quota? Like do you feel like I have to file four stories today or anything like that?

Paul Thurrott (01:09:20):
Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I,

Leo Laporte (01:09:22):
It's self-imposed, I'm sure.

Paul Thurrott (01:09:24):
Yep, yep. I feel, look, I, this, I can't let a day go by and not write something. I, this week, this past weekend was odd because I didn't actually publish a lot to the site until the weekend was almost over. But I was writing the whole time I was working on the book. So the whole Oh, I know. The work, the book is very time

Leo Laporte (01:09:41):
Consuming. You never get to stop. Yeah. yeah, I honestly, I'm the kind of guy that if I didn't have a show to do at 11 o'clock on Wednesday Right. I'd still be in bed right now. And in fact, you notice sometimes I get here 10 minutes late cuz I'm so slow at get, I go, oh, I gotta go to work <laugh>. Sure. It's like, okay.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:01):
Yeah. I mean, I started the day earlier, but

Leo Laporte (01:10:03):
I should, I could.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:05):
Well, no, no, no. I mean, stop stopping, whatever. No, everyone's different. You know, it's whatever.

Leo Laporte (01:10:09):
I woke up this morning at eight 30, pretty typical time for me because I thought there was an earthquake. Turned out it was just the cat deciding, Hey, if he's gonna stay in bed, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get in bed too. <Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (01:10:20):
Nice. Yeah. I, so the weird thing about being a writer is, you know, if you, you have some idea for like, I'm gonna, I want to talk about this thing on a show. You can't get up at three o'clock in the morning and go talk about it. But if I have that thing, I can get up at three o'clock in the morning and write, you know. Ah, good

Leo Laporte (01:10:36):
Point. In

Paul Thurrott (01:10:37):
Fact, in some ways it's kind of better to do that because you forget.

Leo Laporte (01:10:40):
I wish I liked writing. I really do. I would, it would be so much easier.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:45):
Well, you have to be antisocial for starters. I

Leo Laporte (01:10:48):
Am. But, but, but the problem, here's what happened to me. I got spoiled because I found I could make a living just gassing. Right. And once you've, once you've made a living just going ba it's hard to make a living in any real sense. You know, you've been I've been spoiled.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:06):
No, you're, you're ruined. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:11:07):
To, I don't have to to type. I just talk, talking.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:10):
I was joking million years ago is, was in Israel on a, like a kind of a consultant type thing. And you know, everyone gets up in the hotel and goes down and has breakfast. They head into the office. And so I did that and the next morning I was upstairs. I was just, I was getting ready. I was just about to come downstairs and the phone rang and it was the boss. And she's like, what are you doing? I'm like, what do you mean? She goes, well, we're all getting ready to go to the office. I'm like, but I just went there yesterday. <Laugh> like, what are you talking about?

Leo Laporte (01:11:36):
Is there something new I should know about

Paul Thurrott (01:11:38):
<Laugh>? It's this a thing that you go in every day. I mean, you're not paying me that much. So I was kidding. I was heading down. But, you know, but that's, I dunno, you're ruined for this day to day thing. I could never commute. I'd be inside. I would be in jail.

Leo Laporte (01:11:49):
You know, you and I are lucky and I hope that everybody listening is equally lucky. We have found something that fits our abilities. Right. That fits our sense of, you know, what we like and do. And we, so we are very, very fortunate. There are plenty of

Paul Thurrott (01:12:04):
Gives

Leo Laporte (01:12:04):
To say, plenty of people are, you know, have to go in and don't want to. Right.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:08):
Right.

Leo Laporte (01:12:08):
And in fact, that's what I told Henry. I said, look, you don't have to be, it's what you know, he works harder than anybody I've ever seen Being a TikTok celebrity. <Laugh> is a geez is a never ending conveyor belt of content. Right. Just constantly. So he works really, really hard. It's not that it's

Paul Thurrott (01:12:24):
Not, it doesn't wanna work. It's a treadmill. It is a treadmill. It's treadmill. He loves

Leo Laporte (01:12:28):
It.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:29):
This is why I wish I was it. I wish I was good at music. Right. Imagine you released an album or something would never, and it's just the gift that keeps saying, it just makes money. I

Leo Laporte (01:12:36):
Get to

Paul Thurrott (01:12:36):
Play the song on, I write about technology that's outta date two days from now. And so I, you know, I just have to

Leo Laporte (01:12:41):
Keep going. So Yeah, we picked a bad field because there's no picked evergreen content. It's, no, it's not.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:48):
It's just unless you like writing about Cyber Monday or whatever, like, I mean, you pretty much can't.

Leo Laporte (01:12:54):
Lisa asked me, she said, we're doing a gift guide this year. Right. I said, no, do no circumstances. Are we doing a gift

Paul Thurrott (01:13:01):
Guide? I used to get, I used to get pushed to do that and I refused to do this anymore.

Leo Laporte (01:13:04):
Right. Never again, nobody wants it <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:08):
No. And also, you know what I, this goes back to the conversation we had earlier. I I, I have this vague problem with this kind of thing because it's like, I don't think you need to stop spending so much money on stuff you don't actually need.

Leo Laporte (01:13:19):
Like what we were talking about you had earlier. Yes.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:21):
Yeah. Yeah. It's on sale. But seriously,

Leo Laporte (01:13:23):
Look, here's a $40 shiny thing that'll be in the dump in a year. No. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:28):
Stop. Right? Yeah. Like cats chasing a light around a room, you know? So here

Leo Laporte (01:13:32):
Are two people who are particularly ill suited for using Microsoft teams, talking,

Paul Thurrott (01:13:36):
Talking about

Leo Laporte (01:13:38):
Microsoft teams. Of

Paul Thurrott (01:13:38):
Course. So let's move on to the next team's feature, which is <laugh> schedule send. Right? This is classic schedule send. I, I try not to get into trouble here cuz we use teams at work, but let's just say that some people could benefit from this kind of a thing, right? So it's Saturday, you have some brilliant burst of thought that you wanna share with your team. Here's an idea. Don't send it on Saturday

Leo Laporte (01:14:02):
<Laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (01:14:03):
Send it after 10:00 AM on Monday. Perfect.

Leo Laporte (01:14:06):
So now you can, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:08):
You're a good coworker. Now you can. Right. So this, this is a feature that obviously it's been built into email. It's a great idea. It makes sense. So good. Good, good, good. I think it was last week we talked about this notion of the sign language functionality. Love it. In teams. I misinterpreted what this was. So I should say it's not an automatic sign language thing. It's not like captioning. So you're in a team's meeting, you're hard of hearing or deaf and you have an interpreter who's gonna sign for you. What this is is a sign language view so that you and the interpreter ah, are or are always simultaneous up front. Yeah. Yeah. And, and big, you know, then the other people are smaller. So I apologize for

Leo Laporte (01:14:48):
That. So it doesn't actually do sign. That would be, I mean, we're way would been off from that. Right. There's nothing we can do, do that yet. Is

Paul Thurrott (01:14:55):
There? I don't know about that. Why not? We can do live captioning. What you're telling me we couldn't do a thing with hands, like a graphical hands doing the, I can't, I

Leo Laporte (01:15:02):
Don't know. I mean, do you need it if you've got captioning or I guess it's more expressive. That's an interesting question. That's

Paul Thurrott (01:15:09):
Actually a good question. 

Leo Laporte (01:15:11):
Ask Mark. Cuz I mean Right. Everything now is captioned even if your hearing is fine.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:16):
Yeah. We all, I

Leo Laporte (01:15:17):
Watch captions everything.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:18):
That's a, that is a great question. I

Leo Laporte (01:15:20):
Don't know. It is more expressive. I mean, I was watching football game and they had they had one of the cheerleaders doing sign of the national anthem, which I thought was interesting. I think it was on Thanksgiving. And a lot of it was like <laugh> just going like that, like waving her hands, like the sky through the night, all the photo. But it's much more, it's beautiful when you watch somebody who really does sign doing interpretive signing through in a concert, for instance. It's beautiful. It's like the

Paul Thurrott (01:15:56):
Singer. Same tell you. So my son goes to concerts. This is hilarious because he's deaf. So he, but he has cochlear implants, so we can kind of hear, but because he has this disability, he, he des buys the cheapest ticket to the concert and then he goes to the door and demands the disability service, which they have to provide. So brilliant. And they put him up front with an interpreter. Oh. Sign language. So he gets a front row seat to every concert and then two songs in or whatever. He'll say, I don't need this <laugh>. And he just tell tells he just come sit here and watch the concert.

Leo Laporte (01:16:28):
Oh, they probably love it. They get a, they get a, that's why they're doing it. Right.

Paul Thurrott (01:16:31):
That's beautiful. I mean, listen, it doesn't make up for being deaf or anything, but

Leo Laporte (01:16:35):
God, no. In fact, I don't progre him at all. Take it. You know. No, no. Every you know what

Paul Thurrott (01:16:40):
Benefit you should get. Every, we <laugh>, we went to London. Like the, actually it was the, not the, the Tower Bridge and with the kids when they were little and you know, two adults, two kids. And, and the woman said, well, he gets in free. And my wife and I looked at him, we were like, him <laugh>, like, yeah. Like, why? It's like, well, he has something with his ears, you know? Cause they look like he has hearing aids on it. I'm like, okay. I mean, I never would've even, like, whatever, if you say, you mean

Leo Laporte (01:17:07):
Mark, oh, okay. This kid, this guy.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:10):
That little, that little pain in the butt.

Leo Laporte (01:17:12):
Yeah. You know, I'm prestige 11, you know, I mean

Paul Thurrott (01:17:14):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, okay. No, whatever. That's fine.

Leo Laporte (01:17:16):
That's awesome. That's great.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:18):
Yeah. Anyhow, okay. That's great. So the, the, the final Microsoft 365 new feature, actually, this is a new app, is that Microsoft Create site. Right? And so this is Microsoft's attempt to get into that Adobe Creative Cloud, you know field or whatever. So it's a place where you get, you know templates and tips and things for social media or websites and all that kind of stuff. So makes sense. I mean, if you think about the traditional office apps, what they really are, what we would call these things today is like content creation apps, you know I don't, I'm not sure I thought of that, of award processor or spreadsheet or presentation package, whatever back in the day as content. But I guess everything's content now. So we're all content creators and they have a site for that. So Microsoft Create is a thing. Create microsoft.com. You can check it out yourself. That's, that's cool. That's fine.

Leo Laporte (01:18:10):
And that is our,

Paul Thurrott (01:18:12):
Yeah, that's the one thing that happened in <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:18:14):
Like this on 360.

Paul Thurrott (01:18:16):
It's been a short

Leo Laporte (01:18:18):
Week. That's okay. No, no. Let's now that Mary Jo is not here, you're gonna have to buy the Surface Duo, by the way. When it comes, they're gonna do a DU oh three, they're gonna do a do a three, aren't they?

Paul Thurrott (01:18:29):
They're waiting for now. So when

Leo Laporte (01:18:31):
Would they announce that

Paul Thurrott (01:18:32):
Normally? You know what I'm gonna say, here's what I'm gonna say. I think there will be a DU oh three. I I think the duo continues. It's kind of a du I think they're gonna do, so <laugh>

(01:18:42):
Leave the jokes to the professionals LA part. Sorry, I'm sorry. So No, no, yeah, that's good. That was good. Yeah, I would say, if anything, they're probably gonna do more with Android, right? And I, I've speculated about something like a Surface Pro tablet that was based on Android. So they, they've clearly turned a, a corner with this thing where in the beginning it was about dual screen devices. I think they're shifting the emphasis a little bit more to this is a Microsoft 365 device. What does that look like? Yeah. And one of the ways they can make it like that is to make it look more like Windows 11. Use that kind of look and feel, which I think is,

Leo Laporte (01:19:16):
It is still Android, but, but it could look exactly like,

Paul Thurrott (01:19:19):
But what's the difference, right? I mean, Android is where they can make the most difference on a non-Microsoft operating system. They can't really do anything with the iPad or, you know, iOS not, not anything dramatic. But they can really go in and make this thing look like they want it to look, they can customize their apps like Google wants them to do for big screen devices. So I think, I think the next Android thing it may not be called a duo, but will be a bigger screen device. So I, that's why,

Leo Laporte (01:19:42):
Here's the question from my irc. This is from Sarah Deua. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, what you think Microsoft would abandon the two screen thing and do a foldable?

Paul Thurrott (01:19:52):
Yeah. I the, the two screen thing was always a, a holding pattern, right? I mean, the, the end game here is foldable, right? It's not a, a hinge, you know, with a, an empty space in the middle. You want, you want foldable. So the, the dream for a, well, I don't know that Microsoft can achieve this. I, I, I think there's a, a case to be made for a device that could be a, like a big phone and then a small tablet, right? I think if Apple ever figures this out and they have something that's an iPhone that turn kind of turns into an iPad, many assuming they could ever get over, the notion of not selling two devices is a good idea. And they would probably get it right. I think Samsung is getting close to that with their bigger, whichever the, it's like the flip, I don't remember the names of their devices, but I think they're getting there.

(01:20:40):
 But the problem with this stuff is Android, right? So Android is still kind of struggling when it comes to bigger screens. That's been a big push of Googles. And I think when people hear that, they think Chromebook or tablets. But really it's also about these foldables and, and tool screen devices too, for sure. But I think a bigger device is what kind of makes sense. Like if you, you're gonna position the duo is not a phone, then make it a little bigger, you know, make it something you could actually get work done on. So we'll see. But yeah, I don't think they're done with this kind of thing. Oh, and the reason is <laugh> and the reason is they've, they've started it or they're potentially, this is sort of a rumor based on something that someone tweeted about and saw inside of the, I think it was the settings app. Yeah. The settings app in on their Surface Duo something about a surface inside a program. Right. Ah,

Leo Laporte (01:21:31):
And

Paul Thurrott (01:21:31):
That makes some sense, you know, test market some features with this audience. Yeah. 

Leo Laporte (01:21:37):
I mean, you have to be you're already a kind of a devote if you buy the duo.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:42):
Yeah. Right? Right. So you've established yourself as kind of an enthusiast of a thing. Mm-Hmm. Mm-hmm. And that thing, I don't think that thing is just a dual screen. I don't think it's like I'm a fan of dual screen. Like I've always wanted a dual screen. I think it's like I'm a Microsoft guy. Yeah. And I want, I want this thing that I think of it as a Microsoft 365 device. And I think those can take different forms, like I said. But I think this is a good idea. So yeah, I think there'll be more. And, and there'll be new, you know, new features and they'll, they'll update it. And it's always a little behind, I know with Android releases and all that. But it seems like they're dedicated to it. So, well, I don't see any indications this going away. You know, when during the whole Windows phone thing, there are all these warning signs like this might not be, that's making it, you know, and I don't really get that of a

Leo Laporte (01:22:31):
Painful wound right here.

Paul Thurrott (01:22:33):
Yep, yep. Yeah. The only thing that makes it less painful now as time goes on, is that there were these things that were better on Windows phone that have gotten better on Android and or iOS. So, but

Leo Laporte (01:22:45):
I, I'll be honest, the world would be a better place if we didn't have just Android in iOS. If we had Android, iOS, and Windows phone, it would be all of this about the app stores and everything. It would be, I think that choice would be so much better. We just really don't have a choice at this point. It's just two E

Paul Thurrott (01:23:03):
The thing they, they got right from a user experience standpoint that this couldn't have was never gonna succeed. But it was such a great idea for people, was sort of deemphasize this notion of brands and put everything into more logical containers. These the tiles, panoramic experiences. They

Leo Laporte (01:23:20):
Had love tiles.

Paul Thurrott (01:23:21):
So in other words, instead of thinking like, I wanna post a picture online, right? So I'm gonna use, I guess I'm gonna use the whatever app, and now I gotta go find that thing wherever it is in my home screen. You'd think, oh, I wanna post a picture. I'll go into the photos thing. Right. You know, and they, they had this integrated experience where you could send messages over different messaging services.

Leo Laporte (01:23:42):
That's right. It was like the people,

Paul Thurrott (01:23:43):
All your photos were together. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:23:45):
I loved that.

Paul Thurrott (01:23:46):
So this required buy-in from all of these services. And so when you, I always use the example of the photos cuz it's easy, you know, flicker Google Photos, wherever you had Facebook, whatever, these companies were never gonna buy into this. You know, Facebook did very briefly. And then they realized very easy, you know, quickly. Like, this doesn't, this isn't good for us. It's not good for the Facebook as a brand, you know,

Leo Laporte (01:24:08):
And that's what's wrong with computing today.

Paul Thurrott (01:24:11):
Well, by the way, you're sort of joking, but that is what's wrong at computing today because we just talked about how Microsoft is screwing around with the search button and why would they do that? And you said correctly, it's because they want, they trying to figure a way to get people to click on it. It more because it's better for them monetize. Yeah. And the with Windows phone, Microsoft had this idea that was better for people Yeah. Users. But it wasn't better for the brands. And the brands all said No. And I think with it on the Vine, because they don't, Facebook doesn't want you to think photos. They want you to think well better. No, I guess. But the Facebook app is still Facebook. Right? They want you to think of the brand. I care about Instagram, I don't care about photos. You know, they want you to think of Instagram. And that is, that is what's wrong with tech because these things, these companies, services, whatever, they're so powerful. They could, they could kill a platform, you know, which is what they did.

Leo Laporte (01:25:06):
Hmm.

Paul Thurrott (01:25:06):
Yep. It's sad.

Leo Laporte (01:25:09):
I mean, it's just hopeless that we can't bring it back. But boy, I wish we could. I thought Windows phone was great and we need that alternative. But anyway,

Paul Thurrott (01:25:15):
What we need today is actual regulation that opens up app stores and kind of fixes this monopoly probably, I guess we'll call it a duopoly problem that we have. Like we could exist in this world and be fine if these companies weren't so terrible and they're not gonna not be terrible on their own. No <laugh>, you know, they, they're gonna have to be forced to be not terrible. Yeah. And I don't see a lot of action happening. The EU is the most likely candidate to make it happen, but they move at the speed of a glacier <laugh>, you know, it's really slow. So we'll see

Leo Laporte (01:25:53):
What a world, all right, let's take a little break. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, well we mourn the loss of windows falling

Paul Thurrott (01:26:00):
Yet again.

Leo Laporte (01:26:00):
Yet again. The, but there's a, I guess that's the, you know, this all start with the duo. I guess that's really kind of an opportunity. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> the duo could be you know, windows phone reduc without the problem of not having enough apps. Cuz well, it's Android. And

Paul Thurrott (01:26:16):
So that, that's actually okay. Not to get off on a tangent. They don't wanna

Leo Laporte (01:26:19):
Do that. I understand.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:20):
Well, I think what happened was they ha first of all, you can't remake the mistake I just described, right? So they can't do live tiles with integrated experiences and hubs and cause nobody will go along. We've already proven that doesn't work. Right? So Microsoft comes out with their own skin for Android their own home screen replacement, whatever. Now they have duo a lot of people like, I don't understand why this doesn't look like Windows phone. It's like, guys, it's because Windows phone failed <laugh>. So they have a sort of an evolved vision of what they can accomplish in mobile today. And that's what you're seeing now. So it's a little, it's different because it has to be Right? It can't be the same.

Leo Laporte (01:26:54):
I I do. I feel like there is, there are opportunities. There are, there are. It's not just the dual screen, which is a great opportunity. That's a very interesting ui. Somebody in the chat room web oh 9 51 says surface 2 0 3 with a desktop mode connected to a display. Kind of like Samsung's decks.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:12):
Well, kinda like Microsoft's con continuum. They had this right, this, remember when Windows 10 came out with all the universal apps? Yeah. Those office apps ran on phone. They were the same apps. And if you connected it to a MIAs display keyword mouse, you ran the same version of the app you would run in Windows. Yeah. There was a brief moment in time where this maybe was gonna happen. Yeah. Right. And it, you

Leo Laporte (01:27:35):
Know, here's the good news. Elon's gonna do it and he should, he should really have something special for us all. I think

Paul Thurrott (01:27:43):
The TWITtter phone,

Leo Laporte (01:27:45):
He did say if Apple if Apple doesn't

Paul Thurrott (01:27:48):
Cooperate, Amazon did a bang up drug with phones. Facebook did. I don't see any

Leo Laporte (01:27:53):
Reason why he can't do it. No. I think big opportunity here, <laugh>. And by the way, you'll all get cryptocurrency with your new phone. You get a little Elon token. So that's gonna be cool. That's gonna be good.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:06):
Little Elon, how much is that

Leo Laporte (01:28:08):
Worth, Elon bit that changes day to day. Yeah. Right. Hey, let me tell you something that is worthwhile. I want to talk about our fine sponsored MIMO monitors and their amazing, wonderful displays. Their external displays and their unify meeting software. Anybody who's ever had multiple displays will tell you it is a huge productivity boost. MIMO monitors is the global leader, an industry expert in award-winning small format displays. Now, I'm not, yeah, I'm not talking about, and which this is still, you should still do this dual, you know, 27 inch monitors, that's fine. But MIMO also has seven inch displays for purpose-built applications. They've got touch screens, they've got tablets that work with your Windows machine at mimo, they pride themselves on innovative high quality, cutting edge touch screen technology ranging from seven to 21 inches designed to be inherently flexible to suit your needs and bring your vision to life.

(01:29:09):
But they don't stop there. These displays are beautiful. They're sleek, they're premium, they feel good in your hands. You know, I'm starting to sound like Panos pane <laugh> about this. True, you know, know they're intuitive to use. They're easy to deploy. They're designed with durability in mind. They're created with maximum reliability to stand the test of time. Even when you're using 'em 24 7. I mean, you'll see these MIMO monitors everywhere you know, on trade desks with Google. Sonos uses them, Grainger, John Deere, Hertz. Since there are many, many, many, many more big companies, these are very popular. Both the small ones for kind of purpose built like unify meeting and the big ones to give you extended display, multiple, many multiple monitors. They're monitored, designed with a solutions focused approach. That's what's really different about this high value small footprint. Displays. They're used for things like digital signage.

(01:30:04):
 They're using conference rooms, kiosks, point of sale education, healthcare museums, use 'em, love them outdoors. You see, probably every day you see multiple MIMO monitors just don't know it. And the other thing that's great about MIMO is if, if, if you don't find the solution they're looking, you're looking for reach out to them, they will create a custom solution for you that makes sure to meet your needs. And mimo, their touchscreens are designed with a human in mind. With a human touch. Customer service is at the forefront that you can't say that about. A lot of companies these days, their US based customer service team will always make sure that when you give 'em a call, they will get back to you promptly. They'll deliver a premium customer experience with a goal to exceed your expectations. And of course, and you've heard us talk about it, MIMO does this great software that works hand in hand with the MIMO monitors called Unify meeting.

(01:30:58):
It unifies this whole notion of having, I got Zoom, I got meet, I got teams I don't know, which I'm using day to day, pushing the buttons with one interface for all three. You solve this whole problem. And they work so well with the MIMO monitors. Just put unified meeting in that seven inch. They come with the MIMO monitors, put it in the seven inch. Now you've got a calendar display that's always on. You have a meeting, touch that meeting. Boom, you're in the right app. Doesn't matter. You don't have to know. It does it automatically with the right interface. It's just a brilliant way to do it this way. You got your meetings. They don't take up any real estate on the screen. You get enhanced convenience. And by the way, if you want the Zoom or the teams or the MEET interface will launch on your bigger screen.

(01:31:41):
It's just really great. They try unify for your team at work or try it for yourself. Unify meeting.com. U N I F Y meeting, M E E T I N G unify meeting.com. If you go there right now and enter the code WW 50, you'll get 50% off a year's subscription. Or if, if you like this idea, and I think you should try this of a little extra monitor, maybe just for meetings or maybe for other things, or maybe just ex extend your desktop to make a bigger display and make yourself more productive, use the code WW and get 25% off any of Mi Mosts displays as a limited time offer. You better hurry. Simplify with unify unify meeting.com. WW 50 s the code, or use the code ww to get 25% off of any MIMO displays. Unify meeting.com. Anybody who's used multiple monitors knows that's a big improvement. But just the little one and the big one is such a great idea. I hear a deep sigh from Mr. Christ.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:45):
Christine MCee passed away.

Leo Laporte (01:32:47):
I know, that's very sad. That's, I have a big sigh too. Yeah. the lead singer Fleetwood Mac, you know her voice. Oh yeah. They played dreams all the time in the TV commercials. Now that's her. I want to be with you every day. 79. I kind of was surprised to

Paul Thurrott (01:33:04):
See her. That was all day I thought. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:33:07):
But anyways, it's not that old <laugh>. I just wanna say

Paul Thurrott (01:33:11):
Sorry. Sorry.

Leo Laporte (01:33:12):
It's not that old. Yeah. Really sad. I know. I feel the same exact way. Really, really sad.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:18):
I'm glad we actually got to see them live sometime

Leo Laporte (01:33:21):
In the past. Yeah, I've seen him several times. I saw him in Aex. They performed once and it was great. In fact, umm, Mick Fleetwood, who's the, who's the drummer? John mcfe, or no, Fleetwood is the drummer. John MCee, by the way. Christy Mc fee's ex he's the basis. So Fleetwood Mac is named after their rhythm section. They're the originals. Yep. In fact, I used to love Peter Green's, Fleetwood Mac

Paul Thurrott (01:33:46):
And were completely different. Yeah. They were Complet completely different band back

Leo Laporte (01:33:49):
In the day. But the best rhythm section in the business. And I remember Mick Fleetwood at this context concert Yeah. Coming out in a special outfit that was a drum suit. <Laugh>, I love it. And doing a whole solo of

Paul Thurrott (01:34:02):
Him. Guy's like seven feet tall. He's weirds

Leo Laporte (01:34:04):
Looking. He's tapping himself. <Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:06):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:34:07):
Anyway, I love Fleetwood Mac. I've, I saw their most recent tour with Christine. I

Paul Thurrott (01:34:16):
Have no idea. See, Buckingham was not with them. Right? Yes. Because whatever, if you haven't listened to it, the most recent Lindsay Buckingham album is fantastic. Is great. Is clearly what would've been Fleetwood Mac songs.

Leo Laporte (01:34:28):
Yeah, yeah. What's interesting is that Fleetwood Mac changed dramatically when Stevie Nixon, Lindsay Buckingham joined. That's right. That was, that's when the Rumors era. But there's also this great pre rumors era with Christine McPhee and her voice was so beautiful and you know her voice. So I'm sad. Yeah. I'm very sad.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:47):
Tell me lies. Sweet little lies.

Leo Laporte (01:34:48):
Yeah. Tell me lies. That's good. Send me sweet. Anyway,

Paul Thurrott (01:34:51):
Sorry. I just found out. So

Leo Laporte (01:34:53):
Yeah, well I've been, it happened kind of while we were doing the show and, and I've been

Paul Thurrott (01:34:57):
Okay

Leo Laporte (01:34:58):
Watching the chat room talking about it, mask it on. Oh, I see. And that deserved a great big sigh. I understand. Speaking of size, you poor guy, you've been troubleshooting.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:09):
Yeah, I had a one a day over the holiday weekend. Oh God.

Leo Laporte (01:35:12):
This is why I'm putting the radio show. I don't want do this anymore.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:17):
Well, okay, so it's interesting. I, I, on Thanksgiving morning Brad texted me, which I know because I got a notification on my watch. I kinda looked at it and I was like, okay, now I, you can actually answer texts and stuff on a, on the watch. But I went to go get my phone cuz you know, mold and it wasn't there. And I thought, well that's interesting. Cause now it's gone. Right? I can't see it anymore. And man, I could have sworn he texted me. Maybe, you know, I looked in teams, you know, how else might he have contacted me? So I just texted him back and I said, Hey, I don't know what happened to your message, but blah, blah, whatever. Then I realized about two hours later, it just popped into my head this past week, I switched temporarily from the iPhone to the Pixel seven Pro, which I got over Black Friday. And I didn't turn off iMessage. That's why that happened. I have an Apple Watch <laugh>. Right. The fact that the text message appeared on my Apple watch should have been the clue <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:36:14):
It's, I, you know, it's all about do not disturb. Yeah. And focus. So yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:36:21):
Back in the day, this used to be very hard. Now you can go to a website at Apple has, you can they send you a code, it turns off iMessage. Okay, cool. So I fixed that. So Friday I had a, a call with a friend and he told, he's like, Hey, can you talk to him? Like, yeah. He's like, what time's good? I'm like, whatever time. And so the time came and I'm upstairs and I could hear my iPad ringing down in the kitchen. And I'm like, wait a minute, <laugh>, this call's coming in on my pixel. Why is it on my iPad? Same problem every time I face FaceTime. It's FaceTime iCloud integration. Right. So turned that, that was easy enough. That's fine. But then <laugh> on Monday my daughter flew home Friday, sorry, Sunday. And she had, she had test marketed this idea about getting an iPad for Christmas.

(01:37:07):
And we told her that was not happening. And then Monday morning, no. So actually Sunday night she texts me and she says, Hey, my computer doesn't work now. I'm like, wow, that's a fascinating coincidence. I said, why don't you turn it off and make sure it's powered down and then we'll look at it in the morning and we'll figure out what's up. You know? And I was thinking, Hey, she's angling to get an iPad. This is what it is. She's gonna say, the computer's dead now she has to get an iPad. Right. So actually the Monday morning it was worse. Like now leave the keyboard wouldn't light up. Before this, it was just the screen. And so I finally said, look, she could rent a, a MacBook Air from school for nothing until the semester ends, and I'll figure that out when she gets at home.

(01:37:43):
So that one is still kind of unresolved. But then my brother, brother-in-law, same brother-in-law with the fire TV stick, actually this was on Saturday, he texted me and he says, Hey, my computer computer won't start up. It's blue screen. And I'm like, all right, what's going on <laugh>? So like, bring it over. So he actually had a blue screen I've never seen before. It said registry error. That was the code. You usually get like a stop code and it's like numbers and letters. This just said registry editor. And I'm like, I don't, I've never seen that before. So I said, you're gonna have to leave it here. The thing is like, if you want me to try to get you data off of it and back it up, just in case, in case we have to wipe it out, I'm gonna have to get into your account.

(01:38:22):
Are you comfortable with that? And he's like, yeah, I don't care. You know? And so I booted into the Windows recovery environment. Went to the command sorry. No, I went to, I did like the, you know, the stuff you do like the startup stuff, try to fix the startup thing and never does anything, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But I had to type in his password. So I'm like, what's your password? And he's like, I don't have a pa. He goes, I don't think I have a password. I'm like seriously <laugh>. So I just hit enter and it worked. And I'm like, all right, so after we fix this, we're going to discuss the password thing. Like, are you kidding me? So the thing that was interesting about that was I had to use the command line, cuz you can bring up a command line in the recovery environment to see if I could get on the drive, which I could see if I could see the data, which I could, and then back it up to an external drive, which I could, but of course, yeah, I had to Google this because who uses X copy in 2022?

(01:39:12):
But this is a way you can actually copy entire directory structures. Yeah, yeah. It's really good, right? Yeah. You gotta know this, this is important, but it's like a muscle memory thing. Like I haven't used this in a long time. So it was actually kind of interesting. It's

Leo Laporte (01:39:24):
Amazing that it's still in Windows

Paul Thurrott (01:39:26):
Actually. Oh, and it works. It works great. It's great. Like it works great. And by the way, you know, as a Lennox guy, there is nothing more enjoyable really. It's funny how old school this is to see file names flying by in a window like that. I love that. That's how file copy should always be. It's really nice. So I was able to get that done. I was pretty happy with that. I didn't fix the computer yet. He wants to, he's told me to wait on that one. But I'm gonna, this is interesting cause I'm just about to write the <laugh>, the chapter in the book about the Windows of recovery environment. It's also something

Leo Laporte (01:39:55):
Extremely satisfying.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:57):
If your

Leo Laporte (01:39:57):
Brother-In-Law's looking over your shoulder when you say, let just start up the command line here. You type some obscure code, things

Paul Thurrott (01:40:04):
Start and he's, what the hell are you doing? It's like, boom, boom. And he is like, whoa, I'm a hacker. I'm lead. Yeah, <laugh>, right? I have no idea what I'm doing really. But anyway, I can Google. So that works. <Laugh>. So this has been kind of a weird thing, but here's okay. But here's the thing here, here's like the, the long running one for me is this thing I keep talking about. I have the suspicion based on testing lots of laptops, that there's something wrong with the 12th gen intel chip sets. I've been saying this, right? And this laptop that I'm on now is a 12th gen intel chip set. And I think when I first arrived, I put brave on it. Like I put on all my browsers, I had my computers, I had the same problem. I I, I've been using Microsoft Edge, which is another chromium based browser cuz I have to write a about for the book.

(01:40:47):
I've been having the same problem. And I'm pretty much done on this computer with it. So I'm like, I'm gonna go back, go back to brave. I can't wait to go back to brave. And you know, the problem's actually worse than brave, brave as it turns out. And this is a problem cuz I do things like this show on this laptop now. Or I recorded three episodes of Hands on Windows yesterday with Be Benito. And I want this thing to work. You know, so <laugh> today, two things, two data points here. I've, I've not had this problem on AMD based laptops just saying ever. Not once. And today I installed Firefox and guess which did what didn't happen. <Laugh>. I didn't have. The problem I've been having with these other browsers. Firefox of course is based on its own rendering engine. And I'm wondering, I still wonder, I think there's something, I think it says something to do with Windows not being optimized properly for this 12, I'm sorry, yeah.

(01:41:45):
12Th gen chip set, right? So today, randomly in Firefox, of course, cuz I'm using it now temporarily, I see a story on Neen that says Linux gets more intel hybrid optimizations as Microsoft struggles with Windows 1122 H two. I'm like, wait, what? And they have a quote from the sky from Intel back at Intel Architecture Day 2021. They shared the design of this new hybrid architecture. And they said at the time that Windows 11 was optimized in a way to take best take advantage of this hybrid architecture. And it has a new thread director technology that helps with task scheduling. And then it says, early testing confirmed this was indeed the case. And even its first gen hybrid products like Lake well Lakefield, this is the earlier thing where they did like a limited test or limited run benefited as well. So that kind of goes against what I'm saying, but I'm actually thinking.

(01:42:39):
But then it goes on to say how Linux is actually doing a better job of optimizing for this new hybrid architecture. And it says, confirms that blah, blah blah confirms that Windows 11 has lost its performance lead over time as more and more optimizations land in Linux. It also says, ga the gaming performance issue, remember we know about that one. And Microsoft apparently just fixed that with this preview update I talked about the top of the show. So this is the first thing I've ever seen that hints at this thing I've been talking about where I've been really surprised that no reviewers have had this problem. And I, I don't mean to disparage everybody who reviews laptops, but I think these people by and large rely on benchmarks where of course the Intel thing will do fine. And I don't think they use these things in the real world for a long period of time, like I do.

(01:43:31):
And I've had this crazy problem with browsers and and, and that problem, the way it kind of shows up most frequently is the browser will just hang with certain operations, right? So if I have multiple, I usually don't have that many tabs open. But in some cases, because I'm working on something, multiple tabs, whatever it is, I might have, you know, 15 tabs. You, we could be recording this show and I have tabs open cuz I have the tabs open to the stories I'm gonna talk about. That's actually a good example. And if I go to close the tab, cuz we're done with that story, the browser hangs, it turns white and 30 seconds goes by and it's a long time when you're doing a live show, you know. And so there was a time, I think Mary Jo was still on the show where I had a, by the time the show was over, I had like 20, 25 tabs open. Cuz I was afraid to close any of them. And I just kept letting them open because that seemed to work fine. But I'll have things like form submissions will do this sometimes. I tried to post an image to Macon and it that froze. There's been weird issues, but not in Firefox so far. I just installed it like, I think it was yesterday or today. Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:44:39):
So I don't use Brave, I only use Firefox. I don't

Paul Thurrott (01:44:42):
See Right. You're not experiencing this problem. But I, I think it's something to do with the way it's written. I think it is odd to me. I I should, I should mention, I tried Chrome too. I was thinking what a comeuppance would it be if I had to go back to Chrome after spending the past years bitching and moaning about Chrome and how terrible it was and blah, blah blah. What if this thing works and it didn't work. It had exactly the

Leo Laporte (01:45:04):
Interesting, how

Paul Thurrott (01:45:05):
About Chrom browsers? You think Edge has the same, same, same problem. Yep. Interesting. So it's early. I can't say definitively, I just installed this thing, but I did have this thing loaded up with tabs. I waited till you did the ad. I started closing tabs. No problem.

Leo Laporte (01:45:23):
Interesting.

Paul Thurrott (01:45:24):
Yep. Anyway,

Leo Laporte (01:45:26):
I do like Firefox. I think it's hysterical. 

Paul Thurrott (01:45:29):
Well, I, I normally, I love brave, but I gotta, I mean, I, I need to get, you know, life has to continue here. Like, I have to work, you know, I have to get stuff done. So we'll see, the problem is hoping,

Leo Laporte (01:45:40):
It's almost impossible to figure out what's going wrong. I mean, it's just

Paul Thurrott (01:45:43):
Such a, there's

Leo Laporte (01:45:43):
No way environment.

Paul Thurrott (01:45:45):
Yep. Anyway, it's, it's, it's bad. This is a bad problem. So no one else is telling. And

Leo Laporte (01:45:51):
You think it's, it's the 12th gen intel.

Paul Thurrott (01:45:54):
It is absolutely the 12th. I I can load this stuff up on an 11th gen system. No problems at all. Problem. In fact, that's what happened in Mexico. I brought two laptops there when we did the shows from Mexico. I used my old laptop, the one I left there, 11 gen system, cuz it just works fine. Works fine.

Leo Laporte (01:46:09):
Interesting.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:10):
I really think there's something wrong. I think the terms they were using in that Neo win article with scheduling threads and whatever, I think, I don't think the optimization for this Alder Lake thing, which is the, I think is the 12th year. I hope it is. I believe that is, I don't think it's working. I think it's broken. I I and maybe there's

Leo Laporte (01:46:30):
Is the first one that has efficiency and performance course

Paul Thurrott (01:46:33):
The first mainstream one. So that, that article references an older gen where they, it wasn't the mainstream chip set, but they had this, the first test implementation of a hybrid arch. Yeah. It was basically a test. Right. So who would buy such a computer? But they were out there. Now it's everywhere. Yeah. We all, this is the thing thing I talk about. You know, we went from U N H series to U P N H series. We went from you being the mainstream chip set to p being the mainstream chip set, which is brand new, 28 watt, you know, completely different thing. Efficiency and performance cores, you know, like we see in arm, et cetera, et cetera. This is a different architecture. You know, windows has been optimized for the core architecture. When did the first, it was a, the core solo and Cord Duo chips. When did those come out? That was over,

Leo Laporte (01:47:17):
Oh God,

Paul Thurrott (01:47:17):
15 years ago, right? Forever. Something like that. Long time ago. So yeah, it was post when it came after the penny. I don't, I don't remember. It was a long time ago. So look, we figured that system out Windows will run like magic on those, but I don't, don't think it's working on this thing. There's something wrong with

Leo Laporte (01:47:35):
It. I have an h, the i 5 12, 500 H But like I said, I don't, I don't use, I only use Firefox, so I

Paul Thurrott (01:47:43):
Don't Is it tied to a discreet graphics card of some kind? It must be. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:47:46):
Yeah. It's a Dell. So it's using the,

Paul Thurrott (01:47:48):
That's usually why you

Leo Laporte (01:47:49):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:47:50):
Yeah. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:47:52):
Yeah. I don't know. Interesting. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. I mean, these things are difficult. Right. And it's, you know, it sounds absolutely could be a

Paul Thurrott (01:48:00):
Issue

Leo Laporte (01:48:00):
Or a race condition between

Paul Thurrott (01:48:02):
Two. I wanna write it. I've written about it. So what I wanna write is an article that says like, I saw this. And the truth is, I can't say that because there's so many variables and I have to, it's hard to know what's causing it. I have to do it across multiple computers. I can, you know, I have to figure it out. So it's a very hard thing. I might never be able to say it definitively. What I would like to happen is that some month Microsoft ships some random cumulative update that they never explain that it does this and it actually fixes this problem. And that would be fine too. I don't care. I just want it to go away. But it's a, it's a huge problem. And I'm, I'm, like I said, I'm just, I'm blown away. I, I look for it. I've never seen anyone who reviews laptops say, you know, something's not right here. <Laugh>. And I, I, it, it, it kind of freaks me out cuz I, I don't like being, I don't wanna be the outlier guy. Like, I, I'm not a conspiracy theory idiot or whatever. Like, I, but I'm seeing this thing again and again and again, and it's kind of freaking me out. I'm, anyway. All right. So I have two troubleshooting things related to Maton I'd like to ask you about. Although I will preface this by saying I solved one of these problems since I wrote the

Leo Laporte (01:49:01):
Notes. And I should mention, Intel Core came out 16 years ago.

Paul Thurrott (01:49:05):
16 years. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:49:06):
Okay. Now Halem

Paul Thurrott (01:49:08):
That's right. Cuz it was they bought an Israeli company that designs,

Leo Laporte (01:49:13):
The first two were Meam and Pen. I don't remember those at all, but Neha West,

Paul Thurrott (01:49:18):
I wanna say

Leo Laporte (01:49:19):
Ivy Bridge.

Paul Thurrott (01:49:20):
There was a MacBook, like a white MacBook that was used in Intel core solo chip, I think. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:49:27):
Probably

Paul Thurrott (01:49:27):
If you, so this was like a single core. You can believe that. And then of course, they settled on dual core for, you know, a very long time. And then it went to Quad Core. They

Leo Laporte (01:49:35):
Still call it Core. By the way, I'm looking at my system properties on my Windows machine. It's still Intel

Paul Thurrott (01:49:39):
Core. Well, because they're trying to, they're trying to maintain a sense of continuation. Right. I don't

Leo Laporte (01:49:46):
Name you No. And trust.

Paul Thurrott (01:49:48):
Yeah. You need to, you need to move on. Let's call it, call it cell on something we, we like even better.

Leo Laporte (01:49:53):
Celery. All right. Mask it on advice. Okay.

Paul Thurrott (01:49:56):
I am ready. So the one I figured out was notification sounds.

Leo Laporte (01:49:59):
Oh, those are so annoying. Yes. Yes.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:01):
Yeah. Incredibly annoying. So the problem is there's a, there's a main settings interface where there's a notifications part to, it has, it has nothing with sound. Yeah. But when you're in notifications, there's a little setting graphic there. You click on that, it expands, and then you can turn off sounds.

Leo Laporte (01:50:18):
I also notice, and I think you use the, this is the advanced web interface, right? With the columns mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Yeah. You might also be curious to know, I, for instance, I use this to follow breaking news. Cause I have a column with breaking news that in the settings for that. You also can well, maybe I can't, I thought I could that there's also notifications set. Oh, no, I know where it is. It's in the notifications column.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:44):
It's a, it is a little busy, you know, like this

Leo Laporte (01:50:47):
If you use the advanced web interface. But that's because Yeah. You, you are advanced. This is basically a tweet deck. Gotcha. But I like, it's because you can follow all the, you know, the hashtags you want. This is the, so in notifications, this is where all of that stuff goes on. And there are way too many settings in here, but I've turned on everything so that I can see replies, I could see favorites, I could see boosts. You know, you could do all of that.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:16):
The notification being though is, it's

Leo Laporte (01:51:18):
Like, it's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, there's a play sound under each of these, which I've turned off as well. I still get sounds <laugh>. I don't know where it's, I don't know

Paul Thurrott (01:51:28):
Where it's going. Yeah, I, I, it's,

Leo Laporte (01:51:29):
Yeah, it's a little annoying. And I apologize cuz it's bad for the show. Cuz I'm

Paul Thurrott (01:51:34):
Blaming you. I'm just, I'm just, no,

Leo Laporte (01:51:35):
No. You know. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:51:37):
Yeah. I know you didn't write it. I'm just, it was just a question. Anyway, I figured that one out. But the one, the one I haven't figured out is the interface language is English, but it's British English. Like, is favorites with a

Leo Laporte (01:51:49):
U Oh, favorites. With a U. Yeah, you're right. What,

Paul Thurrott (01:51:52):
What? How, okay, listen, it's time to take the language away from the people that are ruining it. How do we get it into real English, as I will call it. I'm kidding. I wonder

Leo Laporte (01:52:02):
If that's me. I wonder if I've said

Paul Thurrott (01:52:04):
It. There's no, there, there's no US English choice. It's just English and for some reason just English.

Leo Laporte (01:52:10):
Not well, he's, he's German. The guy who writes it, Garron and his team, right? They're European. You're right. There should be American English. But in a way that's kind of one of the charming things about Mastodon is it's not US centric. So just get over it. Paul <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (01:52:29):
Paul, you've, you've traveled the world. Act like

Leo Laporte (01:52:31):
It, act like it. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:52:33):
Yeah, no, I, no, that's a really interesting question. I don't I know that I have set set it to favor English.

Paul Thurrott (01:52:41):
Listen, I'm, I'm sorry. I, I'm, if I'm being ignorant, I, I I,

Leo Laporte (01:52:45):
No, I do this all the time with you. It's

Paul Thurrott (01:52:47):
Taken well. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:52:47):
How do you get the start menu on the left? Again? I do this all the,

Paul Thurrott (01:52:50):
Well, I'm an ignorant in a broader sense. Like, I'm not, I don't mean to be br I'm not trying, I'm, I'm trying to make it funny. Not real ignorant about English, but I mean, it's a, it's surprising.

Leo Laporte (01:52:59):
It should be a setting. Yeah. It should be a setting. And and I feel like it is a setting. I know I've seen languages somewhere. <Laugh>, this is my personal preferences. Oh yeah, you're right. English doesn't say American English. Yeah. Just says English.

Paul Thurrott (01:53:17):
If I see one freaking Celsius thing in here, I'm gonna lose it. I can tell you that.

Leo Laporte (01:53:20):
You're gonna, man, you're gonna, it <laugh> that's that's interesting. And then I, this is the other thing. You could filter languages in the public timelines. So I don't, partly part of the problem is for me as a moderator, I don't want to filter. I wanna see everything. But then if something is, is in Urdu, I can't understand what they're saying anyway. They could be saying horrific stuff. So. Right.

Paul Thurrott (01:53:46):
Which is just a, a pro tip for you guys out there. If you wanna screw on with Mastodon,

Leo Laporte (01:53:50):
Do it. Nerd do. Yeah. Yeah. <Laugh>. Cause Leo will never know. There is believe in the in the preview chain of updates that at some point they're gonna put translation, auto translation in, which would be very helpful

Paul Thurrott (01:54:07):
For, oh, there you, that's

Leo Laporte (01:54:08):
Great. Us administrators. And maybe they'll allow you to translate fa into Fay Vite.

Paul Thurrott (01:54:15):
Yeah. Lots of extra use in this version of the language, you know,

Leo Laporte (01:54:19):
<Laugh>. D why do you, I mean, generally you just got there, so it's probably unfair to ask you.

Paul Thurrott (01:54:25):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is just really, you know, this is the, just the things I've noticed.

Leo Laporte (01:54:28):
Yeah. I'm really, I really like it. I just, I really feel so, I think so. And then when I go back to TWITtter to, you know, just check and always, it just feels weird to me. There's still all of that anger and stuff going on, and I just, that's like the friendliness of of a mess on. We are@TWIT.social. If you you don't have to be on TWITt.social to follow me or Paul or anybody. You could follow anybody on any ma on server from any other Mastodon server. And ours is getting a little, it's starting to <laugh>. I know what's happening.

Paul Thurrott (01:55:04):
I, I'm gonna use the, a version of this joke every week. Now you're starting to become Big Mato

Leo Laporte (01:55:08):
Don, big Mato Don. I want to be Big Ma on. I wanna be Little Mastodon. Yep. so we are, I think we're about 6,000 users right now, which is what I've paid for. At some point, I'm gonna have to either pay more or, or shut the doors. But it's fun. I really like it. And I don't, I don't miss TWITtter at all, frankly. It'll be interesting to see what happens over there on the other side, but I don't, yeah, I

Paul Thurrott (01:55:31):
Don't, well, maybe they'll get their stuff together.

Leo Laporte (01:55:33):
It's nice not to have a dog in that hunt. Do you know what I mean? Maybe.

Paul Thurrott (01:55:36):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:55:37):
Totally. Yeah. on we go speaking of hunting, let's Talk. Believe it or or not, Paul is a, if you follow Paul on Instagram, you notice he has Music Night every week. He and his wife will sit down. They'll listen to an album.

Paul Thurrott (01:55:51):
Yeah. Wow.

Leo Laporte (01:55:54):
You're a music fan.

Paul Thurrott (01:55:55):
Yeah. I, I grew up loving music. I, I should, I don't know this for a fact, but I feel like one of the big differences between my generation and maybe younger generations is that we listen to music. You know, that was current, obviously, but we also listen to music from, you know, the seventies, the sixties, the fifties. And I feel like that's kind of been lost a little bit. Maybe I'm wrong, I hope I'm wrong. But I, I have, I I, we love music from almost all errors, I would say, or all errors, I guess. As our kids have gotten older, we've found music through them, which is very interesting. And my, my daughter, before she was went to college, would be downstairs taking a shower, cranking this music through her sono speaker down there. And there was one song I, I would hear.

(01:56:41):
And I, I finally went down there and I said, what is, what is that song? <Laugh>? You know, and it was like a song by Zane who used to be in one Direction Oh boy. Who I used to make fun of. Cuz that was my daughter's favorite band at the time. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I called them One, one Dimension. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> <laugh>, you know. So I'm not, I'm, I'm not close to new music, I mean, or whatever. But anyway, I was fascinated, like a lot of people when they, Peter Jackson did the Get Back documentary last year. Oh yeah. This year. Wow. Gil Martin, the son of George Martin remixed, yet again, they've been various remixes of the Beat Beatles album. But he remixed Revolver using the technology that Peter Jackson's company created for Get Back, which separates discreet parts of audio into their own tracks. Right.

(01:57:31):
So four track recording was the norm back at that time. That's what they had. And if you needed more than four things going on at once, those things all had to be on one track. And then you could kind of fake multi-track recording by putting, you know, putting four tracks together, adding it as one track to another four track recording and, you know, song quality goes down, et cetera, et cetera. And they've actually figured out a way to pull out all the discrete voices and instruments, which is astonishing. And in fact, it's actually better than that because this one description I heard was that every part of Ringo Stars drum is its own track now. So every time you hit a different drum head or whatever, or symbol or whatever, those are all been pulled out and they're all, they're, and they're perfect. Like they sound perfect. It was just one of the best descriptions I've ever heard. I don't know who said this, said it would be like handing someone a cake, and then an hour later they come back with three eggs, a cup of sugar, a cup of flour, and whatever other ingredients, and you're like, here you go. And it's like, what you, that's impossible. You can remake it, but they, but, but they've done it. Right. It

Leo Laporte (01:58:32):
Is amazing,

Paul Thurrott (01:58:32):
Isn't it? And I didn't,

Leo Laporte (01:58:33):
By the way I listened to before I knew that, and I was just baffled. I thought, wow, this is

Paul Thurrott (01:58:40):
Great. Just sounds so good. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:58:42):
Cause the way the Beetles worked, they only had a four track. I think they might have had an eight track i's think they only had a four track. It was four. So if they wanted to do more than four tracks, they had to do something called bounce them. That's right. You would record an organ and record, you know, you'd make, you'd, you'd fill three of the four tracks with Oregon guitar and drum, and then you'd mix, you'd bounce it all down to the fourth track. And then that fourth track has, you were the three, but they're all mixed together. And now

Paul Thurrott (01:59:10):
You have three. But every time, every time you do that, you lose quality and you also all these machines and bleed through.

Leo Laporte (01:59:15):
Yeah. But on these machines, you know, these are very high. They're running 'em in high speed. They're good quality, so they didn't, yes. You always lose a generation.

Paul Thurrott (01:59:22):
And, but the problem is to remix that is impossible. You

Leo Laporte (01:59:25):
Can't Unix it up multiple. Yes. Right. The cake is baked. Exactly. Right. So because everything is bounced, they don't, they only have access to the last four tracks, you know,

Paul Thurrott (01:59:34):
And if they made bad decisions, which they often did with the Beatles you would have everything kind of tilted to one side and one thing would be over on the right or whatever. Right. the best example, I wrote this, the article I wrote about this, but as a big fan of Van Haen, if you go back and listen to their first two albums, Eddie Van Haen is on one side, and the rest of the band is on the other side. And it is awful. <Laugh>. It's like the most awful mix. And I learned, this is probably obvious if you're into music, I just learned this literally this past month. When you go see a band live, it's mono <laugh>. And the reason it's mono is it has to sound the same no matter where you're sitting. You can't have Eddie Van Hillen only over there at a concert. You have to hear 'em everywhere. Right. I never knew that. But a lot of the the Beatles album suffered from this kind of a problem. So there have been remixed versions of these albums that George Martin and then Giles Martin, and now just Giles Martin have worked on. They're, I think they're gonna do the whole catalog over this.

Leo Laporte (02:00:35):
I think they, it's, it started with the Vegas cir sole show Love.

Paul Thurrott (02:00:39):
That's I love. That's right.

Leo Laporte (02:00:40):
Which is the most amazing thing if you've never seen it. It's, it's great. The sound is perfect. Of course. It's a wonderful show, but it's all remixed. And you hear the songs as if you've never heard them before. And they're,

Paul Thurrott (02:00:54):
So this, what this is to me, is the promise of spatial audio, but realized like spatial audio is kind of hit or mix. And you need, you know, sometimes you need a special setup or headphones or whatever, but just with like a sono system, like we have, there's these songs even in the car, they sound great, but I mean, with like Eleanor Rigby, which is a full orchestra,

Leo Laporte (02:01:15):
Incredible.

Paul Thurrott (02:01:15):
You get individual violins going at different, you know, and it's like, oh my God, it's in space. You can, you can,

Leo Laporte (02:01:24):
In that theater, which is built for love, there's speakers all around you, including Bahamas That's right. In your seat. And so they're able to completely specialize it. And it's in the round, so everybody that's right. Gets, it's a, it's an amazing,

Paul Thurrott (02:01:38):
It's worth, it's worth saying, oh,

Leo Laporte (02:01:39):
This album we've gone back TWITce now. We loved it. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:01:43):
This album, I've listened to this album like repeatedly. And there's all these like not really outtakes, but like different versions of songs. The, the one of the most, like the silliest beetles songs of all time, like Yellow Submarine, began as a, like a sad kind of a dge song, which John Linens singing it by the way. And it's like, in the Town where I was Born,

Leo Laporte (02:02:03):
One was so weird hearing that,

Paul Thurrott (02:02:05):
And it's like,

Leo Laporte (02:02:06):
My God, this alter takes,

Paul Thurrott (02:02:08):
It wasn't even rumored that this had ever happened. Yeah. Like, no one even talked about this. Yeah. And this is, I actually, I go back and forth with Verbal Soul, but this is possibly their best album. Like,

Leo Laporte (02:02:21):
Oh, revolvers, when they became the Beatles, they stopped being the four mop tops from Liverpool.

Paul Thurrott (02:02:27):
Yeah, yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:02:27):
Yeah. They went from being one dimension. Well, to Zane

Paul Thurrott (02:02:32):
<Laugh>. Well, they also, this was the point where they knew they weren't gonna be touring anymore. Right. So they, they were like, we're gonna make, we the music we want to make, first of all, we hate touring, but the music we're making is too, the music we wanna make is too complicated.

Leo Laporte (02:02:46):
We'll never have to make this, this live

Paul Thurrott (02:02:47):
For four people to stand on a stage and make it right. So it just, it it it's an interesting kind of synthesis of technology. Right. Which is what we really talk about most of the time here. And music, which I also love. And, and not just like, like doing it cuz we can, but doing it because we want it to be as good as it can be. And this is, you know, I this is astonishing. Like it's astonishing. Yeah. It's just awesome. Yeah. It's awesome. And if you've never listened to this kind of thing, you don't really know that much about the Beatles, maybe, which, you know, you're human, that's impossible. But do check this thing out. It's, God, it's just so good. It

Leo Laporte (02:03:29):
Is. You know, it's also mind boggling. The ability <laugh> that Apple Records has had to force me to buy new copies of those songs multiple times.

Paul Thurrott (02:03:39):
The only thing bought more often than different versions of Beetle music is different versions of Star Wars movies. <Laugh>. Like, it's like, yes. I absolutely, it's

Leo Laporte (02:03:48):
Unbelievable. I mean, I bought 'em when they came out. I bought 'em,

Paul Thurrott (02:03:51):
We literal in the past year bought the remix version of Let It Be Oh yeah. The new album, you know, when they,

Leo Laporte (02:03:58):
Because I think we're hitting the 50th anniversary type of things and we're getting I,

Paul Thurrott (02:04:02):
And

Leo Laporte (02:04:03):
You know, all of them, everyone

Paul Thurrott (02:04:04):
Do that again

Leo Laporte (02:04:05):
Too. I love them. And and it's, it's always wonderful cuz you know, I thought after 1970 we were never gonna hear noon Beatles music. But when you're getting these outtakes, you're hearing it with a fresh ear, you're really hearing something different. You're hearing the, that's why Get Back is so incredible to watch them. Oh,

Paul Thurrott (02:04:24):
It's amazing. Get back. You know, it's funny, I I I feel like there are two responses to get back. The, there's the people are sitting there like, man, this is really long. And there are people like me, it's long who are like, I could watch this for rest of my life. I could use,

Leo Laporte (02:04:35):
I've re-watched it. Like Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (02:04:37):
Yeah. I have too. And there, you know, there's more of it. Right. Eventually there's gonna be a longer Yeah. There's more of it. The

Leo Laporte (02:04:42):
Technology Peter Jackson came up with, because the film wasn't shot for their dialogue, it was shot for the music. So they never recorded the dialogue. So the, the technology he used is mind blowing. Yeah. They

Paul Thurrott (02:04:53):
Pulled it out. Yeah. Well it's like that scene where they, John and

Leo Laporte (02:04:57):
In the Teapot

Paul Thurrott (02:04:58):
Paul are Right. And they have a microphone and like, they're purposely hiding their voices and they, they can, because they were, I think George had left temporarily and they're like, what, what are we gonna do? And it's this private conversation, which both camps, okay. That Paul's still alive, obviously. And it's this, what it reveals is that these guys loved each other and still cared. And, and the original Let It Be documentary or whatever it was called, I think it was Let It Be made it look like this was why the band broke up. Yeah. And what you find out is like, no, these guys were totally cohesive collaborating that he, that like he, he invents Let it be on the spot. Like you see it, what The likes

Leo Laporte (02:05:40):
Amazing. It's incredible. He's just, and

Paul Thurrott (02:05:42):
Then he nails it,

Leo Laporte (02:05:42):
Doodling around on the piano, sings it,

Paul Thurrott (02:05:44):
He just sings it like, it's like that song in Ele Rigby, basically just Paul McCartney. Like just, it's, you know, let's just be honest and dear God, <laugh> is there, is there a more talented person on Earth?

Leo Laporte (02:05:57):
It's really amazing.

Paul Thurrott (02:05:57):
Then this guy, I mean, but

Leo Laporte (02:05:59):
All of them, and even Paul John at the time was deeply into his heroin addiction. But even you also see that Yoko wasn't the evil witch who split the group up. In

Paul Thurrott (02:06:10):
Fact, they made a joke about it. Like, he's like, oh yeah, people are gonna say years from now that we broke up. Cuz Yoko said on an amp. No. And it's like, and then they all laughed. Yeah. Like, like to them this was nothing.

Leo Laporte (02:06:19):
No. They loved each

Paul Thurrott (02:06:20):
Other, but that's the narrative. They,

Leo Laporte (02:06:21):
They, you know, it was just ama It's an amazing story and I'm just really gratified that we get more of it because it was amazing then. And there's more. It's a gift. It's a gift.

Paul Thurrott (02:06:30):
All it is is a gift.

Leo Laporte (02:06:31):
Yeah. And you thought you were listening to a Windows podcast? Ladies <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (02:06:35):
I'm just, listen, this is is like I said, vaguely technology based. Go listen to this.

Leo Laporte (02:06:40):
No, I'm, I'm with you. Unbelievable. I'm actually thrilled that you brought it up. I, I mentioned a few times on other shows, but I agree with you a hundred percent.

Paul Thurrott (02:06:50):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:06:51):
It's, it's, it is an example of technology and somebody like Peter Jackson who had the money, the will the power to bring this all together and make it happen.

Paul Thurrott (02:07:01):
So he's, he, I mean this will probably change eventually and I'm sure there'll be other things like this, but he's not giving this to anyone. He's like, you can use it at Apple Studio for the Beatles. Like, before that goes anywhere else. He's like, finish that first finish. Yeah. Yeah. Do do 'em all finish. And but

Leo Laporte (02:07:16):
You know, you think about their artists like Prince, the Grateful, grateful Dead who have many more hours of recorded music than God we will ever hear, you know? Sure. you know, he would sit, prince would sit in his studio and record all night all the time. And it's all there. Like,

Paul Thurrott (02:07:35):
So if you have a good stereo system, the, there's something interesting about a lot of modern music where it's clearly made for this kind of a system. It just like pumps out of the Sonos. Like, it's amazing. And then you listen to music that you love from the past and it just feels kind of thin or hollow or, you know, kind of bland. Yeah. And you see what they did here and you're like, oh my God,

Leo Laporte (02:07:56):
We could bring it back.

Paul Thurrott (02:07:57):
Fix. We can fix this. We can fix it, you know, and not change it. I don't mean change it, I don't mean modernize the guitar sound or anything.

Leo Laporte (02:08:04):
No. I think that's why Good Giles Martin is doing it. I think he has a, a reference.

Paul Thurrott (02:08:07):
He's he's

Leo Laporte (02:08:07):
Doing it right. He has a reverence for the original.

Paul Thurrott (02:08:09):
He's like the Christopher Tolkin Right. Of this world where Right. He's like the child of the guy and carrying forth the tradition and doing the right thing with it. It's amazing.

Leo Laporte (02:08:21):
<Laugh> yeah. It's a lot. It's what the real dirt that was done to the Beatles wasn't, isn't this generation. It was Phil Specter and generations contemporaneous with the Beatles. The Beatles would be done with an album. Say, we're done with it, we can't do anymore. And then these producers would take it and do extreme stereo for us. Like, they'd ruin it.

Paul Thurrott (02:08:44):
Or what's his fa Phil

Leo Laporte (02:08:45):
Spec ruined, let it

Paul Thurrott (02:08:46):
Phil Specter ruined. Let Oh my God. So, yeah. Like, let, what's the they did the trim down version of that, like let it be

Leo Laporte (02:08:53):
Yeah. The Wall of Sound version that Phil Specter did was not No, no, no. Get rid of anything the Beatles wanted or authorized. And I think as I remember, they were horrified when they, where they heard it, but I

Paul Thurrott (02:09:05):
Think it's, what's it called? Let It Be Stripped or Let it be something. There's a version of it that's just the band.

Leo Laporte (02:09:09):
I I think that's probably the next album. Right? Or maybe not. Are they doing it chronologically? So if they've done Revolver, they've gotta,

Paul Thurrott (02:09:15):
Well, they started right in the middle, so I don't know what they're gonna do, but I don't know. I mean, it's

Leo Laporte (02:09:20):
Really great. I dunno. Yeah. Really great.

Paul Thurrott (02:09:22):
I think he was like, I want to do, I think he's like, this is my favorite. I'm doing this one first.

Leo Laporte (02:09:26):
It's important historically for The Beatles. Cause it really was the beginning of a new era of their music. Yeah. And they really became the artists that they were. And so it's important for that reason. Hey, let's just take a quick

Paul Thurrott (02:09:37):
Tomorrow. Never knows

Leo Laporte (02:09:38):
Tomorrow. And everyone knows what an amazing song.

Paul Thurrott (02:09:40):
Well, because, you know, they did some sea tar stuff on rubber Soul and then this is where it became full fully, you know, fully. And

Leo Laporte (02:09:48):
They used the recording technology and those, the birds and Oh my God. Amazing. Awesome. I'm sorry, I could go on. I didn't know you were such a Beatles fan. I love it. Yep. Ha, happy to hear it. Let's take a little break so you and I can shed a little tear for Christine MCee and think about The Beatles. But while we're doing that, I want to talk about our fine sponsor Nord layer, if you've got a business Nor Layer is a simple thing you can do to increase your company's network security to safeguard your data dramatically, you know, an order of magnitude. And, and nowadays, you know, we're under attack, we're under under assault ransomware. We've got remote work. So we've got employees, you know, trying to connect to the Office network and they do it securely. Your, your business network.

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Paul Thurrott (02:13:47):
Yeah, this is the second light week in a row. I apologize. This has been kind of that

Leo Laporte (02:13:52):
Time. Hey, if there's nothing to say, there's nothing to say. Sometime we should just do a quick play through, you know, of one of your best rounds. Oh, geez,

Paul Thurrott (02:14:00):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:14:02):
Don't tempt me

Paul Thurrott (02:14:04):
Maybe mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. so this week and what Phil Spencer said although this one's rumored, is that Microsoft has gone to the European Commission and said, look, we'll give you, we will promise to release new Call of Duty on PlayStation for at least 10 years. You know, which interestingly is the offer that Phil Spencer did say they offered Sony and received no reply at all. <Laugh>, right. Which, you know, kind of makes sense in the, because Sony's fighting them publicly and wants this not to happen. It doesn't make sense for Sony to be like, okay, <laugh>, you know, but anyway, so that's the rumor. That makes sense. Look, I I've been consistent on this issue. I, there's been some ups and down for sure, but I really feel like Microsoft can make the right concessions and make this thing go through without any issues and it won't hurt them at all.

(02:14:57):
Because why on earth would they want to take Call of Duty off of PlayStation? Right? the interesting thing about this though is that, and this one I'm kind of mixed on, but Microsoft has said publicly many times that this really isn't about Call of Duty, it's about mobile, right? That the one place Microsoft doesn't have much of a position in the gaming world because they're on PCs obviously, and they're on Xbox is or console is mobile. And Activision has an incredible mobile play. They have a lot of studios that do mobile, like they own King that does the Candy Crush and so forth. So it'd be kind of funny after all this was said and done, Microsoft could just kind of rub its hands and be like, oh, thanks for all the stupid stuff about Call of Duty and now we're gonna take candy Crush off of all the other platforms or so, like, not that they would do that, but if you thought it was fun that Candy Crash was candy Crush. Candy

Leo Laporte (02:15:45):
Crash. I like that. That's a good name.

Paul Thurrott (02:15:47):
<Laugh> was bundled on Windows 10 when I first came out. It could be coming back cuz it's gonna be owned by Microsoft soon if everything goes well. Wow. yeah, we'll

Leo Laporte (02:15:55):
See. Wow. That's, that's kind of a, a shocker.

Paul Thurrott (02:15:59):
Yeah. the other bit, speaking of Shockers the other bit of news is we have we know what's gonna be released to games with Gold in December. We know earlier this year they switched from four games a month to two games a month cuz they ran out of older games that they could bring forward like this. They just, they just used them all up, right? They're none left. So now what we get is two Xbox One games each month. I saw an excellent headline, I apologize, I don't remember if it was Gizmoto or one of those sites, but it said something like, Microsoft announces two games for games with gold and no, we haven't heard of them either. <Laugh>, which I was like, perfect. The two games are called Colt Canyon and Bladed Fury. Honestly, Colt Canyon looks like a lot of fun. That looks like a great game. It's kind of a top down 2d eight bit looking kind of shooter or well not shooter, maybe it's more of an adventure action game or whatever. And you play a cowboy and your partner has been taken hostage or kidnapped and you go to rescue him from the bandits. But it, it, the graphics look awesome. It's real. It's a fun, I like this kind of throwback thing. It looks a lot of fun. Braid, bladed Fury, I don't know what that is.

Leo Laporte (02:17:08):
<Laugh> <laugh>. It's got a blade and he's

Paul Thurrott (02:17:11):
Furious. He's furious about something. It looks like a 2D side fighting game, like a, what do you call those things? Like it's

Leo Laporte (02:17:20):
Exactly what I'd expect with a name like that.

Paul Thurrott (02:17:22):
Yeah. So that's all I got. Although I technically have a third thing about gaming we'll get to in a moment.

Leo Laporte (02:17:30):
Okay. That means it must be time for the back of the book and Pauls the tip of the week.

Paul Thurrott (02:17:38):
Yeah. So I've been writing more and more of the book. Obviously the book is about 500 pages now. I've written part of the help and recovery section, which is like recovery drive and reset this pc, in fact, I just recorded episodes about these things for hands on windows, which will probably, I don't know how we're pretty far ahead now, so it might be January before those come out. But I wanted to talk about this because I just mentioned some of those PC related problems with my daughter and my brother-in-law. And I talked about how I was able to boot into the Windows recovery environment on my brother-in-law's computer and use the command line to, you know, get his data off, which is key. But the next step for this thing, which he's not given me the okay on yet, is to use reset this pizza PC to try to bring this thing back to its original factory state.

(02:18:29):
I feel like in his case he might actually have a, a serious disc problem and it's possible this thing will not be recoverable, but we'll see. I can't, I I did kind of get into it not before I did go through with it, but I started the process using the tools that were on the disc and they did not work. And so I, I will try it later with like a Windows install disc or a recovery drive or whatever, but you know, we'll see. But I had also talked through someone I work with was complaining about his think pad and he was having lots of problems with performance and everything and he wanted to wipe it out and could we do it and is it easy? And it was a lot of handholding. It was a smart guy. He just doesn't do this kind of thing a lot.

(02:19:08):
And it occurred to me, you know, I use reset this PC every single week and I sometimes multiple times per week, I use it on the same computer sometimes multiple times per week because there's a computer I use for screenshots for the book that I have to wipe out to get it back to a pristine state. And just in talking to people about this kind of thing, it's pretty obvious to me that, that a lot of people are freaked out by this. They're scared by it, they're worried about the reliability of it. If, if everything's gonna come, you know, become or come back normally be okay. And I gotta say, this thing works great, it's fast, you know, if you're doing it for yourself 20 minutes, right? That's all it takes. It's very fast and you can bring it back with your data and your Microsoft account and your installed store apps.

(02:19:49):
You'll have to reinstall desktop apps if you want. There's also an interesting option that used to be part of a separate tool called Fresh Start, which you can still see links to in the Windows security app and Windows 11, but it doesn't launch the app anymore. That has a unique feature where you, you buy a computer, say it's from like Dell or Lenova or hp, whatever, and you're like, I wanna reset this thing, but I don't want this stuff to be on it again. Right? Like, I want the drivers obviously, but I don't want the utilities. There's actually an option in there for that. And they took that from Fresh start. So I would just say, you know, well, you know, buy the book it's described in there, but or not, I mean, you know, people watching this podcast don't, you can, you can do this. Like this is, I think this is a tool that freaks people out, but it's I use it all. I use it, like I said, every week it's, it works great. Let's, this is a, it's destructive but reliable I guess would be the way to

Leo Laporte (02:20:45):
Use it on the same machine every week. Or just different machines

Paul Thurrott (02:20:49):
The same and different. So there's one machine I use for screenshots of most screenshots. I wiped that thing out regularly. I've wipe it out multiple times.

Leo Laporte (02:20:56):
Is that cuz you want it to be pure when you get the

Paul Thurrott (02:20:58):
Screenshot? Yeah, it has to go back to original. Yeah. So especially, I just finished, did I finish? Yeah. So I just wrote a section on accounts and one of the weird things about accounts is that depending on how you, you can figure them, it, it changes the way the everything's set up so you can remove things, but I need, I need to go back to the beginning. So I, I just reset it and, and 20 minutes later it's there it is. Don't be afraid of it. That's the point.

Leo Laporte (02:21:22):
And do you do it when you do it to completely erase the drive or you save the data? You save

Paul Thurrott (02:21:27):
The So the only reason, the only, the only time, no, I never saved the data personally. I mean you might want to do that. I never clean the drive that will make it take an hour or whatever depending on the size of the drive. The only time I do that is when I review a laptop and I have to send it back to Dell or Lenovo or HP or whatever I do it then. Or if I own a laptop and I'm gonna sell it or give it away to someone else, I will do it then. But if it's just myself, there's no reason to wipe the drive. I mean, it's gonna be encrypted when it comes back anyway. Who cares? Yeah. Right. So if there's like stray bits on there or something from some previous install, it doesn't matter. Right? Right.

Leo Laporte (02:22:05):
Yeah, I, yeah, so the real bottom line is don't don't fear the reset.

Paul Thurrott (02:22:09):
Yeah. I think people look at this and they think, wow, this is a really destructive process. I don't know if I want to do this. Yeah. You know, people might even just like, I'll, I'll just use the windows install media to blow it away that way. And it's like, okay. I mean, yeah, I guess but you know, there's advantages to just using a tool that's built in, it's right there. You don't have to download anything, you don't have to boot it some weird way. You don't, it just built, it just comes right back to the way it was. It's perfect. Plus it's up to date. So the problem with install media, unless you just downloaded it, is it gets outta date over time. Yeah. Whereas the re reset the re the, what do you call it, the recovery volume or whatever that's on your drive is updated with the version of the OS that you're on. So if you've kept your system up to date, it's completely up to date.

Leo Laporte (02:22:55):
That's nice to,

Paul Thurrott (02:22:56):
So that's

Leo Laporte (02:22:57):
Another thing. And you're getting, if you have an OEM machine like that HP you're using, you're getting the OEM version that's,

Paul Thurrott (02:23:04):
But it's up don't it. Or you do. Cause you, you could also say, yeah, I don't want that. You know,

Leo Laporte (02:23:09):
How would you, so then it would have to download it for Microsoft, right?

Paul Thurrott (02:23:13):
No, no, it just takes out the customizations. You could still do it locally. Yeah. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:23:17):
I had no idea.

Paul Thurrott (02:23:18):
Yeah, I know this is, I felt like this is kind of, kind of an unknown thing

Leo Laporte (02:23:23):
If you wanted to create, so used to be I wanted, I didn't want all those OEM customizations so I would download the media creation tool, right. And all this. I don't have to do

Paul Thurrott (02:23:32):
That. You don't have to do that. So the problem is people don't know it exists and you know, as it turns out, Leo, your network has this other podcast that describes us in great detail. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's not out yet, but the episode be soon.

Leo Laporte (02:23:46):
It's called Hands on Windows.

Paul Thurrott (02:23:48):
I think so. Oh my god. It sounds I

Leo Laporte (02:23:50):
Am gonna watch. So there's, is it in the menu command, like you do reset this PC and there's a choice that says yeah, don't use it's two

Paul Thurrott (02:23:57):
Choices.

Leo Laporte (02:23:57):
The oem

Paul Thurrott (02:23:58):
It doesn't. So that's the pro that's the problem with it. So you get a unique choice. So there's two main choices. You're gonna refresh it or reset it. Right. They don't call it that, but it's keep my files that don't keep my files. Right. One is refresh, one is reset. Both of them have a unique capability. When you reset it, the unique capability is it will, it will allow you if you want to clean the drive, if you refresh it, it's not worded very well. That's the problem. Okay. What it means is the, the, the unique option is do not come back with all of the OEM stuff. So it does bring the dr you'll be fine with drivers, you're not gonna have stuff that's not, you know, correctly set up with drivers, but it will get rid of all

Leo Laporte (02:24:37):
The but you then also lose all your personal files.

Paul Thurrott (02:24:41):
No, not necessarily. Cuz you're refreshing it. So that's the choice. You can, you can choose to keep the files.

Leo Laporte (02:24:45):
Okay. So that's not the reset command, that's the refresh command

Paul Thurrott (02:24:48):
Refresh. Right, right. There's also, I, I have a book that describes this. A great tv, thank

Leo Laporte (02:24:53):
God, you know, I wish I had that book. <Laugh>. I'll have to go to lean pup.com and pick up the field guide to Windows 11.

Paul Thurrott (02:25:00):
It turns out you have four ads today, Leo. So

Leo Laporte (02:25:02):
<Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (02:25:04):
I didn't need,

Leo Laporte (02:25:04):
This is good. This

Paul Thurrott (02:25:05):
Is good. But the, the reason I wanted to bring this up was I feel like people are afraid of this. And I believe this, I'm pretty positive this debuted with Windows eight. This has been tested over 10 years. It's, it's, it's been solid. It's, it's always worked really well. And it for some reason, by the way, something gets screwed up on your disc and you can run this tool from the Windows Recovery environment off of a recovery drive off of a Windows 11 installation media and still take advantage of all this stuff.

Leo Laporte (02:25:32):
So you're gonna hate me? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I am looking at it now. I wish I could show you the screen, but I'm having trouble. Okay. Yep. Well, I guess I can go ahead. I've got system I hit, I typed and reset system recovery. If you're having problems with your pc, you want to reset it. These recovery options might help fix problems without resetting your pc. No, no, we're not talking about that. Right?

Paul Thurrott (02:25:52):
Where are you looking? What is, where is

Leo Laporte (02:25:53):
This appearing system? Here? I'll show you. I can't, can't turn the pc. I can't do a screenshot, but I can

Paul Thurrott (02:25:58):
Give you, so what you should do is, well, let me just tell you where to go. Actually, can I just tell you how to get to the shoulder? Oh, there, that's it. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:26:05):
Yeah, yeah. So click Yeah. All I did was I hit the start button and typed reset and then I got this. There you go. But I don't see refresh.

Paul Thurrott (02:26:11):
No, you won't. So click the button next to reset this pc.

Leo Laporte (02:26:15):
Okay.

Paul Thurrott (02:26:16):
Whatever it

Leo Laporte (02:26:16):
Says. Yeah, it says reset. Keep my files, remove everything, keep

Paul Thurrott (02:26:20):
My files. Those are the two options. Keep my files. Just refresh. Ah, remove everything as reset. So if you could click, go ahead. Just go

Leo Laporte (02:26:27):
Through it. Why not click keep my files? Yeah. Yep. Cause I don't wanna lose my files. And then this is the refresh. Oh. And here I could do a cloud download or a local installment.

Paul Thurrott (02:26:38):
Yeah, but you know, so here's the thing. If your computer is up to date, the cloud download is not more, don't

Leo Laporte (02:26:43):
Even need to do that.

Paul Thurrott (02:26:43):
Okay. Don't bother say for, so click local.

Leo Laporte (02:26:46):
Install local, local. Reinstall. Okay. Okay. Now

Paul Thurrott (02:26:49):
This is the trick. Now here you have to check click change settings.

Leo Laporte (02:26:53):
Ah,

Paul Thurrott (02:26:55):
That one on the left is the

Leo Laporte (02:26:57):
Do not re re do not restore pre-installed apps.

Paul Thurrott (02:27:00):
It's not worded very well. <Laugh>, right? It's not a hundred percent clear what that means, but what that means is your PC maker can customize this image. And this takes those customizations out.

Leo Laporte (02:27:12):
That's the signature PC setting. And then download Windows. That's from the cloud.

Paul Thurrott (02:27:16):
Again, I, it's, this is because this

Leo Laporte (02:27:19):
Utility

Paul Thurrott (02:27:19):
Has existed for 10 years and that's a, it just

Leo Laporte (02:27:21):
Doesn't, it's historic. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:27:23):
It's, it's the second time you get to choose that option.

Leo Laporte (02:27:26):
But, so again, the best way to do this would be to get, to get hands on windows. Now the problem with that, are we gonna make that one public? I

Paul Thurrott (02:27:34):
Don't know. Yeah. I

Leo Laporte (02:27:36):
Don't know. Yeah, I can, I can lobby for that. I have friends in high places. Normally Hands on Windows is available only to members of Club TWITt. Because Club Two's basically paying for it. So they get access to it. Occasionally we will put you know, every fourth or fifth one will put it out publicly so people can see what a wonderful job you're doing with that. And so there's two ways you could get it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, but they're not free. There's the 2 99 version where you just pay 2 99 a month and you get that show every show without ads or anything, cuz there are no ads. And then that's why it's paid for by the club. And then you could just join the club for seven bucks a month. You get all the shows ad free, you get hands on Macintosh as well as hand on Windows.

(02:28:20):
You get the Untitled Linux show, you get the GFIs, you get the book club, you get all the stuff that we do. You get access to the Discord, which is always a lot of fun. We were just talking about that earlier. It also helps pay for Mastodon and discourse. Our forums are open to all and free, but it, but their costs money. And same with our irc. So it helps pay for those additional things. Keeps the lights on. And increasingly we're having trouble, I'll be honest with you, we're having trouble selling ads because everybody wants all the information about you, our listeners that we don't want to give them. We don't even know. They want to do a lot of tracking. It's getting harder and harder cuz of Spotify, frankly, and Amazon who are glad to give them all that information. Iheart. So the ad market is softening with, with the recession, but it's also softening because there's a lot of pressure on independent podcasters to stop what we're doing. <Laugh>. So we decided the best way to keep going, doing what we're doing, keep selling ads as best we can, but also offer devoted listeners, people like you a way to help support it. And honestly, if everybody who listens to the show paid seven bucks a month, I wouldn't be doing the show cuz I'd be living in Haiti or somewhere <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (02:29:34):
In

Leo Laporte (02:29:34):
Haiti. <Laugh>. It's a little better than that. Guadalupe <laugh>. But no, seriously we don't need everybody to pay for it and we don't expect everybody to pay for it. But if, but we could sustain this network without ads if about five to 10% of the audience paid for it. That's all we ask. So if you're one of those people in that five to 10%, you wanna support what we do. Twitt TV slash club TWITt, seven bucks a month. There's a yearly plan. Be a great gift. I'm just saying for the geek in your life there's also corporate plans. If you want to do this as a gift to your staff to keep them up on the tech world. TWIT do TV slash club TWIT and you do get hands on windows and you would get the full explanation of what all of this is. Which I'm gonna, it's not. Is it out yet? You think it's not yet done? You did it, but you haven't.

Paul Thurrott (02:30:22):
No, we just recorded it. So this is possibly seven weeks out or so.

Leo Laporte (02:30:26):
Good? Yes. Good, good, good. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, you're that far ahead. Wow.

Paul Thurrott (02:30:31):
Yeah, we got, we bang these things out. They're good. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:30:35):
I don't like to say bang them out. I think they're <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (02:30:37):
No, we have a system. This is a system thoughtfully is No, this is, well, yeah, no, the polic I nothing to

Leo Laporte (02:30:44):
Do with to make it beautiful.

Paul Thurrott (02:30:46):
I am the, the smallest cog in this machine. I I am

Leo Laporte (02:30:49):
The No, it's really cool. But this is a good example. That's why it's in the club because it's too new to have an advertising base and it's expensive. We have a lot of, we have a team that has to do all of this and that's why the club pays for it. Thank you club

Paul Thurrott (02:31:03):
Members. We, we've settled into a nice kind of a rhythm, I guess.

Leo Laporte (02:31:06):
Yeah. Oh, I'm excited. I love it. That's great. Okay. alright. So don't be afraid to reset this PC and what a surprise. The amp pick

Paul Thurrott (02:31:17):
Of the week. Well, here's the thing. So don't be afraid of reset this pc. Do be afraid of Call of Duty modern warfare for two <laugh>. This game. Listen, I've been playing Call of Duty pretty much. I've almost turned it into a career except I don't get paid for it. <Laugh> then it's not a career. It's hobby too. Yeah, exactly. I, this is, this is game is hard. And so I did this math with Brad today, but I was, I I, I confronted this to myself over the weekend. Like the, the, the central goal and Call of Duty as a player online is you're kill death ratio, which is a terrible term, but you want to kill more than you're killed. Right. We talked about this. It's, it's the basics. I don't care about wins or losses or anything like that. I just, KD and I don't know this for a fact, but if you were to go back and look at my previous, you know, five, whatever, you know, titles, I, I was probably like 1.5 ish, you know, 1.4, 1.6 somewhere there on the KD ratio, meaning for every time I died, I, I killed other people.

(02:32:22):
1.4, 1.5, whatever it was. And that's fine. It's, you want, you want that number to be positive, right? So the problem was when this game launched, they didn't have the hardcore mode that I play. It was only standard game modes. Which is harder in a way for me because I'm used to shoot and you know, the guy's dead. I move on. And, and when you do that in standard mode, you shoot, he gets hit once. He, he, he knows you did something, he turns around and kills you. Cause he, you have to shoot a lot, right? So the other prop was click. I heard a footstep. Is there something, what's, what's hitting me in the back? You hear and

Leo Laporte (02:32:56):
Around whizzing by my ear. Yes.

Paul Thurrott (02:32:58):
Yep. So during this, during that first whatever week process, there was no way to see what your KD was. Right? And so when they released season one, which for me was like a week or two, probably two weeks after I started, cause I was away when the game come out I finally got to see what it was. And on day one it was 0.99 <laugh>. I was slightly dying slightly more than I was killing, which made sense cuz it was, you know, for me it was just a, an unfamiliar game mode. And then I started playing hardline, which now is called tier one. And tier one is a harder hard line than hardline was. Like, there's less information than ever before. And I think some of it is related to you know, non toxicity that Yeah. They don't wanna show you that other people team are doing poorly or Yeah. But they don't, you don't never know when anything, like you could get shot in the back and have no idea who did it to you, whether it's on the other team or not. Like I'll, I'll turn an entire afternoon into chasing this one guy around if I can, but now I can't because I have no idea that who does anything. And so it's hard. Anyway, I have struggled to get this thing above one point. I got out to 1.0 it's at 1.0.

Leo Laporte (02:34:07):
Which means you, you're killed exactly as many times as you die.

Paul Thurrott (02:34:10):
Oh no. So my son, that

Leo Laporte (02:34:12):
Makes no sense. You're,

Paul Thurrott (02:34:13):
You

Leo Laporte (02:34:14):
Kill as many times as you've been killed.

Paul Thurrott (02:34:15):
Here's the thing. This is, this is, is this is, this is the math thing I was talking about. This is, the math is hard. This is this statistical anomaly that is Call of Duty. Yeah. It's impossible that I have killed people as much as I've been killed. The numbers have to be off by some amount. Right? So the thing, so my son comes home for Thanksgiving and I said, mark, I'm having this problem with Call of Duty. Like, you know, blah blah, we're talking about different things. And I said, the problem is you can't, there's no screen like on every other game in the series where you can see like you've killed, you know, 500 people and you've been killed 501 times. And then he said, no, there is that screen exists. I'm like, really? Like, where is it? And then we went to the screen where the just the basic stat is, and it turns out this this thing, you click below and then

Leo Laporte (02:34:56):
It Oh, interesting. The kid to figure that out. Yep. Right.

Paul Thurrott (02:35:00):
So what I discovered was at that time I was approximately like 35 kills down. Which is a lot of kills. Sounds like a lot of kills. But here, this is where the math comes in. The prob here's the problem. Like let's say I wanna raise my k my kd, I'm at 1.00. What would it take to go to 1.01? It depends on how many kills you have or how many kills you have. Totally. Right? If you have 8,000 kills, that means you have to kill 80 more people then your kill to

Leo Laporte (02:35:33):
Go at 0.1. Just

Paul Thurrott (02:35:34):
To go up 1%.

Leo Laporte (02:35:35):
Right?

Paul Thurrott (02:35:36):
That's, I don't know if I'm ever gonna do that <laugh>. Like that's crazy. I go up and down in like a kind of a 50 point range. I don't know if I'm ever gonna get to 1.01.

Leo Laporte (02:35:47):
Did they publish like the super great players what their K is?

Paul Thurrott (02:35:52):
So previous games did, that was one of the big things in the modern warfare. You know, the original

Leo Laporte (02:35:57):
Trilogy? Oh, I so you I don't see any rankings. Oh,

Paul Thurrott (02:36:00):
I don't maybe listen, that could be there. I'm not actually super concerned with where I rank cuz it's not gonna be anywhere special. But what

Leo Laporte (02:36:07):
I'd, no, I'm curious. Like what is somebody who's really good at this? Yeah. What do they have? Do they have a I

Paul Thurrott (02:36:12):
Don't, right? So I will just say like, listen, I, I just claimed that I was roughly 1.5 back in the day. What I'm telling you right now is I will never be 1.5. I I I can never get there. I'll be lucky to get to 1.01. Like I, how could I, I would have to get 4,000 kills without being killed once to get to 1.5. I can't do it. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:36:36):
Yeah. I don't have, they should do it this month or this week so that you start fresh every time period. That would be smart.

Paul Thurrott (02:36:45):
Plus I'm not gonna play at the, I mean I, I played a lot right up front because you know, it just came up. That's gonna die.

Leo Laporte (02:36:50):
But I would say most people, unless they come into the world ready to shoot <laugh>, right, most people are going to have that upside down thing. Cuz when you first played, I would die all the time. Nobody, I wouldn't give

Paul Thurrott (02:37:04):
Anybody actually. And that's kind of the point. Like, this is a hard game. So. Right. When I, when I look at the score at the end of each game, it's, most people are actually under <laugh>. I, you know, their, their kill death ratio for the game was six, nine point, you know, eight, whatever. It's, it's whatever it is. Yeah. I always look, I have games where I'm like, okay, that one went. I'm like, I did well that's good. I picked up a couple points and then I see my final score and it's like 17 and 23 and you're like, come on, <laugh>. It's like, like, it's a hard game.

Leo Laporte (02:37:36):
It's hard. It's hard, but you want it that way. I just read a thing about why hard games. Look at Eldon Ring, you know, which is the hardest game? You know, that series is the hardest game ever.

Leo Laporte (02:37:49):
That sometimes people want that.

Paul Thurrott (02:37:52):
I would like something in the middle <laugh>, you know, I don't want, what I, I guess what I really want is what hardline used to be, what it was in previous games. I don't know why they, they took this game, which I think a lot of people found intimidating and they made it harder. <Laugh>. It's really strange to me. Like that's not the direction I would've gone with this if it was my choice. But anyway, that's what they did.

Leo Laporte (02:38:15):
That's what they did.

Paul Thurrott (02:38:16):
Yeah. You know what, what play one of those games with gold titles I mentioned earlier. That's gonna be fun. You know, this this Call of Duty thing, I it let it go <laugh>. It's too, it's too late. Don't even think about it. Don't buy it on sale. Don't do it. It's just it. If you haven't been doing this all along, you'll never figure it out. Now I can barely figure it out. I've been playing the damn thing for 15 years. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (02:38:41):
You know, I'm gonna pass along a breaking news story that we will be covering I'm sure. Oh on maybe tomorrow on Tech News Weekly or on Sunday on TWIT. But there has been another last pass breach according to Michael Can writing at PC Magazine. This time customer data is affected the hacker according to last pass used information obtained in the August breach to gain. This is last pass certain elements of our customer's information. What data was stolen remains unclear. But last Pass says customer password should remain safe because the company doesn't store information on the master password customers use. So your data is still encrypted, but something to pay attention to. And since I know a lot of you, our audience, because Last Pass was for so long, a sponsor on our shows use Last Pass, we still use it. The enterprise version that's here. So passing that along. We'll, it's hard to tell what the severity is, but this is just breaking now from PC Magazine. Hmm. Oh, well thank you Mr. Paul Thro. Thank you for a greater than ever Windows Weekly.

Paul Thurrott (02:39:54):
This was what I called Making Lemonade <laugh>. You know, it's also longer

Leo Laporte (02:39:59):
Than ever. We almost we're two minute. Two hours and 40. Yeah. You know, 40 minutes. That's good. I like it. Keep up the good work. See, see, we don't need any news to talk

Paul Thurrott (02:40:10):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:40:11):
Paul Thurrott is@Thurrott.com. T H U R R O T t.com. And definitely you're gonna want to join the premium Paul Thro stuff cuz you're publishing really good stuff. In fact, that whole revolver discussion was under the premium tier. So Right. Well worth subscribing. I do. Paul's newest book is the Field Guide to Windows 11. But here's some really good news. It includes the Field Guide to Windows 10. So you get 2, 2, 2 books in one when you go to lean pub.com and pay what you wish I suggest paying the most possible that way. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:40:48):
I just, sorry to interrupt, but people have been pretty good about that. I bet they

Leo Laporte (02:40:51):
Have. I

Paul Thurrott (02:40:51):
Think that's interest. I have actually paid it. Yeah, it's nice. Like I, I get emails sometimes, you know, people, someone bought the book and it's like, man, you didn't have to spend that much. But it's

Leo Laporte (02:41:00):
Nice. No, they care and they appreciate it. And it's a very valuable book to have. So go to lean pub.com and get it. We do Windows Weekly every Wednesday, 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern 1900 utc. Please stop by watch us do it live. If you want live.TWIT.tv people chat when they're watching live@irc.TWIT.tv. There's always good conversations going on there. Or in in our discord if you're a member of Club TWITt. And now I have to say, we're starting to get people talking in the am Macon as well about the show, which is fantastic. That's TWITt.social, but don't tell anybody <laugh>. It's a secret just for you. Just for you. We've talked about it a lot, <laugh>. I know. I'm regretting that. No, it's good. But we're, you know, we're, we're hitting the limit now. It's gonna cost me even more, I think, to to, to beef it up. Well, so far it's not slowing down. So I I'm hopeful.

Paul Thurrott (02:42:04):
<Laugh>, what is

Leo Laporte (02:42:06):
That? I don't know. Lisa just popped her head and it started playing music. Is that, is that because, is is that because of the, of the good news you just received Lisa, she's dancing around. I think she's doing the money dance.

Paul Thurrott (02:42:20):
Oh, okay. That's good. That wasn't just Rick Asley was, what was

Leo Laporte (02:42:23):
It? It was she she did, she, she, Rick rolled us. Yeah. Okay. Boy, you recognize that song in one note. I'm impressed. <Laugh>, I'm impressed after the fact. All the shows are available on the website, TWIT tv. This case it's TWITt tv slash dub dub for Windows Weekly. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly. That's a great way to share clips with friends and family. And of course the best way to get it is to subscribe in your favorite podcast catcher. People use podcasts. Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, all kinds. Please go ahead. Actually, pocket casts, just as, as many do Spotify does this too have like their year? Here's your year end listening.

Paul Thurrott (02:43:03):
Oh, yeah, yeah, I got

Leo Laporte (02:43:04):
That. A lot of people said Windows Weekly was number one on that chart, so

Paul Thurrott (02:43:07):
Thank you. Yeah, I've gotten a few messages about

Leo Laporte (02:43:09):
That. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks Paul. Have a great week. See you in December for week A of Windows. That's right, <laugh>. That's exactly right. Bye-Bye.