Paul Thurott (4:36)

Somewhere between two and three hours on average. And let me just get this back to my normal video. And from here what we'll do is go into.

Paul Thurott (4:47)

The machine itself. We'll be looking at the.

Paul Thurott (4:51)

Screen, such as it is. So I actually do have it connected to a dock. There's a mouse and a keyboard connected, but I'm not going to use those for this demo. I'm going to use an external controller. And the reason I'm doing that is because it would just be awkward for me to grab the the screen up where it is, you know, the sides of the controller so you can connect to Xbox controller works normally. So the way that this works is when the computer boots, it boots into this app, which is the Xbox app. So this is the new home experience. You can run Windows apps in this full screen experience. So if I launch settings like I did using a keyboard shortcut, in this case, it's actually running full screen, you see, there's no controls or anything there. And if I go down to gaming, you'll see there's this new section here for this full screen experience and it's set to Xbox. The other choice is none, in which case it just boots normally into Windows and you can determine whether it does that or not. And also whether it gives you some nice hints because some of the keyboard shortcuts or in this case, button, short button, I guess they're button combos are a little bit difficult to just know. And so it will give you a little bit of a prompt to let you know. But one of the things you can do so on the controller, if you hit and press and hold on the Xbox button, which is the white lit up button, you get this new Task View experience. And it works just basically like Task View does normally in Windows 11, except it works with the controller. So I can use the right bumper or left bumper to go back and forth between all the running apps. I can actually go down and just launch into the Windows desktop normally. So if you want to get out of this, you can do that. I'll just go back. Oh, no, actually let me go back to Xbox because that would be the normal experience. So I'll just do that. And so from here, it's your basic launcher. Right? We have access to all of the games we got through Game Pass. If you have that subscription. I do have Game Pass ultimate, so I've got the kind of the full meal deal over there, access to my library. So these are the games I've downloaded to the device. Grounded to Forza Motorsport, the recent Doom game, Call of Duty, of course, and Ellen Wake. Just because I've never played through it, I wanted to kind of check that one out. But there's also this view up here which I think is really interesting, where you can go in and you can see your own apps. And in this case, these are third party PC game stores, right. So Epic Game Store, Steam, of course, Unity or Ubisoft, rather Goggle Battle.net, which is, I think it's technically part of Microsoft these days, but, you know, whatever. And the idea here is that you can install these stores, install the games you want to play, and when you do, those things will show up in my games here alongside your Xbox games. Right. So it's not limited just to the games you get through Microsoft. So that's, that's pretty cool. Other than that, it's pretty much a standard Xbox app experience. If I just tap on that window or, sorry, Xbox key. You get the Game bar, which is also. It's not really full screen per se, but it is an overlay. You only get one widget or view at a time. This is what's called compact mode, actually. And there's a couple of additional things in here in addition to what you typically see on a Windows PC. And you can go down, for example, you get the power menu. So if I want to shut down the computer, I can do it right from here. I never have to go to the desktop or never have to use a mouse or whatever, which is kind of same thing with networking, Bluetooth, you know, for connecting controller, airplane mode, and then other settings. And the other settings are actually. These will be familiar because if you've ever used this, because these are all the same settings that you get in Game bar on a typical PC. You also get to go to the settings app from here. But I've already done that, so there's no reason for that. Let me bring that back, because I didn't show you everything yet. So you get Game Assist. This is the mini version of Microsoft Edge Web browser. So you're playing a game if it knows the game. If it knows it can help you with the game, but will actually preload with content about that game. So it can get going, helping you. If it doesn't, you can just use this for a search as you would anywhere. The social stuff. These are the people who are your friends and so forth. Gaming copilot. This is brand new. I think we talked about this sometime in the past couple of months. Same thing as Game Assist in a way, but more proactive and I think over time probably more powerful, where if it recognizes the game that you're playing. I'm not playing a game right now, but if it's. If I were, it would say, hey, I see that you're playing Call of Duty. I see you're, you know, having a hard time at this part of the level. Do you need some help getting through here? That kind of thing. And then just other controls related to volume capture. This is for screenshots and for video capture in gameplay performance.

Paul Thurott (9:30)

You can see. Yeah, I mean, this thing's doing pretty good. So I'm just. I actually do have Call of Duty running in the background, interestingly. But it's using a lot of the ram. But as far as cpu, gpu, not too much right now because we're just running the Xbox app and then Xbox Chat. And this is just a list of all the widgets which are those views that you can display as part of Game Bar. Okay, so that's probably most of it. But first, here's a quick message.

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Paul Thurott (10:23)

This thing weighs a ton. Drew Ski, lift with your legs, man. Santa. Santa, did you get my letter? He's talking to you britches. I'm not.

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Of course he did.

Paul Thurott (10:32)

Right, Santa, you know my elf Drew Ski here. He handles the nice list. And elf, I'm six' three.

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Paul Thurott (13:23)

Now, as far as the gameplay experience goes. Now, normally, obviously I would boot into this thing. I would launch a game, Call of Duty. If you've ever played it, it takes a long time to come up, so I have already got it running. I'm going to assume it's going to work well, but let's give it a shot, see if we can get in there. And when I was originally looking to do this episode, I was like, how am I going to do this? Like what exactly? How exactly could I show you this? I was going to do a remote desktop thing, but I figured that would kill the frame rate. But actually looking at this now, I can see it's killing the frame rate regardless. So usually on this device I get between I'd say 50, 55 and maybe 75 frames per second. That's at 1920 by 1200. So it's possible this is due to me.

Paul Thurott (14:13)

You know, changing the resolution of the screen. It's not running at native res. It may be a little, you know, confused by that, but I will just get this thing kicked off the thing. One of the things that's really nice about this particular device, meaning the Lenovo, and for this I do have to come up Here and push the button is they have this interface up here for just going through all the aspects of the PC. So from here I might say, you know, I really want this thing to be on, you know, high performance mode or something, or you can just kind of go through the various settings and then just get right out of it again. Right. And so it's just kind of a quick kind of handy side menu here, which is now not exiting. There we go. But yeah, so I'm looking, I can sort of see one of the things I did use that interface for was to get it to display the frames per second and then the latency in milliseconds up at the corner. So actually I can see now it seems like it's recovered a little bit. So it looks like it's in 60 somewhere. We're not in a game or whatever. But this is the basic experience. One of the other things that's unique to this particular device, which I don't believe is true, the Asus Xbox Alley devices, is that those controllers are removable. And so you could play them, you know, play with them detached like you might with a Nintendo Switch, which I would never do because I'm an adult. But you could also use one as sort of a first person shooter mouse. So it has like kind of a high precision mouse capability where you could roll it on the table and then use the keyboard. Your other hand with the keyboard. You know, in the old kind of classic PC style, I play games with a controller. So I, when I play on this, I use the two sticks and I use the, you know, the D pedal, the buttons, whatever. It's, it's pretty standard.

Paul Thurott (15:51)

This particular device also doesn't have that Xbox button. So I've been using using the Xbox button on my external controller. But you can go through that software I just showed you and program. They have extra, they basically have several extra buttons in here. So you can actually program any of these buttons to bring that thing up if you are going to participate in that Xbox ecosystem. And I think as the game or as rather as the hardware is updated to support this Xbox new full screen Windows.

Paul Thurott (16:21)

Thing, it will go. So I'm not gonna, I'm obviously not gonna play the game, but I just wanted to kind of show you, like, actually, yeah, it's running, it's 70 frames per second. It's, it's doing good. So that's good. Like this, this is the type of thing that would have been very hard to show you, you know, with a remote desktop, of course, but in this type of thing, it's, it's very good. Just let me get out of there before I destroy my, my KD ratio or whatever, and then I, I'll just back out all the way over.

Paul Thurott (16:50)

It's funny because it says, you know, quit the desktop, which is normal for the PC. And you're like, yep, but it's not going to quit to the desktop. It's going to quit quick to the Xbox experience. I haven't run this in a little while. I'm kind of curious what this will look like. It will say it's not been optimized. Right. So, yeah, in this particular case, I think because I screwed up or screwed around with the.

Paul Thurott (17:14)

The native resolution, you know, these games were already optimized for the screen and now it's like, what is this thing? This looks different. So it's trying to load. But you get the idea that it's. If anyone who's been in the Microsoft ecosystem for a long time, if you go back 20 years plus, you might have used Media center or Tablet PC Edition. And one of the problems with Windows at the time, XP Media Center Edition was that it was an overlay on top of Windows, which this sort of is.

Paul Thurott (17:42)

But what would happen is you'd be in the middle of a. Well, watch a TV show or whatever content, and as, as you were just using it, a dialog box would pop up and, you know, you'd be sitting there with a remote and it. You couldn't click the dialogue. And so one of the things that Microsoft's trying to solve here is that windows should be 100% controllable or as close to 100% as possible with a controller. Right. And in my experience, I have to say.

Paul Thurott (18:09)

They'Ve pretty much achieved that.

Paul Thurott (18:12)

I can't think of any. Well, every once in a while you do get a dialogue, actually. But because the. In this mode in particular, so, you know, in the, in the original software that they shipped, Lenovo does. It's a. It's a PC, so it's kind of an awkward experience. You get that little kind of, you know, get the PC thing. So you get a dialog box and you do have to go to. You can use a little trackpad or whatever. But with the Xbox full screen experience, everything is full screen. And so even if there's a dialog box, you're still going to be able to access it with the controller. And let me get out of this thing and show you what that looks like real quick, because this is, to me, it's Kind of the final piece of the puzzle in a way. I guess I did not exit that very well. Okay, so again you exit, you go back to this. So I will use the mouse on the keyboard here for a moment just because I'm just trying to make the point. But if I use a shortcut like Windows key +E to launch file Explorer, it launches and I've got the mouse attached, you can see the mouse cursor. So I can't drag this down. I can't click this to restore it. This is running full screen. If I. Then.

Paul Thurott (19:25)

I'm trying to think how I can do this in a way that makes sense. Yeah, if I just go to. Actually let's go in here. So I'll grab all these images and if I copy them into the download folder, you'll see a file progress dialog appear. But it's not going to appear over this window. It's going to appear in its own full screen experience. So it's going to be up in the corner like it looks like a window but it's actually everything that is running will run full screen. So this might be difficult on the same computer. I was too quick. Yeah. So I guess you'll have to take my word for that. But the way that it works, you know, I do this like PC to PC actually let me see, like maybe I can do that. I'll try to share it with my other computer if I do this over the network.

Paul Thurott (20:10)

And I will have to accept this here if it ever comes up. Let's see. Yeah, and so it did. And then when I do save. So you'll see now. Well actually it's appearing. It's not a file, it's not a file copy dialogue, nevermind. But these things, you know, it's full screen and you can access anything that appears on screen with the controller now. So I think they've done it. You know, Windows is still heavier than Linux, right. So if you have a Steambox which is coming soon, or a Steam Deck or Steam OS on whatever PC, you know you're going to have more resources to work with for games and so forth. Of course the games aren't going to be as compatible and you might not get the same performance. So this is kind of a neat in between.

Paul Thurott (20:58)

Experience where the performance is fantastic. You get the full compatibility with all the games. All the games that require the anti cheat technology, like Call of Duty does for example, all work, which is a problem today on Linux. Still, you know, the battery life is terrible. Right. You're not going to go on a cross country flight and play Call of Duty for five hours. Sorry, it's not going to work that way. Call of Duty, we're looking at maybe two, two and a half hours of battery life. Some of the, like Grounded 2 or some of the games that are lower impact will do better. But we're still, it's still three hours maybe at the best. So it's a, it's an interesting thing. It's. And I, I, I wrote an article about how to get this onto a computer today. You could actually put this experience in any computer if you wanted to, but really it's designed for These handheld gaming PCs where you have the integrated controller. So that's probably the better experience. So is Windows viable as a handheld gaming platform? Yeah, you know, but I, I think there's still optimizations to come. Inevitably there'll be some little problems probably with dialogues and things like that where they might have to fix that. But I think this points the way to the future and I think this is what future Xbox consoles are going to look like too. So hopefully you found this interesting. Interesting or entertaining? We'll have a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. You can find out more at TWiT TV. H O W thank you for watching. Thank you so much to our Club TWIT members, if you remember. Thank you so much. We love you. If you're not, please consider joining and you can find out more about that at Twitt TV Club Twit. See you next week.

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