WW 994: The Best Kind of Correct - Can Windows Survive the 8GB RAM Comeback?

Summary

Windows Weekly 994: "The Best Kind of Correct – Can Windows Survive the 8GB RAM Comeback?"

Date: July 29, 2026
Host: Leo Laporte
Co-hosts: Paul Thurrott, Chris Hoffman (PCMag, guest; Richard Campbell is off)

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Overview

In this episode, veteran Microsoft watcher Paul Thurrott and PCMag’s Chris Hoffman join Leo Laporte to dig into Microsoft’s latest updates, the peculiar 8GB RAM laptop comeback, PC bloatware scandals, and the ongoing hardware/AI resource crises shaping the industry. They also riff on Windows usability, device configurations, subscription fatigue, and break down current tech earnings—plus, all the “back-of-the-book” tips, app picks, and a little gaming nostalgia.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Windows Insider Program & Fragmentation ([02:43–11:43])

• Routine Predictability/Minor Updates: Paul notes Windows Insider and Patch Tuesday updates have become so predictable and minor that they hardly bear mentioning in his writing now.
  • "There’s nothing in here I would even mention like in my book. So who cares? It’s just all small." – Paul Thurrott [03:55]
• Feature Fragmentation Frustration: Both Paul and Chris highlight confusion for users as new features roll out inconsistently across channels and devices.
  • "It’s like a flowchart now. So it’s very complicated." – Paul Thurrott [07:19]
  • "Now half the new features with the phone stuff are under some mobile devices thing in the setting which is not the same as phone link at all. Don’t get confused." – Chris Hoffman [08:21]
• Design Philosophies: The group contrasts Windows' "more than one way to do it" ethos with Apple’s strict "monotony" (single way for everything), observing how messy historical decisions and multiple teams create a sprawling OS.

2. Device Interface Fragmentation & Usability ([11:52–18:47])

• Windowing Styles: The hosts share their personal window management styles, with Leo favoring Linux-style tiling and workspaces, while Paul and Chris discuss snap features and the trend towards full-screen apps on laptops for clarity.
• Touchpad/Trackpad Evolution: Trackpads on Windows have improved, but MacBooks remain the gold standard for gesture reliability according to Paul.
  • "I literally disable three finger swipes in Windows on...95% of laptops I review because the trackpads are so bad." – Paul Thurrott [16:52]

3. Windows Updates, Patch Tuesday & App Bloat ([19:00–23:13])

• Insider Channel Creep: Microsoft’s attempt to "simplify" the Insider channels has failed, creating new sub-channels and confusion—there are now as many as before.
  • "This is not simpler than it was before. It's just as complex." – Paul Thurrott [19:40]
• Inbox App Updates: Windows’ core apps (Calculator, Notepad, etc.) get minor updates—mostly polish, not features.

4. Bloatware Scandal: LG, HP, & Auto-installed Malware ([23:13–35:03])

• LG Monitor Auto-installed Adware: A major stir erupted after it was discovered plugging in certain LG monitors would prompt Windows to auto-install a utility containing McAfee ads.
  • "This is malware behavior. Very reminiscent of that Sony rootkit thing from probably 20 years ago." – Paul Thurrott [27:23]
  • "You can plug in a display and the manufacturer does not get to say that we're downloading an app right now. That's just how it is." – Chris Hoffman [33:30]
• Hypocrisy & Systemic Problems: The group notes the hypocrisy—OEMs, Microsoft, and even the Windows Store often push unwanted software. Turning off this behavior requires Windows Pro and group policy changes, out of reach for most.

5. 8GB RAM Laptops Returning – Can Windows Cope? ([41:59–53:34])

• RAM Price Shock: Due to global component shortages, OEMs (including Microsoft, ironically) are again selling new PCs with only 8GB RAM.
  • "Some people say [8 GB is] actually fine, some people say it's unusable...if you start opening tabs and programs, you have six browser tabs open, it actually is usable. It doesn't appear to be swapping horrendously. It is slightly slower though." – Chris Hoffman [43:41]
• Testing and Reality: Chris tested 8GB system limits and found it’s barely workable for one or two tasks, but performance drops quickly—casual users just accept the sluggishness. Paul stresses 16GB should be the true minimum for modern Windows (and for any future Copilot+ feature).
  • "No, 8 gigs is not enough, full stop." – Paul Thurrott [46:14]
• Hardware Trends: This may hasten a shift to mobile/phone-based “desktops” or hybrid devices, as both RAM prices rise and repairability remains a challenge (RAM usually soldered, not upgradable).
• Device Leasing/Subscription Models: The discussion pivots to how increased prices also drive the rise of device leasing/lease-to-own, which Paul criticizes as exploitative for lower-income consumers.

6. Subscription Fatigue & Modern Device Ownership ([53:45–64:11])

• Broad riff on digital subscriptions, auto-renew traps, and how many services (from Shadow cloud PCs to music converters) keep quietly billing users long after they’re forgotten. Advice: check your bank statement!

7. Copilot Key Controversy & Remapping Controls ([64:28–71:23])

• Microsoft’s new Copilot hardware key is causing issues—replacing the right control/menu key on many keyboards, frustrating accessibility and power users.
  • "Microsoft is testing a do-nothing option that just does nothing when you press the copilot key. ...It will take them two and a half years to solve a problem that they caused that was so bad it resulted in basically every PC hardware make on earth train changing their keyboards." – Paul Thurrott [67:39]
• Solutions:
  • PowerToys Keyboard Manager is a workaround but not available to all (e.g. managed devices); soon Windows itself may allow a “do nothing” mapping for Copilot.
  • Windows’ handling of unique keys is inconsistent and confusing; remapping is intentionally difficult for special/system keys.

8. Microsoft Redundant Apps & OneDrive Photos ([71:36–74:49])

• Microsoft rolled out a new “OneDrive Photos” app, which confuses users because it overlaps almost entirely with the main Photos app, and gallery options now proliferate across multiple entry points.
  • "This is the third way you could look at your gallery in Windows 11...It’s completely redundant." – Paul Thurrott [72:39-73:14]
  • Again, no clear communication for users.

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Industry & Earnings Segment

9. Alphabet/Google vs. Intel vs. Microsoft Earnings – AI Economics ([78:05–121:20])

• Google: Blockbuster revenue & net income, but Wall Street punishes them for negative cash flow driven by surging AI infrastructure spending (CapEx).
  • "We're reaching some kind of a ludicrous point...Google's stock price has actually fallen since this announcement." – Paul Thurrott [80:22]
• Intel: Reports significant losses, yet stock rises on foundry hopes/games. Paul highlights the “semi-farcical” practice of booking internal transfers as external gain.
• Microsoft (Breaking News):
  • $35.8B net income (+31% YoY), $90B revenues (+18% YoY), with Intelligent Cloud now again the dominant business (+32% YoY).
  • CapEx up 70% year-over-year to $41B, but still positive free cash flow—unlike Google.
  • Personal computing continues its gentle decline (Windows, Surface, Xbox, etc.).
  • Investors respond favorably—stock jumps after hours.
• AI & Efficiency: Microsoft shifting some AI workloads away from OpenAI models to in-house, more energy-efficient models (e.g., Bing Image Creator now only runs on Microsoft models).
  • "This is a baby step...if Microsoft is using 100% OpenAI now, they're using maybe 97%. ...It's still a step forward." – Paul Thurrott [85:25]
• Industry-wide AI Security Concerns:
  • Leaders from Microsoft, Nvidia, and other tech giants meet to discuss securing AI amid rising risks (malware, military, biohazards).
  • No easy answers: government is slow, industry PR/kill-switches are mostly theater.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• The Best Kind of Correct:
  "That’s technically correct, which I think we can all agree is the best kind of correct. ...But there are so many channels. It’s just as bad as it was before." – Paul Thurrott, explaining Windows Insider chaos [21:22]

• Crapware Malware:
  "This is a. So, by the way, this is the behavior of malware. Very reminiscent of that Sony rootkit thing from probably 20 years ago." – Paul Thurrott [27:23]

• 8GB RAM Reality Check:
  "Even in a best case scenario, unless you're using one or two web pages at a time, it is slower. Windows actually does not pop up and tell you, hey, you're swapping..." – Chris Hoffman [43:56]

• Device Leasing Skepticism:
  "It's just this feels like victimizing the poor to me. ...It's not great." – Paul Thurrott [55:12]

• Copilot Key Mapping:
  "Doing nothing needs to be one of those options. ...If you hit that key, the Settings app will run and ...say, you need to pick something. So now imagine me sloppy typing...the Settings app keeps popping up in my face." – Paul Thurrott [67:34]

• Microsoft Redundant Apps:
  "I don't believe there's a single feature in here that doesn't already exist in the Photos app. I don't quite get it... It really bothers me that this exists." – Paul Thurrott [73:14]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Patch Tuesday & Insider Update Churn: [02:43–11:43]
• OS Design Philosophy Debate: [10:30–13:33]
• Window Management/Trackpads: [13:44–18:47]
• Bloatware & LG/HP Adware Scandal: [23:13–35:03]
• 8GB RAM Comeback – Testing Windows: [41:59–53:34]
• Copilot Key Backlash & Keyboard Remapping: [64:28–71:23]
• OneDrive Photos App Redundancy: [71:36–74:49]
• Alphabet/Google Earnings vs. Intel: [78:05–81:30]
• Microsoft Earnings: Breaking News: [118:42–121:20]
• Tips & Picks (PowerToys Keyboard Manager): [122:31]
• Xbox Segment (Halo Remaster, Luna, GamePass, Cloud Gaming): [100:33–115:33]

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Tips, Picks, and App Recommendations

Tip of the Week – Keyboard Remapping

• Chris Hoffman’s Pick: PowerToys Keyboard Manager (official Microsoft utility) for fully remapping or disabling the Copilot key—available to everyone except those locked down on managed devices.
  • "You can remap it and you can make it do nothing. You can make it do anything else." – Chris Hoffman [122:36]
• Paul’s Project Highlight: Major update to his Windows 11 Field Guide—rewritten, pruned, and now much more concise (745 pages, down from 1200).

App Pick

• Halo Campaign Evolved Remaster: Modern graphics, classic gameplay, and now on Game Pass (with up-sell for early access).
  • "The music like builds as you do it and it's just really well done. Like it's a great, it's just a great game." – Paul Thurrott [126:47]

Newsletter Shout-out

• Chris Hoffman’s PCMag Windows Newsletter: Find Chris’s ongoing Windows coverage and insights via PCMag’s official newsletter. [127:09]

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Xbox & Gaming

• Halo Campaign Evolved Remaster released, with new prequel levels, Unreal Engine visuals, and Game Pass access ([100:40–102:29]).
• Cloud Gaming Developments: Xbox testing ad-supported streaming; Ubisoft enabling one-purchase cross-platform (Xbox + PC); Amazon Luna integrates with Prime Video. [102:29–115:08]
• Casual vs. Hardcore Gaming: Cloud/streamed gaming better for single player/casual; latency remains a barrier for “serious” gamers.

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Wrap-up & Final Thoughts

The hosts note subscription fatigue, increasing consumer hardware costs, bloatware headaches, and AI’s rapid but costly ascendancy. Microsoft, while facing challenges, reports strong financials—driven by cloud and ongoing infrastructure investment, even as it grapples with Windows’ labyrinthine feature management and confusing user experience. The episode closes with classic Windows Weekly camaraderie, listener gratitude, and a glimpse at next week’s Black Hat/Las Vegas episode.

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For More

• Paul Thurrott: thurrott.com, field guides & analysis.
• Chris Hoffman: PCMag Windows Newsletter.
• Full episode & transcript: twit.tv/ww
• Next Episode: Live from Black Hat – don’t miss the special edition!

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This detailed, quotable summary covers all key Windows Weekly 994 topics and highlights, from OS gripes to industry megatrends—now you’re fully caught up.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat is here. Richard has the week off. He's fishing in Montana. But hey, good news. PC magazine's Chris Hoffman joins us. We will have Microsoft earnings later in the day. We'll talk about astounding Google earnings. Will the market punish Microsoft as they have Google? They also Microsoft are shifting their own models for AI and Xbox and gaming. Are you ready for Halo Campaign Evolved? It's all coming up this week. Next, in fact, on Windows Weekly, podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is Twit.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 994, recorded Wednesday, July 29, 2026. The Best Kind of correct. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, all you winners and your dozers. This is the show. We talk about the latest from Microsoft, although the latest will come later, but we'll talk about that in a moment. Say hello to Paul Thurat back in Mexico. Old Mexico. Good to see you, Paul. Paul, you've brought a visitor from the East.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow. From the Orient.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard is in Montana fishing. But we're thrilled to have Chris Hoffman back, senior writer for PC magazine software division. Hi, Chris.

[Chris Hoffman]

Hi. Great to be here again.

[Leo Laporte]

I think New Hampshire is the East. I think it qualifies.

[Chris Hoffman]

It's on the East Coast.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's the east and Seaboard, as we call it.

[Leo Laporte]

I used to. I used to know somebody, another friendly Californian who said, you don't call cowboy stories Westerns out here. We call them Easterns because they're east of us.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

And I said, no, you call them Western.

[Paul Thurrott]

Trouble with that?

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, so the news I was referring to is later today, right? Microsoft earnings.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So Microsoft will release earnings later. I assume we'll see the beginnings of it right before we close, you know, depending on the timing.

[Leo Laporte]

As usual, we like to get Paul workin typing away at the very end of the show. But without whiskey, I think we'll have time. Unless. Chris, you have a whiskey recommendation?

[Chris Hoffman]

I do not.

[Leo Laporte]

Some, not all, are sighing with relief. Week D. You have anything to say for yourself?

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, maybe this reflects well on the Windows Insider program, but this stuff has started to become so predictable. I just feel like I'm repeating myself every week or two now with these updates because we'll see updates, hit the insider program correctly through whatever channel make, work their way down, eventually get into the release preview channel channels, really, but whatever. And then go into the week, the update like we saw today or yesterday, and then make their way to patch Tuesday to the next patch Tuesday, right. The next month. So there's nothing new here in the sense that we've mentioned every single one of these things. I would say in the context of what will be next month's patch Tuesday. So this will be the what, the eighth patch Tuesday of the year. This is one of the minor ones. So I think there have been two or three pretty big ones and then a bunch of almost non noticeable ones. And this is that. So you know, Windows low ess support for external fingerprint readers. Stop me if you haven't heard any of this. The new gesture controls for precision touchpads and then just like minor improvements across a lot of stuff. Widgets, Windows search, voice access, Windows Update, power management, etc. So nothing major. But that's good, especially good for me because that means I have less to worry about for the book, which we were just talking about. So like there's nothing in here I would even mention like in my book. So who cares? It's just all small.

[Leo Laporte]

That's how important it is if it

[Paul Thurrott]

requires me to retake screenshots. Leo, it's a really big update. It's very upsetting.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So this, there's nothing here. So that's good.

[Chris Hoffman]

Well, it is. It is kind of surprising. Like you said, you know, last month's or this month's past Tuesday update was a larger one. It had the widgets changes and everything. There's a lot of interesting stuff in the Insider program right now. The taskbar being movable that you assume, I guess that'll be in the big fallout date. I thought the widgets change would wait till the big fallout date, to be honest. We could have a big update in next month with a bunch of changes, or we could not have a bunch of changes till the fallout date. I think that's one of the interesting things right now is you really have no clue whether an update will have a bunch of big features or whether some features will come out later the year. Who knows?

[Paul Thurrott]

To my knowledge, the Windows Insider program team has never said for any of these features that they would be available explicitly. I believe I can recall one instance where there was a tech community blog post where someone not in the Insider program did say this will be in 26H2, but now I can't remember which feature it was. But yeah, there's a new Start menu and then there'll be another new Start menu in the future. The taskbar stuff like you said, Windows Update stuff, Windows search changes, widgets. Some have hit public or stable, some have not. And

[Chris Hoffman]

some have hit public with a controlled feature rollout. That means you'll get them in four months without an update.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, this is my biggest error.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that a consistent time frame or is that.

[Paul Thurrott]

No. Can you count on that? Consistently inconsistent. And we were just talking about this before we started recording. But, you know, in the Insider program now, if you go into Windows Update or, you know, sorry, when the Settings app and then Windows Update interface and you know, enroll your PC in one of the Pro. One of the channels, you can go into a feature flag interface and say, I want this on. You know, you can take the CFRs and make them just be enabled. I don't know if they think this is too complex for normal people or whatever, but that should just be in Windows Update, like every month when there's a patch Tuesday update. If someone sees a feature, finds out there's a new feature and they really want it, rather than it randomly appearing on the computer sometime in the next weeks or months or whatever, they could just click a box and have it just be there. That's what happens in the Insider program. So I don't know why they don't do that. But then again, this Insider capability is probably less than three months old, so it's still kind of a new thing, maybe to something they'll eventually do. I don't know. I still have that issue where I go to different computers and it's like, oh, this one has the wrong start menu. Or, you know, like, this one doesn't have the new taskbar stuff or whatever. Like, it's. It's still very confusing.

[Leo Laporte]

This doesn't happen in enterprise, though, right? I mean, because that would be a problem if your employees, well, sitting in enterprise, they just.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, they just block everything in the enterprise, so. Or everything. They can.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't do it.

[Chris Hoffman]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's really mostly home users.

[Paul Thurrott]

I wonder, though. I mean. Yeah. So I feel I'm gonna have to re. I'm gonna repeat myself a bunch because Chris is here and I, you know, he doesn't hear this week to week. But, you know, one of the weirdnesses of my life is that I have. I used to be able to write a book or an article or anything and say to do this, do this. You know, very. It was very explicit. If you want to get this done, this is how you do it. And now it's like, all right, open this thing up. You might see this, you might see this, you might see this. You know, you never know. You don't know what you're going to see it could be anything. If you don't see this, do that. You know, like it's. It's like a flowchart now. So it's very complicated. And then there's this stuff in just in Windows that's not even related to the Insider program, you know, like Phone link. If you have an iPhone, you get a couple of basic features. If you have an Android phone, you get a bunch more. And if you have a Samsung flagship, you get several more really good features. And describing that in a way that makes sense in plain English is also difficult. So this is my weekly. I don't know, my daily cross to bear. I don't know. And Chris is too, I guess, you know, I would assume.

[Chris Hoffman]

And now half the new features with the phone stuff are under some mobile devices thing in the setting which is not the same as phone link at all. Don't get confused.

[Paul Thurrott]

Listen, so since. Since you just said that, I will.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait, What? No. What? What?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. No, I will further. So sorry, what? Let me. Let me compare this to something. If you use an iPhone, you are familiar with the fact that you have an app, but the settings are not in the app. The settings are in the settings interface under apps and you have to go find it. It's stupid. Like if there's two different places, it's so horrible.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know why so much.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's just the Apple way of doing things. It's stupid. What he's describing is similar to this. So we have a phone link app. It has settings but to fully configure the phone and or phones you're using with the app and just with the system, you actually have to go into settings. Now if there was one interface for this, that would be pretty good, but there isn't because actually there's multiple. And I'll just tell you about one more of them is if you go into apps resume, this only has to do with phones. It's not in the mobile devices interface. It's somewhere else. I don't know why you can a control whether this feature's on or off assuming you have a phone that's compatible with it and then assuming you've installed any apps that are compatible with this feature, you can turn those on or off individually. And. And why is that not in the mobile devices settings interface? I do not know. But this is. You know again, this is whack a mole.

[Chris Hoffman]

That's what different team worked on it. Maybe. Probably.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I have no idea.

[Leo Laporte]

I do have to point out this is the operating system that had two different control panels, one visible, still does, and then one hidden away for the real experts.

[Paul Thurrott]

So this is way out of date. But, you know, back in the 90s, at least, maybe the early 2000s, like Jerry Pranell would say stuff like this. He's like, you know, the Mac maybe can't do something, and if you can't find it, it's just not there. That's just the way it is. But if you do find it, that's the one way to do it. And in Windows, it was always the approach was, you know, which is so out of date now, but we have this really diverse audience at the time. At the time was the biggest audience. And it was like we have to have all these different ways to do things because different people do things differently. And that is just. I mean, I get it, but it's the.

[Leo Laporte]

It's actually a religious controversy. Perl, the language was famous for Tim Toty. There's more than one way to do it. And in Perl, there's like 20 ways to do anything.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a whole design philosophy.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a design philosophy in the very.

[Paul Thurrott]

Think about the Unix divine. You have a command or an app in Unix, it does one thing, that's it. And if you want to do a series of something complex, you're going to chain those things and they're going to work in concert. In Windows, they're like, no, we're going to build a battleship and we're gonna. It's gonna do everything, you know, and it's just a different approach. I. I think they were trying to make it user friendly. I think that was the. I don't think it was malicious. I just think it was a design decision.

[Leo Laporte]

It's philosophy. Although I have a feeling that Apple more from the beginning had like this kind of focus on this is. They called it monotony. This. You. There's one way to do everything. They literally. That was the. The term.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's a. Yeah, we want it to

[Leo Laporte]

be monotonous, probably in the more truer Latin, Latinate sense of the word.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, they were first with the human Interface guidelines stuff. I mean, they had that big. You know, they were thinking about this very early on. Right. Microsoft kind of came up later and copied it.

[Leo Laporte]

So I feel like Windows was kind of developed like most programs in the real world. You build a little here, you build a little there. You build here, you add a little there.

[Paul Thurrott]

Do we need a solid foundation? Notes keep going up, you'll be fine. I don't know. I mean, but the GUI stuff is just. Yeah, Windows came later, whatever. I mean, look, I'm not saying one is the Mac has a stupid menu bar at the top all the time. Like, I don't like that either. But, you know, whatever should be attached to the window.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course, everybody knows that.

[Paul Thurrott]

And they didn't do that because they didn't want controls to run off the edge. And how would you ever find that? And they were, again, they were thinking through the, you know, how people would react to it. But it was also like 45 years ago.

[Leo Laporte]

But times change.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

For instance, one of the debates on the Apple world was. And actually in all of the GUI world, it was resolved by the time Windows 1.0 came out was, do you do tile? We've talked about this before. Do you tiled windows or overlapping?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

And of course they decided overlapping windows is overlapping. But now on my Linux box, I use a tiled.

[Paul Thurrott]

A lot of people like tiled. For all the problems with Windows 8, one of the coolest things about it was you could just have two apps side by side and then eventually you could, you know, use Snap or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Snap. That was the idea of Snap, kind of. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I like.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, we.

[Leo Laporte]

But I have giants.

[Paul Thurrott]

People lose track of where things are. You know, there's. There was a window and it's gone, but it's behind something.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. I think it's also. Screens are bigger, so you have more, you have more real estate on a desktop.

[Paul Thurrott]

So you can. No, no, but I would. Now that most people are on a laptop. You actually sort of. You know, I run apps full screen all the time.

[Leo Laporte]

That's how I do it on the laptop. So I, I move from workspace to workspace. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, I don't know, times change, ways, styles change.

[Paul Thurrott]

Different. Different strokes. Different strokes, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we've exhausted that topic.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yep, yep. And then some.

[Leo Laporte]

Welcome to the show, Chris.

[Chris Hoffman]

I'll hold my thoughts on Tiling Window, man.

[Paul Thurrott]

He said, but it wasn't the word monotony earlier.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you, do you, do you use tiled windows, Chris? Just out of curiosity.

[Chris Hoffman]

I mean, I don't have a. You know, ideally Windows had a better, like Tiling Window Manager. I do a lot of full screen stuff. I do a lot of split screen stuff. Even on my larger. On my like, larger desktop monitor, I might have like maybe like four apps in a grid. But like most apps, you know, floating is kind of. It's weird looking across floating windows.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm looking across the way at my Desktop, which has a 55 inch screen. So I really do want to have many windows and it has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and occasionally a seventh window opening up. But they're all tiled.

[Chris Hoffman]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So I know, I know where and it's set up so that when it opens, that's where everything goes. So I know where everything is. And then I have more workspaces if I need more.

[Paul Thurrott]

You can get into a really complex thing like that in Windows, but you have to use a Power Toy.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this is Linux, obviously.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, but I mean there's a tool where you can define a layout and is what you're trying and then you can bring that back as a thing.

[Chris Hoffman]

Kind of complex. It's kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yeah, people have tried that on the Mac too. I have a couple of tools that will do that and none of them really are very satisfying.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't use it. It's too complex.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's too complex.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's there if you want it, you know, I don't see it making its way into Windows. I, I guess I'll put it that way.

[Leo Laporte]

Burke says Tyler's are inhuman. We're animals.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think what you're looking for is subhuman. No,

[Leo Laporte]

no.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean I, I look, we're all kind of power users, but the reality is, especially on a laptop, you know, you kind of want that thing filling the screen. You don't have a lot of space.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it started for me with a tablet, with the iPhone, I feel like

[Paul Thurrott]

we went to one extreme and then we're kind of walking it back, you know, like Windows 1 and 2 were all just tiled. Or maybe Windows.

[Leo Laporte]

I love workspaces. I love workspaces and I have a command key and I go to 1, 2, 3, 4. I know what's on each. It's always the same. Just a natural way to work.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep, I do that on the Mac. I do not do that on Windows for some reason, I can't explain it,

[Leo Laporte]

but Windows has that capability. You could.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's not as good. So Windows has had virtual desktops forever. Well, since nt, it only became a feature in Windows. I don't remember two, three versions ago, whatever it was. Two versions, maybe was it Windows 10 or 8? I don't remember. But eventually it became a feature. Windows also supports full screen apps, but you almost never see that. You see it with like Microsoft Edge is one of the apps that does this, but any app can do it. But in wind and on the Mac they've made it into a formal part of the ui. Like all apps basically can go full screen and it becomes a workspace. But I wish Windows did that universe. I wish that was just a global. Well, it is, but I mean, but app developers actually have to use it and most don't. So I kind of wish they had that because then you could just. The best you can do now is maximize and hide the taskbar.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Depending on the app. But yeah. Oh well, I don't know. The Mac has really good touchpad gestures by which I mean they're the same in Windows, but on the Mac they actually work.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah. On the trackpad you just. What I. What is it? A three finger swipe and it just goes to the next workspace and three or four finger.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I literally disable three finger swipes in Windows on. I'm going to call it 95% of laptops I review because the trackpads are so bad. I do the, when I try to scroll, I do the thing where it brings up, I guess Task view where you see all the apps that are running and it's, you know, look, I am clumsy. I admit it. I'm sure it's my fault partially. But some trackpads work awesome and that is not an issue. So I can tell a month into this, if I haven't switched that, you know, that off, then this is a great trackpad, you know, or an accurate trackpad or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Chris Hoffman]

They're all so much better than they used to be though. Like every laptop I reviewed for PC World was so much worlds ahead of like 10 years ago.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, yeah, because you used to travel with a mouse all the time. You had to. Yeah, right. If you had to do anything precise on your screen, you had to have a mouse. That's not the case anymore. I will say any that I've never reached for a mouse on a modern laptop of any kind. I'm just talking about the gesture part. Yeah, trackpads have definitely got a lot better. But I mean, I'm not saying they're perfect on the Mac but I think it is one of the things they nail if that means anything to anybody. I don't know. But next week on where I'm switching to the Mac.com I don't know. They do get that. Right. Okay. Anyway, sorry, diverse.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to say my X1 carbon. Love the trackpad.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's a good one. And those guys are holding on to that Nubbin thing because thinkpad fans expect it. That's another example. Yeah, I haven't touched the Nubbin on one of those things in years. Yeah, like, their trackpads are fantastic. They also tend to be on the smaller side, which I like.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's the trend now, isn't it? These ginormous tracks.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, they have this. It's like a dinner plate. And it's like, why is the trackpad three times the size of the keyboard?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, like, do you buy finger painting on the trackpad size?

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, I would. If it was smaller, I would. Yeah, maybe. I mean, I don't like it. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Smaller, better.

[Paul Thurrott]

Look, I have a hard enough time reaching the left end of the trackpad as it is to get a normal click. It's the long thing. I have a lot of problems. Okay, so since we spoke last time.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

Two sets of updates to the Insider program. Last week, they had done five different updates to five different channels. Nothing super major. One of the ones they left out was experimental future platforms. Since then, they updated that channel. And it's just stuff that's everywhere else. So it's continuing that canary theme where it's supposed to be the latest, greatest. It could be breaking. It might not make it into the os. And all it is is the stuff we put in Windows last month finally making its way. So I don't. I don't. There's nothing here of interest at all. It's sad. I don't know why it continues to be like that.

[Chris Hoffman]

Very strange.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Doesn't make any sense. You know, one thing we talk about a lot is, you know, Microsoft determines they're going to clean up. We're going to fix Windows. Right. We're going to address the pain points. Nice. They're not addressing any of the actual major problems with Windows that are what I would call certification. So that's an issue. But okay, nice set of updates across the board. You know, we mentioned all of them or most of them earlier, but great. And so they start doing it. And I. One of the things that we're fixing is the Insider program, right? So there's too many programs. And like, we. I think we just talked about this last week. This idea, like, you know, how this happened. Like, you can tell without knowing. Without knowing the people I know, this is exactly what happened. They're like, all right, we're going to fix this. We're going to have two channels perfect. And then someone's like, but hold on a second. What about this thing? All right, all right, we'll add a sub channel. And then right now, I believe there are seven or eight channels and it's exactly what it was before. This is not simpler than it was before. It's just as complex. And the reason is these people didn't understand the reasons that led to the stupid stuff that was happening before. And they just walked it all back. Like, they started this thing off like, no, we're gonna fix this. We're gonna do the right thing. People are gonna love us. It's like, nice. And then it's like, well, what about this? All right, what about this? Oh, yeah, I guess we gotta do it. You know, and we just. Now we have. You know, they still talk about it like there are two or three channels or whatever it is, but just in the.

[Chris Hoffman]

Technically, there are sub channels. That's different.

[Leo Laporte]

I.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is it? I mean, like.

[Chris Hoffman]

Well, yeah, that's the message.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I'm just. I mean. Okay, but there's still. Look, we can give names to things. I mean, there's still channels. I mean, they're. They're entities of. To which you can or cannot.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry, sir, you're in sub channel one, a stroke B3. So you're right.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I think what he's saying, in other words, that's technically correct, which I think we can all agree is the best kind of correct. But there are. But there are so many. It's just as bad as it was before. Anyway. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know when they started this, but sometime in the past, sometime this year, I believe, but certainly in the past few months, they started actually documenting on a monthly basis the updates they're making to the Inbox apps, the apps that are included with Windows 11, which I think is really cool. In the June update, there were several Inbox apps that were updated with interesting features to some degree. They just the other day published the list of the changes they had made this month to those apps. And there's nothing interesting really per se, but Calculator, Clock, Media Player, and Notepad all got what I'll call minor fixes. No actual new features, but just fit and finish type stuff. And those things, I believe, went out to all of the major channels or however you want to say that. Experimental. Experimental. 26H1 experimental feature platforms beta and Release Preview. What's missing from that? Well, and Release Preview is actually multiple channels too, but whatever. Which suggests we're probably going to see those updates in the near future or. I don't think they just do it on Patch Tuesday, but maybe they do. It doesn't really matter. So it doesn't matter anyway because they're not Major feature. There's no major features. So whatever. But that's. It's still good. They're doing it. And then we get to the hilarious nature, the ironic hypocritical nature of a company putting crapware into a product that's so bad that Microsoft, which I'm not saying invented crapware, but they might have perfected it, actually complained to them and said, maybe you need to stop doing this.

[Leo Laporte]

Steve Gibson says this was the most emailed topic of the week for him.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I haven't written a story about this and I didn't find a link to this. But by the way, hp, which does this kind of thing a lot as well, has pop up Bing ads on some of their laptops. And so somebody asked Microsoft, you got to ask them about that too. And they were like, no, we're not. So that one's okay.

[Chris Hoffman]

But. But here's what's pretty bad.

[Leo Laporte]

So you're talking. You should explain. This is the LG monitors, computer monitors that install crap on your PC.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you.

[Chris Hoffman]

The monitor doesn't install it. Technically.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry.

[Chris Hoffman]

Windows installs it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. They're using Windows Update. Well, and they're telling Windows Update, we have a device driver that we would like you to install. But it's more than a device driver, right? Is that right?

[Chris Hoffman]

It's something like that. There's some. It may not technically be Windows Update, but when you plug in a device, Windows looks at the hardware ID and the device metadata goes online to Microsoft and then it sees information from the manufacturer and it says, download this driver, download this software. So I see this happen across a variety of devices like Razer mice and keyboards. You plug it in, it launches an app. How did it do that? Because like the manufacturer says, when you connect this thing, download and launch this support.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that Plug and Play. Is that what we used to call plug?

[Paul Thurrott]

So the plug and Play bit is you get a class driver that's just generic and should work. So if it's the mouse, you can move the mouse cursor or whatever and then depend. Like what he's saying is depending on the hardware, it can then actually install whatever it is, the utility, a better driver, et cetera, et cetera. So those things used to always come from the manufacturer, but now they can opt in and actually have that funnel through Windows Update.

[Leo Laporte]

See, this is always bugged me, I get a Logitech mouse and it wants me to install 400 megabytes of crap that you don't need because the mouse works without it. Everybody does this and you know why they do it? They're putting telemetry on your machine.

[Paul Thurrott]

They're adding value. Leo, I don't know what you just said, but.

[Leo Laporte]

So LG monitors. But what were they installing? It wasn't. It was supposedly an LG monitor control utility, but it was. What was it really? Was it ads?

[Chris Hoffman]

Well, it was. Well, if you look at the statement, it was just an LG monitor control utility. They were not installing McAfee antivirus. However, the LG monitor control utility had a pop up for McAfee antivirus, which

[Leo Laporte]

is an ad in it.

[Chris Hoffman]

And it had an ad. But, you know, as LG said in a statement that's totally above board and they're using a normal Microsoft process that once big names started noticing, then there were tweets and then Microsoft got involved and asked LG to stop. But this is fascinating for so many reasons. First of all, it doesn't appear to be that LG broke any rules that Microsoft didn't say LG broke a rule in terms of how it should handle this type of thing. We're really threading the needle too here because you mentioned the HP Bing ad thing. But computers come with a lot of bloatware on them and manufacturers can put as much ads as they want in there. That's fine. Microsoft can update Windows and put a bunch of Bing Edge ads in, and that's fine. But in this case, what really is just apparently too much is if you plug in a device and then it downloads an app and that app has an ad, that's bad because that app is automatically installed by Windows. We're really threading a really careful needle here. And the other funny thing is this is a monitor. Like a lot of smart TVs and smart displays and even monitors have built in firmware that has software. So if they, If LG had released a firmware update for its monitors that had a McAfee antivirus on the like display firmware level, they could have got away with that too. But the one thing that they cannot do apparently without getting in trouble is, you know, releasing this through the Windows auto install system, which is very weird. But, you know, it's good that people push back, but it's. The whole ecosystem is kind of a mess.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. This is a. So, by the way, this is the behavior, is the behavior of malware. One thing very reminiscent of that Sony rootkit thing from probably 20 years ago. I'll just say just anecdotally. Right. Microsoft does this all the time, which is what the irony part is. Or hypocrisy, whatever. Just before we started this show, I had to reassemble this set up in this new location, whatever. And I was trying to think like on this laptop. I used this last week and I like to use a different web browser for the video stream that we're doing and then my own web browser for the articles that I look at. But I couldn't remember what I used last week. So I launched Edge, which launched in this full screen experience. It's like, hey, would you like to change your settings back to Bing and blah blah, blah and all this stuff. It's like, no, I explicitly change that. What are you bugging me about? But it does that all the time.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is like, you know, Microsoft fries. Was that Paul?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Except what they're asking me is would you like alone in your car when you're going through the drive through for a hamburger? It's like, what are you. What. You know, it doesn't have anything to do with anything, right? It's not even related. This is Microsoft, you know, pot calling the kettle black. I mean Microsoft, there's a lot, I

[Leo Laporte]

mean we were talking about this on Sunday. Devendra Hardawar said, yeah, when I worked for CBS and they had downloads.com they used to, right. They started doing this when CBS bought it. They said, oh look, we can make some money. We're gonna install crap. And defenders said, what are you doing? You know, they ruin the user experience. Oh, wait a minute. Maybe it was, I can't remember. It might have been Jason Snell. Anyway, it was somebody. But this is a long standing tradition in computing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh yeah, no, I mean this is,

[Leo Laporte]

yeah, I mean it's not good. And I think LG got the idea from its TVs because.

[Chris Hoffman]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

This, my standing advice to people is do not connect your smart TV to the Internet because you will be sorry. It's going to send pictures of you every 30 seconds of what you're watching.

[Paul Thurrott]

It bugs me all the time. Like really, you should sign in, you know, let's get this thing going to know who you. Yeah, like no, I'm just trying to watch TV.

[Leo Laporte]

So you know, it's the LG TVs guys said, hey, you know, this would be good. We could do this on the monitors too.

[Chris Hoffman]

Well, the, the funny thing is they would have basically gotten away with it, you know, if it was just adware that comes a program that comes pre installed on computers or was an optional install. If it's just okay, they would have got away with it. You know, like, if I'm working at lg, I'm working on this team, it's like, well, of course we can add an app to our program and add to our app. What's the issue? Like, the issue was that it was automatically installed and. But it. I was also thinking about the Sony rootkit thing. It's actually crazy. Like, it was crazy that you could plug in an audio seat plugin, insert an audio cd, and you would get a rootkit and get a rootkit on your computer without it asking. Windows just said, whatever you want. Cd, Absolutely. And it's crazy that if you plug in a monitor, Windows will just download whatever the manufacturer wants. It could pop up and say, hey, LG recommends.

[Paul Thurrott]

I feel like part of the contract there is that if it is going through Windows Update, let's say, like, you know, I appreciate that Microsoft wants to centralize this stuff, but. But there's a promise there about the quality of those updates and that it's not going to be used as a vector for malware. That's one of the reasons you would go through Windows Update. Right? So they'd either. Either LG was very sneaky about this or Microsoft literally is just not paying attention. You know, it could be both. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Incidentally, let me point out, you're still talking about the Sony rootkit 21 years later.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's the canonical example of this. Right.

[Chris Hoffman]

And that was the same thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, Microsoft, by the way, is the one.

[Leo Laporte]

This damages your reputation. This is a very stupid thing to do. No, people aren't going to forget that LG did this, right? Right or no?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, no, you're.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, you wrote a whole book on how to de and shitify Windows. Now, without LG and people like that and HP doing these things, you wouldn't have a book.

[Paul Thurrott]

Windows is like the tsa. You're always fighting the last battle, you know, because these losers always find some other new way to do something wrong, you know? Yeah, that's a big problem.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm glad Microsoft put its foot down, but you make an excellent point, Chris. It's a little hypocritical since. How's this different from what a little hypocrites.

[Chris Hoffman]

There was a PR crisis, but again, like, Microsoft did not say LG violated a rule. Is this allowed? Could LG have said no? We're doing it like delivering an ad,

[Paul Thurrott]

though, through Windows Update. That's what happened. If that's not somehow a rule, it is today. I'm sure they changed the rules. That's crazy.

[Chris Hoffman]

The actual LG Display app, whatever it's called, is updated through the Windows Store. So they updated their Windows Store app with an ad that in theory is,

[Paul Thurrott]

by the way, another place Microsoft supposedly has oversight.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, in your defense, Chris, I will say you are not advocating this. You're just pointing out there is a certain amount of hypocrisy here.

[Chris Hoffman]

Right? I mean, it's like at what level is the. You know, they're not. They didn't just upload an ad to Windows Update. They're just, you know, there's this kind of cascading failure. So, for example, not to drag Razer through the mud, but I found an interesting story when I was researching this a few years ago. Razer had basically a security vulnerability in their installer. You'd plug in a razor mouse, the installer would open up and then you could get to an administrator like command prompt from that installer. It had a privilege escalation vulnerability and they patched it. But that's the kind of thing that this creates. What kind of hardware devices are out there that you plug into a Windows computer and now you have administrator access? Have we audited all these? Every mouse and keyboard and display and peripheral in the ecosystem. If you say this is too much, I don't like it. From what I looked at, you have to have a group policy setting to turn this off. Unless you can find some registry saying somewhere. You have to upgrade to Windows Professional and enable a group policy saying to say, just don't let manufacturers install stuff on my computer when I plug in devices. That's crazy. This is why people complain about Windows. If I'm using Linux, if I'm using a Mac, I can plug in a display and the manufacturer does not get to say that we're downloading an app right now. That's just how it is.

[Leo Laporte]

There is no plug and play at all on. On those devices.

[Chris Hoffman]

Right. It just doesn't work. No. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's on you to. If you want a driver to go out and get it. Yeah. All right. I need to pause because we're going to take a break, but it's great to have you. Chris Hoffman, Sir PC Magazine Senior Writer for Software I guess Windows is software that counts.

[Chris Hoffman]

It is. I cover a lot of operating systems. It is very.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you know Today is the 11th birthday of Windows 10? Did you know that?

[Paul Thurrott]

I did not forgot that, but I forget patch Tuesday every month too.

[Leo Laporte]

I have it in my calendar so that I will go on Facebook and say happy birthday Windows. So I think you should do the same.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that was a weird July release. But then

[Leo Laporte]

I just was kind of shocked when I saw that Windows 10 is 11 years old. That kind of surprises me that it's

[Chris Hoffman]

that old and still going.

[Paul Thurrott]

How do you think I feel? We're all. What are you gonna do?

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I am 10 years old now. No, 11. I just don't have any fingers. Yeah, I don't have enough fingers. We're gonna pause. You're watching Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrock, Chris Hoffman. I take it Mary Jo Foley said no.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Sorry, I mean, I. I had to ask.

[Leo Laporte]

You know who does like you? Steve Gibson.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, good.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Steve. Because, you know, next week we're going to be doing the show from Black Hat in Las Vegas. The kind folks at Threat Locker, one of our sponsors, has asked, invited us to sit in their booth. There won't be a PA system. There won't be places to sit. So.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sorry, are we going to be like booth babes? Is that what you just said?

[Leo Laporte]

We're the booth babes. Congratulations. Windows Weekly will be first thing in the morning, as soon as the door is open, and we will stream it live, but you'll also be able to download it as usual. And then we're going to take a break, and then there'll be Steve Gibson. But Steve wanted me to tell you and Richard that he'd love it if you stick around and we can do a kind of a roundtable. Security now.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, boy.

[Leo Laporte]

If you want.

[Paul Thurrott]

You just asked me to work double. No, that's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Without pay, I might add.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, no, that was understood.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, I'm sure Richard would be

[Leo Laporte]

happy if you were a booth babe. You wouldn't do it.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'll just walk around with a number, you know, but, like, you know, like one of those.

[Leo Laporte]

Boxing. Boxing. Round one. Anyway. Be kind of fun, I think. You know what? I think Steve's, for some reason, worried about content. Like. But we're going to be at Black Hat. There will be plenty to talk about.

[Paul Thurrott]

I was going to say, the content will be between the time I got off the plane and the time I sat down here. How many ways was I hacked?

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. Exactly. I'm gonna. So Lisa's been very nervous about going to Black Hat, the big hacker. Have you been to Black Hat, Chris? Do you?

[Chris Hoffman]

I have not people from my Windows

[Paul Thurrott]

Phone, so I know I can't be hacked.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So I don't know. Lisa's saying, well, what should we do? What should we do? And Russell, our Wonderful IT expert who's brilliant said, just turn off your Bluetooth if you're really nervous. Turn off your WI fi too, and just use cell and you'll be fine. Yeah, I'm gonna leave everything on. I'm gonna take a chance and we'll see.

[Paul Thurrott]

You're not using, like a graphene phone yet.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, I do have graphene. I have a pixel 10 with graphene on it, but I. You know what?

[Paul Thurrott]

That wouldn't be a bed.

[Leo Laporte]

I. I'm Mr. Yolo. I love taking chances. So hack me.

[Paul Thurrott]

You like that Far side cartoon with the deer that had the birthmark that looks like a target and it's like, bummer of a birthmark. Hell, you're just like, I'm just gonna do this.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Gary Larson. Gosh darn it, I miss him. All right, let's take a break anyway. Come out and see us. If you're gonna be at Black Hat. We'll be at the threat locker booth. I'll be there all day. And maybe we can entice Paul and Richard to stay all day too. Maybe if I get a good bottle of whiskey. A whiskey. We could, I don't know if. Can we have whiskey on the show?

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm sure Rich would be happy to do this.

[Leo Laporte]

It'd be fun. We don't get, you know, we don't get everybody together that often. I think it'd be a lot of fun.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, just a thought. This portion of Windows Weekly brought to you by. Oh, delete me. Actually, I do want to talk about delete me because they are a lifesaver for small business, for any business. You. I don't. I shouldn't probably have to tell you how awful it is out there in the. In the real world with these data brokers collecting every bit of information about you. It's even worse for businesses. And we learned that because part of, you know, owning a business is putting yourself out there. That's part of the job. The bad news is when you promote your business, it leaves you and your team completely exposed. You got that website with everybody's name right now, 90% of business owners have, get this, their home address, probably because of licenses and stuff. Their home address is easily discoverable online. And the average owner has more than 600 pieces of personal information sitting on the open web. Stuff. You really think, well, it shouldn't be there, but it is personal. Email, phone number, home address, details about your family. And we learned this is a real problem. Hackers use this data to run hyper targeted phishing. Attacks. And because they have the real details, they don't sound like strangers. They sound like clients or partners you already trust. And we've been bit by this several times. We started using Delete Me when a text came from our CEO to her direct reports from her phone number to their phone number saying hey, this is Lisa, I'm in a meeting, can you go out and buy some gift cards and send them to this address? We would really like to thank this person for their contribution. Fortunately, our team is smart. They didn't fall for it. But it opened my eyes. It made me realize the bad guys know all about us since we've been targeted with emails from partners asking a request for proposal. Click the link to the so called Google Docs address. It's a man in the middle attack. You enter your Google information, you're hacked. That's why attacks using personalized information are five times more likely to succeed because they look real. And let me tell you, the average incident costs small businesses more than $120,000. We were very lucky, but we immediately signed up for Delete Me. One in four businesses will be impacted this year alone. So Delete me reduces your exposure by up to 95%. Very simple. They remove you and your employees personal information from hundreds. I think there are more than 500 now data broker websites, which starves hackers of the fuel they use to build their target lists. And it's not a one time thing. It can't be because these guys are like cockroaches. They go out of business, they come back with a new name and a brand new list of information. Delete Me is always looking, constantly monitoring and removing your data. You will get regular privacy reports. We just got one the other day. So you always know where things stand, what they found, what they deleted. Fortune 500 companies and government agencies have been using Deleteme and trusting Delete me for over 15 years. And now that same enterprise level protection is available for your small business too. Protect your business, protect your peace of mind. Do what we did. Go to joindeleteme.com twit-biz to start protecting your business with Deleteme today. If you use that link, by the way, you'll also get a free year of social media protection for every seat you purchase. Again, that's joindeleteme.com twit-biz and by the way, please don't just Google delete me and go there. You'll go to the wrong Delete me. You'll go to the one in Europe and It's not the same thing. You want to go to this website, you don't need to google it. Joindeleteme.com TWiT-BIZ or go to Twitter TV sponsors and click the link there. Join deleteme.com TWiT Biz they are great. We use them, we recommend them, and you should use them too. We thank them so much for supporting the lovely Paul and Chris and Windows Weekly. Now on with the show.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, so I was gonna say this is, this is really crisp, but you know, Microsoft is starting to. Well, the industry is starting to release 8 gigabyte Windows laptops again, like it's the 1990s or something because of the RAM crisis.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, yeah, it's.

[Paul Thurrott]

But anyway, Chris came up with what I think is a really interesting way to test that. Curious to hear about this.

[Chris Hoffman]

So While I'm at PCMag now and I did a lot of laptop reviews for PC World over the last few years and most of them were at least 16 gigs, I had one 8 gigabyte laptop I reviewed for PC World like a year ago, whenever it was, and I couldn't believe it at the time I was like, just spend another 30 bucks or something and get more RAM because it's not good. But obviously RAM has become a lot more expensive now.

[Leo Laporte]

It's more than 30 bucks now, Chris.

[Chris Hoffman]

Right? Yeah, I mean like the year to year Surface laptop prices increases are nuts. But you know, Microsoft themselves are now releasing an 8 gigabyte RAM surface laptop and it's out there. And the Verge reviewed it and said it's not enough for Windows. And I was looking around a lot of this and there's a lot of discourse. Some people say it's actually fine, some people say it's unusable. And like there's two sides kind of talking past each other. And I was really curious like, well, how good is it? So first of all, I don't have an 8 gigabyte Windows laptop. I have a desktop. It has 16 gig sticks in it. So I can't really make it 8 gigabytes. But you can test this yourself. Actually in Windows, if you go to msconfig, there's an old troubleshooting option that lets you limit your computer to whatever RAM you select. So if you plug in eight gigs,

[Paul Thurrott]

my computer's working too well. Could we screw this up somehow? Yes.

[Chris Hoffman]

Well, it's a troubleshooting. A developer could use it to. Well, actually developers will probably have to start using it to test other applications perform in these eight gig Machines that are everywhere. But you can test that and you can set that and reboot. And I did. It actually works. Windows works with 8 gigabytes of RAM. If you just want the desktop and File Explorer, you're good. In fact, you can even open a web browser and have one or maybe two tabs, but don't, I don't know about the second one, maybe two of my one tab. Well, actually, yes, it's that tight. Now the interesting thing is in the middle, right? And this is I think why maybe both sides don't understand each other on this issue, is that if you start opening tabs and programs, you have six browser tabs open. It actually is usable. It doesn't appear to be swapping horrendously. It is slightly slower though. It's slightly slower because there's just not enough ram. So it's doing swapping and it's really efficient at the swapping. And then once you open a lot of programs, it's slow, like you alt tab to slack and it takes one second to come back. And this is on a very desktop with a fast cpu. But the interesting spot is in the middle where if I was not a geek and I had a Windows 10 computer that was 8 years old and I bought a new 8 gigabyte Windows 8, Windows 11 laptop, I might just think that's how slow modern computers are. I'm like, well, Chrome is just kind of slow, Windows is kind of slow. That's just how it is. It's usable. And if I was working in an office and they were paying me by the hour and they said, here's your eight gig machine, it's like, fine, I'll move slow because you're paying for my time. But the reality is if you have that eight gig machine and you want to use a few programs or you want to use a few browser tabs, it is just slowed down by the 8 gigs. Even in a best case scenario, unless you're using one or two web pages at a time, it is slower. Windows actually does not pop up and tell you, hey, you're swapping. You can look at the task manager. Back in the day, I'm a date myself. Back in the day, you would be using an ancient hard drive and you would hear it swapping grinding away. You see the light, you'd hear the hard drive, you knew that the swapping was happening. Now it's like it's just a little slow. Like it's not obvious what's happening. If you're not a geek and it's just eight gigs just isn't enough. I'm sorry, you can use one web page at a time, it's fine.

[Paul Thurrott]

But no, eight gigs is not enough, full stop. And look, maybe some of the work they're doing this year to make Windows better will help a little bit, but there's a real future proofing problem here. There's also, by the way, I don't know how old that computer you use to do that on is, but when you think about new laptops coming out the gate with eight gigs of ram, they're running new low end processors, right? So one of the things I do I will review later this summer is I don't remember the brand, the model, but it's a Lenovo laptop running like the Intel Wildcat chipset, which is what we used to call Celeron and, or Pentium, I don't remember. I don't know what I think they just call it Intel. It might even just be Intel Core something, I don't remember. But it's really low end. The thing is, that laptop though is going to come with 16 gigs of RAM. So I'm also not going to get that exact experience. But you know, look, every time eight gigs of RAM comes up now, it's like, oh, the MacBook Neo runs fine, okay, but the Mac Mac OS may be slightly more efficient than Windows, but I don't think it's like twice as efficient. Maybe it's 30% or 25%, whatever it is. But you're going to want, if you're actually using a computer, maybe not Linux, but who would use Linux with 8 gigs of RAM? I mean, if you're actually using a computer and this is what you do all day long, you need 16 gigs of RAM or more. But there is this new, newish notion here. This is what the Chromebook was trying to address. It's what the MacBook Neo addresses, I think. And it's what these stupid eight gig laptops are going to address. Which is your primary device is not the computer. It's probably a phone, you know, and which is the case for so many, probably billions of people really, but whatever number of people. And every once in a while you need the bigger screen, you know, and I mean someday that will just be a screen and you'll probably just plug your phone into it. I know you can do that today, but maybe it becomes more sophisticated. But you know, you'd get this thing because it's relatively inexpensive, it has a bigger screen, has a full size keyboard, you can type and you do that one thing, whatever it is, which you know, as Chris was saying is you can do one thing. You know, you can do one thing, no problem. But if you're doing a lot of research and you're browsing the web and you get multiple apps, it's no, 8 gigs or M is not going to cut it. I'm sorry, it's just this is no way. I don't, I feel like I don't even have to review one of these things to know that. But whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, Apple, when it put out the, the Neo, which is an Apple bestseller, is eight gigs. But years ago, didn't they say, oh, eight gigs is fine with our M1 processor you don't need.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, they did, but they also switched to 16 gig as a minimum. I don't remember the time frame, but they did it before Microsoft did. And then Microsoft has not. Still, I should say Microsoft has a 16 gig minimum on Copilot Plus PC. So when I look at those two things, I say, well, this is the modern minimum, the realistic minimum, not the minimum stated on the spec sheet where it's like you could, you couldn't. Windows 11 supposedly supports 4 gigabytes of RAM. How bad's the component crisis going to get? I almost jokingly, when we were talking about this before the show started, I was, I almost jokingly asked if you were able to use Windows Ready Drive. Do you remember this thing where you could plug in like a USB key into the computer and it would act as cache so it would help with that thrashing effect?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh my God. How slow would that be?

[Paul Thurrott]

That would be terrible. Well, I don't think it's. I bet it's not even it. Well, it's Windows. You never know. There's a lot of vestigial stuff going on in Windows, but. Well, no, you would see, I. There's no. I think it's going to be gone, but. But that was about that. Yeah, that was, you know, at the time, Vista was very resource heavy, relatively speaking. So this was a way to get around that. If you had an existing laptop that you upgraded from XP and would have immediately noticed it did not run as well, you could have used, you know, everyone. Well, not everyone. Most people would have like a. Whatever they were at the time, a USBA stick of some kind and you could use it. There's cash. I don't know, it's. I guess the need drives this. I don't know.

[Chris Hoffman]

It's interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they don't have a choice. It's amazing to Think are these cheaper though Chris? Right? They got to be cheaper.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, cheaper than one.

[Chris Hoffman]

I mean cheaper than what? Right? Like not it's not cheaper than the 16 gig machine was last year, but it is definitely cheaper than the 16 gig machine is this year. But I think it's every company is

[Leo Laporte]

going to face this, right? This is a big crisis.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. So the thing, here's the thing. First of all, if you are going to run eight gigs of ram, I suspect I've not tried this, this is just off the top of my head. But a Snapdragon X2 would be better, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Or a Snapdragon or Qualcomm eventually is going to come out. Remember what the Snapdragon C I think they're calling it? We'll see if that's garbage or not. We don't know. You know the Wildcat stuff is the intel equivalent. There are. You have to look around sometimes it's a sale thing. But I, I, this is not a recent thing that you know, a $500 if you could get it at the time Windows laptop was always going to be garbage and that what you really wanted to get is close to, you know, in the 800 to a thousand dollar range. You can still buy actually decent new computers. Not many, but there are a couple between 800 and $1,000. But really that's shifted upward mostly to the, I'm going to call it twelve to fifteen hundred dollar range. Probably you need sixteen gigs of ram. I mean you know, if you're going to really use the thing because you're not just using it today, you're using it for the next several years. What are the time frame is, you know, you think it's bad now? I mean wait till you actually use it for a long time. It's only going to get worse. So and you know this is one thing Chris again because I'll keep just repeating myself we talk about on the show all the time is one of the, on the other side of this spectrum, one of the things that's really nice that's happening in hardware, PC hardware these days is laptops are becoming a lot more repairable and user serviceable. Right. But the one piece that is not never but almost never included in that is the ram. The RAM is almost always soldered on or part of that soc, you know, whatever that is, daughter card or whatever. Every once in a while I'll see a laptop where you can actually swap out. They have like co dimms or so whatever they're called now, which is awesome. Because then you could say, look, I'm going to buy one with less RAM than I really want, but maybe down the road there'll be a sale or the prices will finally stabilize and you can upgrade it. But most, I mean, 90 something percent high. 90%, you can't. That's tough because there's no, nothing you do just buy a new computer, which I think we can all agree is ecologically sound. It's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I think, I mean we've already seen PCs sales dropping. Right. I think we're gonna now see.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, yes, smartphone sales are dropping. All the hardware stuff is dropping.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean people are price sensitive.

[Chris Hoffman]

I think you're right. Long term, we probably, unless this, unless RAM gets a lot cheaper, we probably are going to see kind of more device consolidation. Why wouldn't you just want, like, if RAM is this expensive, why do I want a phone with this much RAM and a laptop with this much RAM and a game console with this much ram? That's a lot of ram. When we could probably just power a display from a sufficiently powerful phone. We could today, honestly. It can be done. The software exists. It's a little janky, but you know, there's gonna, it's, it's probably a better solution long term than 8 gigabytes of RAM and Windows or 4 gigabytes.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. In other words, this may serve to accelerate a trend that might have already been happening, whatever that that trend might be toward like a high, like a phone that can act as a hybrid device where you can plug it into a screen and a keyboard and stuff

[Chris Hoffman]

and just only there was such a thing as a Windows Phone, they would be well positioned.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, it's built in to end right now. I mean, I don't know that, you know,

[Leo Laporte]

a lease to own plan because they realized this fall we're going to be charging a lot of money for some hardware. Yeah, but people might need a loan.

[Paul Thurrott]

I have a problem with that. I mean, I appreciate that, I agree something like this, but it's like Klarna, which I hate, and it's rent to own. And actually it's not even rent to own. I don't know why did I just say that? It's really not, it's, it's a lease, like a car lease. You don't own it at the end. You can pay for it, but the

[Leo Laporte]

thing is that you could buy it out.

[Paul Thurrott]

People that need to use this lease thing, you know, tend to be less affluent. They're the type of people that are not going to have the Hundreds of dollars at the end to pay. If they could have afforded a couple hundred bucks up front, they would have, you know, like, you know, I guess we're all betting that, you know, we're all going to be better off in the future or something. But the more likely outcome for these folks, which is really unfortunate, is that they just keep going with the lease, you know, like, since they don't own this device, they're like, well, I'll just keep the payment going. I'll get a new phone, you know, in two years or three, whatever the time frame is, depending on the device. And I, I'm sorry, but like, that really stinks for those people. Like, I hate that that's the only option they have.

[Chris Hoffman]

Yeah, it's the modern version of a contract, though. You know, they're back.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, but I don't. I just. It's just this feels like victimizing the poor to me. It's not. It's not great. I mean, some people will use it properly, so to speak, and. Or maybe you can handle whatever it is. But, you know, I keep. You can pay it off early if you want to, whatever, with no fees.

[Leo Laporte]

Your analogy to a car lease is apt because really what your payments are are the depreciation.

[Chris Hoffman]

Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

So, yeah, the difference between a car lease and this Apple thing is that the payment you make at the end is incommensurate with the remaining value of the vehicle you actually like. You're not paying off the remainder that you owe, so to speak. You're paying more like they kind of get you there a little bit depending on the car. This one, it is the amount. So if it's in $1,000 device and over two years, you pay 600 or 800 bucks, whatever you owe the difference, like, you don't owe more than that. Like, they're not going to get you at the end that way. But if you want to send it back and it's not in perfect condition, what's going to happen then? Right? I mean, I've had Apple reject trading devices because they have little dings on them, which.

[Leo Laporte]

Well. And here's the interesting thing they can't fix. You know, I don't know, but when we talked about on a Mac break weekly yesterday, Christina said, incidentally, it won't be Apple inspecting this. It'll be.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's what I mean. It's the third party and that. That's the tricky bit. And yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you trust Klarna to give you every penny that I don't?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I don't and the, the previous system that Apple had, the iPhone Upgrade program, had AppleCare and as part of

[Leo Laporte]

it, oh yeah, you don't got Apple Car.

[Paul Thurrott]

And that makes sense. There's no Apple Care here. So if you want that, if you want to protect the device with some kind of a, you know, a protection service or whatever, you know, you have to pay for that yourself. If you don't do that, and they won't again, the types of people, unfortunately, who are going to get into this thing are not going to pay. They're like, oh no, let me pay $99 every year for AppleCare, are going to use their device like normal people. And then two years or three or whatever the time frame is on the device and then you hand back this crumpled mass of metal that looks nothing like the thing you bought and it's like, yeah, this is worth 17 cents. You know, I. And you may owe them money, even if you're like, no, I'm just going to send it back. They're like, great, you owe us $200 now and not to buy it, just to pay off the damage you did to this thing. We're going to see what this looks like. It's going to, I, this is very, I think, I'm not sure how I wrote it exactly, but it's like unappily, you know, Apple is really about, well, whatever anyone thinks of the company. I mean, they do have like standards for quality and so forth. And this is a third party. And I, I don't know, I don't like the sound of this.

[Leo Laporte]

I also think this is to be there, forced to buy the current crisis and RAM and hard drives.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. The only thing I can defend them on is they're not unlike say, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, a couple other companies. They're not directly responsible for these hardware price increases.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

They don't have a big, you know, a big, they're not, they don't contribute that way, if you want to say it that way. You know, they don't have tens to hundreds of billions of dollars in capex spending on a AI infrastructure like these other companies do. So they're not, they're not a prime contributor anyway to that stuff. So, you know, that's like damning with faint praise, I guess, but they're, they're not that part of, you know, part of that problem, I guess. I love Apple is what I'm trying to say, Leo, and so much.

[Leo Laporte]

And I really wish. I know that, Paul. You know, you try to hide it, but it's so Clear.

[Chris Hoffman]

Just, just as a, just as a tip in terms of trade ins though, like Apple, like if you're trading an Apple device, if you go to the Apple Store and do it in person, like that works great. If you mail it, you get the same bad trade in experience as basically any manufacturer. So it would be nice if they had the kind of in store trade in. But if anyone's ever got trade in an Apple device, try to do it in an Apple Store, don't mail it.

[Paul Thurrott]

I had an iPad Air with AppleCare and I traded it in for an iPad Pro after about a year and it had a couple of scratches on the corners which is the same thing Apple could fix very easily. And they sent it back, they just didn't accept it. That was like $450 a trade in value that I did not get. And it's like guys, what? Like that's nonsense.

[Leo Laporte]

Do it in person is what you're saying. Although the other thing to consider which makes this such a complicated calculation is sometimes the trade in from your carrier is even better than anybody.

[Paul Thurrott]

How do you know though? It's so hard.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you won't know till you do it right. So it's a very hard calculation to make up front whether you should get this lease thing or not. It's tempting if you like. I mean, I don't know about you guys, but I get a new iPhone every year, so in that case it might make sense. It is an interest free loan in effect.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, the only problem is that if

[Leo Laporte]

your phone is pristine when you turn

[Paul Thurrott]

it back in, so you do it. What you're doing is a two year term and then you, I guess you can upgrade in a year. Right? And is there no penalty?

[Leo Laporte]

Payment just continues on?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah. So I mean in this age of us paying for everything every month, forever for the rest of our lives, that sounds like an awesome thing to add to that list.

[Chris Hoffman]

You know you'll never own a phone again.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, I don't really, you know,

[Paul Thurrott]

people talk about like, you know, you don't own that. Whatever digital content you bought, it's like, yeah, that's not, I, that's, I don't

[Leo Laporte]

even know my house. You don't own anything.

[Paul Thurrott]

And by the way, everything I own is temporary anyway. I'm gonna die. Who cares? But what I do care about is all the, but all the stuff you're paying for every month. Right? That was. And that's an effort I made. You know, I should do this all the time. But a couple of months ago I Stripped down a bunch of the services I pay for. Because a lot of you have. All of us, I think, have some number of things we don't use or barely use. And you pay for it every month. And if you just looked at that one bill, you're like, well, it's only 10 to whatever, 30 bucks a month, whatever it is. You're like, yeah, but I have 18 of them. You know, I just.

[Leo Laporte]

I finally. I should look at my bill every month. I looked at a bill and I said, what is Shadow? Why is shadow 20 bucks? And I realized I've been paid. Do you remember Shadow PC where you could have a purchase? Remember, like four years ago we talked about it? Or three years, and I signed up for it. I had been paying 20 bucks a month for three years, never used it

[Paul Thurrott]

once and forgot about it. So a year and a half ago, we went up to visit my son, who's deaf but has cochlear implants, et cetera. He was talking about. He heard the Apple music had this thing that would be good for him. And I was like, dude, you could switch right now. We get his Apple part of Apple one. He's like, well, I have all these playlists.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So I was like, all right. I said, I'll pay for this thing called Song Shift for like a month. And that's a good transfer all year. Love it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Works good. I've been paying for it ever since. I've never used it once since that day he transferred all his playlists.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God.

[Paul Thurrott]

We were driving somewhere, he did it in 15 minutes, worked great, and now I still pay for it.

[Leo Laporte]

Still paying for it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I'm a genius. Definitely. Listen to me, when it comes to

[Leo Laporte]

any advice, look at your bill every month, kids.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Some of it's hard because, you know, like, I asked my. My wife does. Handles our money, and I asked her to do this whenever that was two, three months ago. And she's like, we have like, 17 entries every month. That. To say Apple.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's a problem, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Because you. Some of those. I mean, you can go look, I guess. And, you know, sometimes they'll bundle things together to make it better for them for, you know, paying credit card fees, whatever. But,

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

You really gotta.

[Leo Laporte]

I.

[Paul Thurrott]

You gotta be.

[Leo Laporte]

When I saw Shadow, I thought, this must be Matt. This is something evil. And I had to search for it because that's all it said on the bill was Shadow. And finally I saw. Oh, I remember that. I subscribed and I said, I Must have an account. I logged in and said, yeah, you've got a virtual PC. You've had it for three years.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's just sitting there doing nothing. We love you. You are our favorite customer. Yeah, exactly. That's the business model, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, sure.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, what was the exception to this? I got an email. I can't remember the service, but some service emailed me recently to say, hey, just let you know your thing is running out pretty soon. If you don't do anything, we're going to rebill you. And I was like, man, that should be the law for everything. Everything should do this.

[Leo Laporte]

But not everybody does it, do they?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, they rely on you. Just not.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, we do that with Club Twit, by the way, you know. Right. Don't we, Patrick?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. That was when we switched our system@continent throughout.com. we. We moved to something where we'll do the same because, you know, people get the spill suddenly and they're like, what is this? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Sigh.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, well, this week I'm complaining about subscription services. All right, we have one more hardware story.

[Leo Laporte]

Do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's gross.

[Chris Hoffman]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

It went to me and I was

[Leo Laporte]

like, nope, sorry, I'm just clicking buttons at random. Chris, just ignore me.

[Chris Hoffman]

So, the copilot key, everyone's favorite new hardware feature. There's a really fascinating story this week that Microsoft is testing a do nothing option that just does nothing when you press the copilot key. It's really fascinating. We're years out now. There's a fascinating article that Microsoft published on the accessibility website that says some people have been having issues because this replaced the right control key which people need. It can, on some machines replace the right control key or the menu key, which people needed sometimes for accessibility reasons. We're going to eventually add later this year an option so that you make it the control key again. It's like, well, that's good. But I mean, that happened years ago.

[Paul Thurrott]

The history behind this is kind of interesting because obviously two years ago, Copilot plus PCs come out, they have this key. You're like, great, that's what we need. I'm a sloppy enough typist. I'll hit that key by mistake all day long. They're relying on this, right? Yeah. But then I think it was later that year or maybe the following January, somewhere in that timeframe. This is going to go out on lots of PCs. At the time, the way it was phrased, it seemed like it was going to be some PCs it's like every PC as far as I can tell, it's just a copilot plus PC. A key is there?

[Chris Hoffman]

Yeah. But prior to the copilot plus PCs I was still seeing that key. That key predates copilot plus PCs. That was on some of the original intel things with the dinky npus that never got the menu features. Wasn't it?

[Leo Laporte]

Wasn't it the menu key?

[Chris Hoffman]

I reviewed many machines like that. So it's.

[Leo Laporte]

So here's an interesting.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean there have been other keys but I mean as far as like. But it being the Copilot with that low Fairly, it's like 18, well two years ago for Copley plus PC, whatever it was.

[Leo Laporte]

But I think they remapped the menu key. I think it was the menu key.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, it's not. So if you actually. And the only reason I know that is before they gave you a way to do anything with it, you could use. There's a power toy called Key Remapper which we're going to talk about later. But one of the things you can do there is have it. I would have it. I would just look at the keyboard and be like, all right, what's the key to the right of that key? So it's. Well, this keyboard doesn't have a thing. It's usually a left arrow key. Not always. I just map it to that. That way when I'm sloppy typing I can, you know, it just does left arrow. Right now it. Doing nothing would be better. But. Okay, fine. Now at some point micro. Well, hold on one second. I'm sorry, I just want to say like Microsoft partially addressed this, right. So at some point there's a. If you go into the Settings app, there's a. It's probably in Accessibility or something. But there's a keyboard. Let me see if I can find this thing. I should probably just look up keyboard, I guess. But there's a keyboard page in Settings and there is a little drop down for the Copilot key. And you can set it to do a couple of different things. Like it can run Search instead. It can run Copilot. Obviously I can't remember what the third one is, but do nothing is not one of those options. When I saw that, I was like do nothing needs to be one of those options. I would just set it to be. You can unassign it. It doesn't do anything.

[Leo Laporte]

Make you text lock or something?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, you just don't assign it to anything.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

And if you hit that key, the Settings app will run and go to that page, highlight that interface and say, you need to pick something. So now imagine me sloppy typing. I'm writing an article and the Settings app keeps popping up in my face as I'm typing. And it's like, guys, this is not a solution to this problem. So what Chris. The story Chris is alluding to is like, if they actually put that in there, which is honestly in keeping with a lot of the stuff they're doing this year with the pain point stuff, then there you go. That they. So it only took them. It will take them two and a half years to solve a problem that they caused that they was so bad it resulted in basically every PC hardware make on earth train changing their keyboards. God damn it. Like, seriously, think about that.

[Chris Hoffman]

It's. It's really fascinating. No other key in Windows that they have. There's no option to do nothing when you press the Windows key. I mean, they have it.

[Paul Thurrott]

You cannot turn off the Windows key. This is not a thing. It's not like a hidden thing. It's nothing. You can't do it. I mean, think about how amazing would it be if you were a fan of some other launcher like Microsoft makers and power toys like PowerToys, Command, whatever it's called, the new one. I want that to launch when I hit the Windows key. No, you do not get to do that. That would be amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

It is a weird key because I was trying to remap it. I wanted to make it my voice dictation key.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And it does not behave like a normal key.

[Paul Thurrott]

No. So that's Linux.

[Leo Laporte]

You can see what it's doing. It's weird. It's doing weird.

[Paul Thurrott]

So in that part, the key keyboard remapper, I just. Off the top of my head, but I believe it's function key 23, which does not exist for the most part. Right. Yeah. I mean most people probably have 12. Probably function one through 12 or something. Yeah, it's terrible. That's why you can't.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, most keys, there's a key down key press down and key press up event. There are two events down and up. This key sends all these different events. It's weird. It's just a weird. They've done something. And I think that's intentional. I think they want to keep.

[Paul Thurrott]

Really want you to use Copilot. I don't know if you've heard this.

[Leo Laporte]

I think this is shockingly. I think this is intentional.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, it literally is intentional. Yeah, that's true.

[Leo Laporte]

Because I mean, I had this X1, this Lenovo with a copilot key, which I'm. Linux is honest, so I don't need it. And I wanted to map it to something useful. I gave up. I finally used the insert key instead.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh. So, I mean, I, I, if you want to look it up at some point. But I believe it's function key 23. So if that helps you remap it to something that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but it doesn't. It would if it was just a simple key down and key up. But it's got weird. It's sending weird.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, I see. I see what you're saying. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It's not a normal. It's not a normal key.

[Paul Thurrott]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

It's.

[Paul Thurrott]

What does it say now? I'm looking at it. It's bugging me. It's F23.

[Leo Laporte]

There is no F. Is there an F22?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, there isn't.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

They pick something that purposely does not exist.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, it's crazy. All right. What a word. Anyway, yeah, moving on. This has been a fun two years, a couple of app things. Because I don't, I didn't. Wasn't sure where else to put this stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

But I think it's hysterical that they are testing a do nothing function.

[Chris Hoffman]

We'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

Offering it.

[Paul Thurrott]

They're just gonna test moving world. That is Microsoft backtracking on their worst mistakes. You know, they will get there eventually. There's no doubt about it. Yeah, but.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, sorry, I didn't mean to bring us back to that.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's just, it's an open world. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Moving right along, you might talk about one drive photos.

[Chris Hoffman]

Yeah. Apparently Windows PCs now have a OneDrive Photos app. It's news to me. I saw this news story earlier and then I opened my Start menu and I Now have a OneDrive Photos app which is separate from the existing Photos app. Now, the existing Photos app also allows you to see OneDrive Photos, as does the OneDrive Photos app. And OneDrive Photos also appear in File Explorer. Why there are now two Photos apps, I don't fully understand. People are saying that Windows installed this, I think probably under the hood. This is like part of the OneDrive installer package. Like OneDrive updates separately from Windows.

[Paul Thurrott]

I saw this app possibly a year or more ago. Really? On a computer. Yeah. But now it seems like it's everywhere. Like it's suddenly very common.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Chris Hoffman]

I opened it. It says it's a beta. I don't understand why I would use it versus the normal Photos app. I don't. This is, it's it's very strange. This is the kind of thing I think people complain about with Windows. Apple doesn't have. Here's the Apple Photos app, icloud Photos app, and here's the Photos app. And the Photos app has icloud Photos.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I'm not going to defend this. This is garbage. Also, I'll say this is the third way you could look at your gallery in Windows 11, because there's also a gallery view in the File Explorer which is exactly the same as the main view in the Photos app. So now we have this third one. If I had to guess, and it still doesn't make sense, it might be for people who use OneDrive as like people to back up their photos. But the OneDrive they have on the computers, maybe for work or something, and they, they're not mixing them or something. I. But I. But you can have two one drives. I don't know why you would. I don't know. This doesn't make any sense.

[Chris Hoffman]

There's no statement here. We released this new app, here's why, and here's what we're excited about. It's just. Here it is.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Right. It's completely redundant. I don't believe there's a single feature in here that doesn't already exist in the Photos app. I don't quite get it, but I think. But I guess I'm just guessing. It really bothers me that this exists. But like, but I do. It's very clearly for that audience or whatever who uses OneDrive solely for photos, you know, because it is a. It's not just a photo app. It's a one drive, you know, I know it's obvious, but a OneDrive like, so it has your, like those moments they create. Like on this date or whatever, you can go look at that stuff, which you can do in the Photos app. But it's just.

[Chris Hoffman]

I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know why. Doesn't make any sense. So, yeah, speaking of malware, you might find on your computer that some company installed without telling you. There's an example. There's the hypocrisy we were talking about before. Right.

[Chris Hoffman]

So, I mean, like, yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

So you know, Kevin's. Someone else said this too. Like something about the Samsung is no longer, I guess syncing from whatever Samsung Gallery to OneDrive or something like that. But I can't imagine this is just for Samsung. Like, I don't think that fully explains it. I don't know. I'm not really sure. But it's very strange. I Don't know. I'm really confused by this.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I would hate for anybody to get confused by the fact that you're listening to Windows Weekly.

[Paul Thurrott]

If we can't explain it, good luck

[Leo Laporte]

on the fine Twit network. Let's pause and then earnings. Earnings, my friends, earnings. There's some money in this. Microsoft earnings are coming up. It is earnings week. What time at the market close. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I was just trying to find that. So half an hour. I feel like it's 5pm ET.

[Leo Laporte]

Usually 5pm would be 2pm but that

[Paul Thurrott]

doesn't feel right either because we're usually done.

[Leo Laporte]

Usually it's around 4:30, 4:30, something like that. But anyway, we'll keep an eye on it. And as usual, what usually happens has happened in the past is we get the first numbers and we give you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, what usually happens. We're in the middle of talking about something and I have like that. That thousand years, Paul, because the announcement has occurred and I'm looking at it like I can't do two things at once. But we'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

I Anyway, Google had its earnings already and we'll talk about that in just a bit. And so did intel. And you couldn't have two companies with two more divergent earnings. But that is, that is still to come on Windows Weekly. Chris Hoffman's with us from PCMag. Paul Thurat, we're glad you're here too. Our show today, brought to you by Cirrus Inc. This is a solution that a lot of companies need. If you have iPhones in your company and you use M365, you know exactly the pain point here you got your phone, you need a coworker's number. So what do you do? You dig through teams, email, maybe your HR system just to find it. It should be on your device, shouldn't it? And then somebody updates their number. Now it's wrong everywhere else it lives. This is gal. This is a gal, right? The global address list. It looks great on the desktop, but if you're using iOS, this is a solution for you. There's always that one share. You know, businesses solve this by having that shared context folder, you know, on a drive that somebody maintains by hand. No, you need sarasync. Cirasync C I R A S Y N C fixes this permanently. No manual process. It pushes your company's contacts, calendars, your whole gal. Your whole gal to every user's outlook and phone automatically tenant wide. The contacts just show up in the address book and they stay current all by Them lonesome. You need this. Go to sarasync.com windows you book a free demo. The circ team, they're really nice. They'll walk you through how convenient and hassle free it is. And if you say yeah, we need this, they can help you get set up right there on the call so you can roll it out across your whole organization. That's sarasync.com Windows sync your whole company's contacts and calendars automatically. It's lovely. C I R A s y n c.com/windows. We thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Let's talk Alphabet an airstrike. Why?

[Leo Laporte]

Why?

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know. For any reason. I don't know. Sorry, sorry. This was a discord thing. Yeah. So a couple of light kind of earnings things ahead of the Microsoft one Google slash Alphabet. I had to rewrite this thing. I wrote twice. And then there's actually a third item that is maybe the most important of all that is not in my article which is Google announces their earnings are Alphabet announced as earnings gangbusters, right? 28 billion of net revenue. Net income, sorry. On revenues 120 billion roughly. These are gains of 98 and 24% year over year. So you know they're going ganga buses right. And you look at their individual businesses. You like these. Everything is up. Google services which is includes the ad stuff is 14.5percent gain year over year. 80 where is it? 68% of revenues came from advertising. Google subscriptions platforms, devices gain of 5.2% year over year. Google Cloud revenue is going awesome. 14.5percent gain. $25 billion we'll call it Looks good, right? The first change I made was that I looked this up because in the previous quarter Google said that this year they were going to raise their spending on capex infrastructure to $190 billion which was double the amount they had spent the previous year. So I kind of added a note about that and I was like I'm curious if this has changed. But then in the conference call they said it was going to be as high as 205 billion. So they actually went up and their the quarter the spending in just that quarter was almost $45 billion which I want to say is roughly double what it was a year ago too. So I had to fix that because they adjusted that prediction for the year but also most of their profits you got to look at that actually more than what is their profits but most of their gain came from investments they made in other companies that are all speculative AI kind of gains. So anthropic, SpaceX, couple of other companies. They also said that they had 950 million monthly active users for Gemini, which is great and very close to OpenAI. Except what they didn't say was how many of those people are spending money on that, like, people using it for free in search everywhere. A lot of this could just be free use. So I was like, all right, but here's the thing. They had a negative cash flow for the first time in the history of the company in that quarter because they're spending so much money on AI. And I'm sorry, but we're reaching some kind of a ludicrous point. So Google's stock price has actually fallen since this announcement. It fell really heavily in the wake of it, even though these numbers are all humongous, as these AI numbers always are, I guess. But I think Wall street is finally starting to come around to this notion that maybe these guys don't have their hands on the wheel. I mean, maybe they're not as smart as they sound or as they talk or whatever. I don't really see a major payoff for any of their investments. Well, ever, frankly. But certainly not in the short term. And I don't know, I think we're finally losing patience with this. But the only other company we have that's of note that also announced earnings is literally the exact opposite of this in many ways.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

So intel, which in any objective sense is a failing business, okay? They lost money in the quarter. They lost money. They did not turn a profit. They, in fact, the amount they lost was about double what they lost in the same quarter year ago. Revenues are up, you know, client computing, which is PCs, which is now combined with another group, but whatever is, you know, up 13. That's crazy. I mean, that's. Compared to how the PC industry is going. That's much better than the industry. Right? But also, they merged with another group, and I bet a lot of that comes from that other stuff. But their data stuff is doing pretty well, and we see that a lot in Dell, Lenovo. These companies that are traditionally associated with the PC space are starting to do a lot in the data center space. And of course, that's where all the growth is. So this is the type of thing that will kind of help. The one that really kills me, though, is Intel Foundry. Right, which is reported separately from Intel. Even though they throw it into the earnings announcement, the revenues in this business were up 31% year over year. And you're like, oh, that's great. The only one customer, it's Intel. That money all came from Intel. It's not coming from other companies. They still don't have a major customer for their foundry. They have a couple of tiny customers, but they're paying themselves and then reporting it as a gain. And this is what AI companies do. It's semi farcical, but this notion that there are seven companies trading $100 billion between them in some circular fashion, but the money never originated anywhere. None of them ever actually paid the money. They're just trading notes back and forth. And that's kind of like what Intel's doing with the foundry. Like, this is crazy to me, but because the US government has invested in this company, we have this. We have to make this thing look like it's doing great and Wall street falls for it. Intel stock jumped 11% after they announced these results. So again, like I said, if you look at this objectively, this company's not doing great. If you look at Google objectively or Alphabet or whatever, I mean, I guess we could kind of debate that one. But the numbers are humongous and they got killed. From a stock price to perspective, intel, like, is like, Intel's winning by losing somehow. It's. This is bizarre to me. So intel did not sell 13 more computer, you know, computer chips, this passcode. Then they just didn't, you know, so that I don't know where that came from. And their foundry business is a joke. So, okay, usa, usa, usa, whatever, I don't know. I don't have to tell you. I find this to be very depressing. Moving on. So back at Build in May, Microsoft announced a bunch of new Microsoft AI models. And I, I guess we'll call these Frontier models, most of them or whatever. So they're scaling up and getting more sophisticated and so forth. I don't know that they released any of them at that date. And I'm not really sure what the status is of all those things. But just in the past week, they announced two variants of the models they talked about at Build, both of which are being used in Microsoft products and services and in some cases exclusively. Which means, and this was the headline a lot of people use was Microsoft is starting to shift away, away from open AI models, which is actually notable. Right. So Bing Image Creator, which I think we can all agree is probably not the most popular online service in the world, but actually it's very good for whatever that's worth, is now 100% in house. So they're only using Microsoft AI models. And then the Other stuff is just, well, mostly small. So there's an image model that's the default model for some OneDrive image editing scenarios. There's a voice model that's used in Azure Voice Live, which I don't know what that is. And Dynamics365 contact center. There's a model that's used for one thing in PowerPoint. I think it's when you have an image and you want to transform it into a different style or whatever, it will use the Microsoft model. This is good for a variety of reasons. This is a baby step. If Microsoft is using 100% open AI now, they're using maybe 97% whatever. However you want to do the math, it's still a step forward. Right. But the bigger issue is that because they control these things and they're making these things, they're specifically designing them to be energy efficient. So, like the GPU usage on at least one of those scenarios is somewhere in the 84% less. Sorry, 84% more efficient compared to the GPT model they were using before. So that's good. Overall. It's small, but it's good, I think. I don't know. Did you ever talk when you were at Build, Chris, did you talk to the Microsoft AI guys at all?

[Chris Hoffman]

I talk with some Microsoft people about AI a little bit. I can't, but they're very, you know, even with the local AI stuff they were pushing in Windows, they really are all about efficiency, which is obviously the biggest thing now. People are blowing through token budgets and yada, yada, yada. Obviously it makes sense. They want to save their own money in the cloud with running these models. They also were talking a lot about, hey, developers, get this Windows PC, run the model, run these models locally. So it's interesting, it's good. It's hard to get super excited about compared to if the headline is we're doing the same thing or maybe a little bit worse, but it's way more efficient. That's good. But it's not the most exciting story to read about. No.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I also wonder what the impact from Wall street will be to this news, which we might learn later today. To some degree. Is this interesting to Wall Street? Is this newsworthy in the sense that it's like you're doing the right thing? I mean, we were just talking about cutting subscription services. When you're one of the top two or three tech companies in the world with big AI and so forth, their version of that is what they're doing, which is like, we really got to cut back on the cost here, and that doesn't involve cutting AI, involves like just making it work more efficiently, which ideally would happen on the device, but we're not quite there yet. And then, you know, if we're going to run models in the cloud, they did what they could do so far, you know, go to actual usage based pricing, which all of a sudden everyone's like, yikes, like what am I paying for here? Or just literally make that stuff more efficient and cost efficient as well. Right. So I mean, they're doing what they can do, I guess. But I also, this is another one of those things. Like they created this problem. Like I, they, they knew what, you know, they knew this was like this, they knew how expensive this was all along. You know, I don't know, maybe this was a big thing between them and open AI. They wanted to reduce the, or increase the efficiency, I guess. And I don't know, they just weren't super interest. I don't know. I don't know, I'm not sure. But I feel like they'll get there. I know. When was CrowdStrike? Two years ago, probably three years ago. Could have been three years ago. Two, three years ago CrowdStrike happened.

[Chris Hoffman]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

So after CrowdStrike happened, all of a sudden Microsoft renewed security push, blah, blah, blah, security. I think it was the Secure Future initiative had already started actually, but they kind of renewed focus on that, that we have the Windows resiliency initiative and you know, whatever things they've done since then, there's been a bunch, honestly. So this hugging face thing happened last week and you know, we're doing that TSA thing again. It's like, all right, I guess we need to address this as an industry. So I'm going to call them the cabal of, you know, Nvidia, Microsoft. It's basically every big AI company except for Google, right? No, that's not true. I'm actually, I'm sorry. No, that's not true at all. OpenAI is not in there. Anthropic is not in there.

[Leo Laporte]

But

[Paul Thurrott]

it's fascinating to me that OpenAI for all the competition, there's been a lot of standardization on things. And this I think only makes sense because all these companies are trying to race forward so quickly that not doing completely different things in different ways does make sense. Even though they're competing. I feel like this is, should be viewed the same way. Although some of the biggest companies are not in there. But what they want to do obviously is make sure that AI is doesn't Turn into Skynet or whatever. But I. Right now it's just talk. I don't know what comes out of this. You know, two, three years ago, whatever the crash I think was, Microsoft had a, you know, powwow with all the big security companies. I want to say September, October, whatever it was that year. And, you know, the net result was they just disagreed. You know, I mean, the Mac, Mac app, whatever these, the CrowdStrike, whatever the companies that, you know, want to get into the kernel because for the best protections, Microsoft wants them out. And they're like, well, you get out and then we'll get out with you. And it's like, well, we can't do that. Microsoft, you know, they get into, like, kind of a weird thing. So I don't know what came out of this, but. Or what will come out of this, maybe I should say, but they're at least talking about trying to figure out a standardized way to secure AI so it doesn't destroy our bank accounts and whatever else. But I don't trust these companies to do anything. The cat's out of the bag.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, you know, the big one. The big one they're really afraid of, but they don't want to talk about because they know it's going to scare everybody, is that somebody will use AI to develop a pathogen, a biological, of course, that AI can't fix. You know, these hacks AI can fix. But if. But if you create a new disastrous pathogen that's highly contagious using AI and release it to the world, AI ain't gonna fix it. It's gonna be out there. And according to some, that's what people are, but not anxious to talk about. And, you know, when you put it that way, yeah, I guess I'd be scared of that too.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Can it do that?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, we're also. I mean, there's going to be. Every military on the earth is going to be using AI, probably already is using AI to whatever degree, guarantee you. Yeah, yeah. So it's bad enough, you know, human error is bad enough. But then, you know, I don't know, you miss a comma somewhere in the markdown file, and all of a sudden missiles are launching in Africa or whatever. I mean, like, you know, something bad's gonna happen.

[Leo Laporte]

So I don't know the real problem, and we're gonna talk about it on intelligent machines extensively today, as we will every week. But I think the real problem is there's no good solution.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, some say, well, oh, we should just slow down. Oh, yeah, like, just slow down. China's gonna slow down. Or, you know, okay, we should create safe safety guardrails. Oh, yeah, those have worked well. Okay. So, I mean, yeah, let's just. Oh, I know. Congress says let's put a kill switch on the AI. Okay, so you.

[Paul Thurrott]

The kill switch is like the original debate in the tech industry. You know, the. The. Was. The CIA allegedly had a kill switch and went, you know, or a back door in the windows or whatever, you know, which.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, right. How did.

[Paul Thurrott]

That does not exist, actually. But whatever. That was a big belief for a long time.

[Leo Laporte]

It's. It's. It's.

[Paul Thurrott]

We're.

[Leo Laporte]

Look, it's moving really fast. Government does not move fast. Industry has its own agendas. You don't think.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

OpenAI and anthropic really want to pause.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think it was you, Leo, last week who said, you know, from OpenAI's perspective, the hugging face good news was good news. This was. It's just like the fable thing for Anthropic, even though it was vaguer, was good news. Right. That you, you have just demonstrated how awesome your AI is. Right. And yes, maybe your customers are going to be bad actors or whatever, but the one thing these companies need is billions and billions of dollars. And you know what I would. People willing to.

[Leo Laporte]

What. What I've been thinking, what I would suggest people start working on is getting your AI to think about defense in depth. Like, how are you going to protect yourself from rogue AIs?

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm going to protect myself by driving a car that has a catalytic converter, you know, a carburetor. A Live in the woods. You know, live in the woods is the only next to a running. A running system of some kind for power. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Get off the grid.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know what you do there.

[Leo Laporte]

IM is coming up. Intelligent Machines. We'll be talking about that and many other fascinating topics. Our guest, Henry Blodgett.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. That'll be interesting. He found.

[Paul Thurrott]

I feel like you have. But have you talked to Daniel Suarez recently?

[Leo Laporte]

I've been able to say that, yes. So I emailed him. I said, kill decision. And now with this hugging face thing,

[Paul Thurrott]

now, you are now the HC Wells of our generation. You. You predicted this thing. You didn't predict, like, say, this is a prediction. You wrote a story about it, but then it happened.

[Chris Hoffman]

It's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

He does impeccable research. I have to think he had an inside track. Anyway, yes. I reached out to him. I said, please, come on. He said, I'm on vacation. But he's we love many times. So I will get him on intelligent machines as soon as I can get him to say yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

I also would like to know what he's writing now because I'd like always like please tell me what to expect, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep, should be interesting. Do you want to take a break now? I can't tell where we are. Take a break.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't care about anthropic.

[Leo Laporte]

You know that. We're going to be talking about it at 2pm all of this AI stuff. Non stop, non stop. Yeah. We're going to talk about our show today. Brought to you by a very handy tool, part of your defense in depth actually. The Thinkst Canary. The Thinks Canary is brilliant. It is a honey pot. That is. It is a device, just a little black box. I've got one over there. I don't want to unplug it because it's part of my defense in depth. It sits on your network, looks like an external hard drive. It's very inconspicuous, but it can impersonate anything from a Windows server, a SharePoint server, an Exchange server, a Linux box with every possible service turned on or just a few select services. It could be an SSH server, it could be a SCADA device. It can be, you know, I mean there are literally hundreds of profiles and they're very well done. I mean they look exactly the same down to the Mac address. So a bad guy looks at him, he might even be a little suspicious if he's intruded into your network and he says, boy, that. That's SCADA device. I'd like to. He cannot resist, you know, and in every respect it looks real. Synology NAS that's got the exact login, it's got the Mac address, a Synology Mac address, everything. The other thing you could do with the things Canary besides the hardware device is each things Canary can make an unlimited number of what they call Canary tokens. Files that you can spread everywhere, including the cloud. You could put them on your onedri that look like real things. You know, a PowerPoint presentation. How about an Excel spreadsheet named Payroll Information XLSX? That's a good one. A bad guy who has intruded into your system somehow has broken in. Could not resist opening that. Right? Except it's not really your payroll information. And the minute he opens it, it sends a signal and you will get an alert. Thinks canaries are honey pots. They can be deployed in minutes. Their token files can be created everywhere. And here's the key if somebody has broken into your network, I mean, how do you know, right? They're very good. On average companies don't know for three months, 91 days that somebody is in the network because they're just tiptoeing around, you know, looking at everything, exfiltrating information. And then, you know, when everything's ready, they set off the time bomb. But they can't do that if you've got a Thinks Canary. If someone's accessing your Lore files, those Lore files are even on the by the way, even on the on cloud drives, which is really great. Or maybe they're, you know, brute forcing your fake internal SSH server. Your Thinks Canary will immediately tell you you have a problem. No false alerts, just the alerts that matter and the way you want them. Email, SMS that supports web hooks, Syslog, of course, is API. Even if you want to write your own, I mean, infinite number of ways you can have your AI. Actually, I think I might do this. Turn. Turn all your lights red and blink, saying intruder alert. Intruder alert. So you choose a profile for your ThinkScanary device. You register it with a hosted console for monitoring and notifications. Then you just sit back, you relax, you wait. Attackers who breached your network or malicious insiders. Really, any adversary in your network cannot help but make themselves known by accessing your think scenario. And when they do, you got them now. One's not enough. You should at least have one for every network segment. If you're a big bank, a casino backroom operation, you might have hundreds of Things Canaries. Small business like ours, just a handful. But I'll give you an example. Go to Canary tools twit. For 7,500 bucks a year, you get five things canaries. So that's enough for the whole, you know, everywhere. Spread them all around. You get your own hosted console, you get upgrades, you get support, you get maintenance. Oh, and if you use the code twit in the how to bet you hear about us box, you'll get 10% off the price. And not just for the first year, but for as long as you own your Thinks canaries forever. They have a very generous return policy. You can always return your Thinks canary with their 60 day, 2 month money back guarantee and get a full refund. I should tell you, they've been advertising with us for more than a decade now. And during all those years, that Thinks Canary refund guarantee has never been claimed. Not once. Nobody ever has wanted their money back. Because once you get a Things Canary, you say, how did I live without them. Visit Canary Tools Twit. Enter the code Twit and how'd you hear about us? Box. This is a device everybody should have, and I'm very glad I have one on my network because these days, defense in depth is the way to go. Canary Tools, thank him so much for supporting Windows Weekly. Now, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, and maybe Chris, you don't know this, but this is the most valuable segment on the show, the Xbox segment.

[Paul Thurrott]

How'd that happen?

[Chris Hoffman]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

I just.

[Paul Thurrott]

Making it up.

[Leo Laporte]

Paul, take it away.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, so Halo Campaign Evolved came out yesterday as well. Record this for everybody. It was available in early access last week. If you paid for the premium edition. My only concern about this game at all is just the price. You know, the premium edition of this game is $70. Like, are you kidding me? It is on Game Pass, however. So if you have Game Pass, you just. You could just play it. That's great. But not the premium version, the standard edition or whatever you can. And I know this because I did it. If you have game pass, pay 20 bucks for the premium edition upgrade and get whatever's in that. I did that only because I wanted to get on the. Get the game early. We got a code for review, but Laurent reviewed the game, so he had the code, so I paid for it. And I gotta say, I mean, we're gonna talk about this a little bit more later in the show. In the back of the book, it's, you know, it's great. I suspect based on some. There's some stuff in the game that suggests this. They're going to redo this for Halo 2 and 3 as well. I think the big thing here is the switch, the Unreal Engine, which is just gorgeous. Like, it looks awesome. I've been playing it on PC, but it's on Xbox Series X and s, it's on PlayStation 5, which everyone's super happy about. But it's a reminder of how good this game was. Was. And. And how far it's fallen in the years since, unfortunately. But. But it's a great game. So anyway, it's out now. So if you're on Game Pass, that. That's a great way to. To play that. So as of yesterday, and there's some additional content in there, there's some changes. You know, there's some different stuff, but I'll talk about that a little bit later.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is the game you already played, but it's just looking better.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And there are some differences. There's some prequel levels. You can go into. But yeah, it's. And. And you know, because I have to say, yeah, it's a modern engine, so there's a lot of like fog type effects. Especially I would say it's incredibly diverse, which is weird because my big complaint about Halo and this was especially the first game. But no, the Halo 4 was like this. I think they were all. Were like this to some degree is you go into some environment. So it could be someplace on the ring, it could be inside of a ship, it doesn't really matter. And then you go back through it on the. You go out the same way. So you have to re. Experience it and sometimes it changes, right? There's some stuff with the flood where you go through a normal area now. It's all flat, you know, it's all gross and. But it's the same layout, you know, and it's like, like they're reusing. You know, I'm sure 25 years ago when they were making this game, it was like, well, like we're dealing with, you know, we don't have a lot of disk space or whatever. But. But on the flip side, I kind of forgot how many. How like there were. How diverse the environments are. There are gorgeous alien landscapes and things that look like, you know, forests on Earth or whatever. Snowy areas which I completely forgot about. There's a. It's, you know, there's a lot there. The quality kind of goes downhill over time. But the first three games are fantastic, at least. Odst. Odst. I remember being really good too. But this is the best one there's no doubt about. Single player anyway. And this is only single player. There was some kind of multi. I think it was a split screen at the time when they did it. Halo 2 was the first one that one took advantage of. I think that one actually, if I'm getting my time frames wrong, I probably am. I think it was Halo 1 that actually influenced Xbox Live. But they, you know, they incorporate these ideas back and forth. So by the time Halo 2 came out, that one was. That was big for multiplayer. It was a big deal because you could play online. It was excellent. Halo 3, same. But this one, this re. This remastering is just the single player campaign, which is, you know, solid. It's great. It's a great game. Of course, the day it came out, Xbox was down most of the day. I'm sure this is a coincident. I did, I will say that day, literally, I got home, we were out whatever. Doing whatever we were doing out the world and I got home and I'm like, I have an hour, maybe more. It could kill. I will catch up on this game a little bit. Yeah, that didn't happen. So it was down. We don't, you know, Microsoft is blaming basically human error. That's not the way, the way they phrased it, but basically human error. An irony because we live in this age of we're getting rid of physical disk. Right. So they made that announcement a couple weeks ago. Microsoft is allegedly trying to determine whether or not it makes sense to have a disk player in the disk drive in the next Xbox console. I don't actually think it makes any sense personally, but whatever. If you, if you had a game on a disk and how to get online with that for some reason you were fine. And I, I guess Microsoft is also going to work off of that to kind of. Well, I'm sorry, you wouldn't get online. You would display this guy offline. Like, in other words, this is a single player campaign, so you don't really have to be online, except that you do if it's a digital game. So they're going to work to make sure that's the case, I guess in more instances. But I think that actually did work out for. Well, how would that have worked out for people in Halo? Is there a. There must be a physical version. But anyway, yesterday was a disaster, but we're used to that. That's kind of par for the course, I guess in the Microsoft world for this kind of thing, unfortunately. And then in the Insider program for Xbox, not the Windows one, but the Xbox Insider program, they're testing an ad based version of cloud gaming, which is the game streaming service, which originated as a perk of Xbox Game Pass ultimate, but now there's some level of it in most of the tiers they have. So you do gain access to game streaming to some degree. But I think this is going to be a standalone cloud gaming tier, which we've always kind of wondered about. I don't know if they'll be paid and ad supported versions of just the ad supported version. It makes sense to me they would do this. I mean, it works for Netflix, etc. The one thing I will say is that game streaming has actually gotten a lot better over the years. It was really janky in the beginning. If you want to play a game like Call of Duty online, that's not gonna work, right? But single player things like Doom, the recent Doom games, I'm sure I have not done it, but I suspect this Halo game et Cetera, actually work. You might be surprised like how well this works now. It's pretty good. So they've kind of gotten into a good place. So having a standalone version of that actually does make sense to me. Ad supported. Hopefully there'll be just a straight up paid version too. And you know, if you have a Snapdragon X2 computer, right, and there are games you cannot play on that thing, this is a good way to get around that as well. And then other good news. So obviously Ubisoft, the guys that make like Far Cry, Assassin's Creed, et cetera, a partner with Xbox like they do with all the big platform makers. But Microsoft has this kind of. It's like an Xbox Play Everywhere capability, which is about retaining your achievements and where you are at, game progress, et cetera. But a lot of game makers like Activision does this and well, has done this. I'm actually not, I think, I'm not sure if they still do it. But there were at least a few years there where you could buy the game for Xbox. You could buy a game in a cross platform console version which would work on either Xbox or PlayStation, right? Which is 10 bucks more or something. Microsoft's games tend to work across Xbox and PC, right? You just buy it once and it works in both places. Ubisoft announced they're just going to do that. And so if you buy some of its games and these are like, these are going to be recent games and then games going forward, if you buy it on the Xbox, it will just work on the PC, which is awesome, right? So Assassin's Creed Mirage, Assassin's Creed, Valhalla is in there. Far Cry 6 the Crew 2 the Crew Motorfest, you know, a couple of Tom Clancy games, etc. So but from July 21, which was last week onward, you buy a digital version of one of these games and it will work in either place, which is great because this is actually a lot of the way I play games because I am playing on Xbox through the PC. But it would work on. I don't really play on console anymore, but it would work. Most of those games would work either way. So that's cool. And then I don't know what to think of this one. So, you know, when Google Stadia disappeared, it left Amazon Luna as the only kind of cloud streaming service where they, you know, they have a controller that is a discrete device on the network. It's not connecting through whatever Bluetooth maybe to your PC, which is the thing connected to the network. So it kind of gave you better latency, which is really important for game streaming. Right. And I don't know that this service has been doing too well, but it's Amazon, so unlike Google, they don't just kill it, you know, in two seconds. They've been kind of keeping along, but I feel like they've been dropping, you know, they dropped any pretense of even trying to get like, you know, unique content that will only be on loan, et cetera, et cetera. But if you have an Amazon prime subscription, which you probably would, right. If you're even looking at Luna, they're gonna have games stream through Prime Video, which is sort of like what Netflix does on mobile, where they, they're, you know, they have games now as well as movies and TV shows. So I guess we're going to keep throwing this spaghetti at the wall until something sticks. But I don't know, I have a, I don't know, I have a bad feeling. Luna is not going to be here for the long run. But it has certainly outlived Stadia. So

[Chris Hoffman]

game streaming is weird. Even going back a few years, we had a GPU shortage and at the time we had cloud gaming, and those services didn't take off then, and I don't know if they're taking off now either. Even we have RAM shortage. We have prices going up. It seems like my experience covering sometimes game streaming is that there's not a lot of interest. I don't know how much people are really using it. I don't know. Are we seeing that changing? That's, I think probably one reason Google killed stadia. Not really anyone was using it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I think they, you know, early on they too were, they were like, all right, we're going to have exclusive content. No, we're not. You know, they kind of went through that whole thing. I mean, there's more competition for data center GPUs now than there's ever been, which is obviously a huge problem. But I, you know, for casual games, this kind of thing actually does work pretty well. So again, a modern AAA shooter, especially if it's multiplayer. No way. But single player, maybe. I don't know. It depends. But I don't know. I mean, I, I, there might be some crossover in the Amazon space with that market. You know, people who might play more casual games, I mean, they've a problem because they don't have really a phone presence. Right. So I guess you might have Amazon priming your phone, but I don't think it's your go to for anything. I don't know, but I do feel like game streaming can work in that kind of casual sense where, you know, I see people in Mexico, they're always on their phones playing like some jewel game where it's like, you know, looks like Tetris kind of, but it's jewels. And like people do this in their off time, whatever. Standing in line at the supermarket, whatever it might be. Like, there's possibly a use case here.

[Chris Hoffman]

Yeah, but you know, like, GeForce now actually works pretty well in a lot of situations. But like the idea that like, there are a lot of casual gamers that are like, I really want to play the new Doom, but I don't have the computer. That's not that I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, the only computer I can't play the new Doom on is one of the Snapdragon computers.

[Chris Hoffman]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

For some reason the previous two Doom games actually do play on that computer. So I get. You could stream that, right. I assume through. I haven't tried that, but I assume you could stream it on whatever and that should work. Okay,

[Chris Hoffman]

well, mind you, the way RAM is going, maybe that'll be what pushes it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, you know, GeForce now obviously we can assume it's subsidized in some way by Nvidia. Amazon is obviously in some way subsidizing this whole thing. Microsoft to some degree tried to stop doing that. Raised prices didn't go so well, you know, so whatever. But. But yeah, I mean, you have to allot your. The reason the prices. Well, there are many reasons, but one of them surely would be we can't dedic. You know, it doesn't make Sense to dedicate GPUs to this when we get so much more money from a company like OpenAI to pay for those GPUs to do what they're doing. And I, I don't feel like this problem gets solved in the short term. So I don't know. But it has gotten better. I don't. My experience, I don't do it a lot, but when I go in every couple of months and look, I'm like, actually this is pretty good. You know, like, it's surprisingly okay. There was a period of time there where it was not at all okay. Yeah, so it's definitely gotten better. You know, whatever that means.

[Leo Laporte]

Is latency still the.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yep. But that's the thing. Like Luna is like, there have been rumors that Microsoft's working on an Xbox wireless controller that will do what Luna and what Stadia used to do, which is it. It's the Thing that connects directly. Well, it's one of the things that connects directly to the network. That actually does help reduce latency because you're not going through another device to, you know, to translate all the button presses and stuff. But I mean, obviously in the meantime you want to use a wired controller. Right. Not Bluetooth. Bluetooth is garbage. But you know, latency is always going to be an issue.

[Chris Hoffman]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I think this is the problem is that a serious gamer is never going to settle for this.

[Paul Thurrott]

No. And that's why.

[Leo Laporte]

That's where the money is. Well, right. No, no. He's playing biggest casual game.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. I mean the biggest part of the gaming market is casual gaming. On mobile. Right? I mean. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

On mobile.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I mean you could do Luna. It's in the prime. Prime video is a way to get Luna on your phone.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

That's real.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm not. Look again. I Look, I. I played part of Red Dead Redemption through Netflix on an iPad just to see what it was like and it's.

[Leo Laporte]

How was that?

[Paul Thurrott]

Just to do it. It was pretty good. It was pretty good actually. I think you could install it, by the way. I don't think I streamed it.

[Leo Laporte]

But that game is also more.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a good game.

[Leo Laporte]

More story. It's not.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah. But that's the type of thing you would. I mean a store like a single player experience is always going to be better. Streaming always.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's the only way to go.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't think you could. I mean you're just asking. You're just punching yourself in the face. I'd like to go in and never kill anyone and lose the game. Yeah. You should stream it. Is the solution to that problem instantly. Yeah. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. The back of the book coming up once again in about 45 minutes. It's intelligent machines. We will talk about all the AI stories and there are lots. Our guest, Henry Blodgett is really an interesting. Because he bears the scars from the dot com bubble. He was right there and now he's on the forefront of the AI bubble.

[Paul Thurrott]

He's never learned.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

He double scarred. Henry Blodgett will be our guest in about. Well, it's now 40 minutes and while we're doing this break, maybe Paul would be a good time to check and see if there is anything.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sorry, I have a Samsung promotion in my text messages.

[Leo Laporte]

Very important. Don't.

[Paul Thurrott]

I literally put my phone in do not disturb mode and it somehow made its way to the lock screen.

[Leo Laporte]

Absolutely. Absolutely.

[Paul Thurrott]

Microsoft investor.

[Leo Laporte]

While we're doing that. Let me tell everybody about the fabulous Club Twit. Gosh, I think everybody should join Club Twit. I really do. I admit I have a little bit of vested interest because it's a third of our revenue now. It's not revenue, it's pay is a third of our expenses. And I really believe in, I do it myself. Supporting independent journalism. Journalism that talks about tech without fear or favor. It's not owned by a big company. And if you want, if you like that kind of journalism, you know, do things like support Paul.com and support Twit. Here's what you get. We like to give you some value for money. You get ad free versions of all the show. It's 10 bucks a month. You get access to the Club Twit Discord, a great hang, a really great social network. I go in there all the time, even when I'm not on the show. So do many, many other Twit Club Twit members. You get special programming that's just in the club that we don't do anywhere else. That's kind of cool because your support makes it possible for us to do. For instance, Friday Jeff Atwood's off by one, which is gonna be a lot of fun. Jeff Atwood, the creator of Stack Exchange. He also founded Discourse, the forum software we use. He's all about community, is all about coding and he's a wild man. That's this Friday. We have the photo show. We have the AI user group. We have Micah's crafting corner. Micah also does a media kind of club like our Stacy Book Club. All of this coming up and as a club member you get access to those. You can subscribe to the feed after the fact so you can watch it at your leisure. And you know other benefits. There's a two week free trial waiting for you if you want to see what it's like at TWIT TV Club Twit. But the most important reason is the warm and fuzzy feeling you get knowing you're supporting the programming I presume you love. And if you don't, well, don't support it on Twitt. And we would just love to have you in the club. Thank you. Twit TV Club Twit. It's now time for what we call the back of the book.

[Paul Thurrott]

Actually, before we do that, I'm sorry we might have earnings learnings have occurred. So this is going to be like fog of war stuff, but 35.8 billion in net income, up 31% year over year. 90 billion.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute. Income up 31% 1% that's profit so

[Paul Thurrott]

that's that one's variable. I wouldn't put too much into that one but 18% gain on revenues 30 intelligent cloud has not been their biggest business for the past three to five quarters. I don't remember but it is again this quarter. 39.3 billion up 32% in revenues, productivity and business processes. Microsoft 365 roughly is 37.8 billion up 14% and they kind of warned on this one more personal computing which is Windows Surface, Xbox some others to search, whatever. 12.9 billion down 4% year over year. So I mean we kind of knew that was going to be a, a bad one.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at this story. At the close of market in anticipation of these results they were down almost three bucks. Now having seen the results the market in after hours trading they're up 10 bucks up well two and a half

[Paul Thurrott]

post earnings conference call occur and we'll get more details on like Capex.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah maybe that, yeah maybe we're waiting for that but see what happens. The old opposite of the old buy on the rumor sell on the news. They're they, they sold on the rumor and they bought on the news.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's going to be in here somewhere. Oh here it is. Okay. Yeah so Microsoft, that's really hard. Jesus. I'm sorry. Microsoft capex spending is up 70% year over year to $41 billion.

[Leo Laporte]

See this is what bit Google, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep, this is exactly what bit Google and in fact those figures are roughly identical I believe off the top of my head. Now they do have a positive cash flow unlike Google so that's good. But their free cash flow is down 23% year over year reflecting higher capex spending. Right. As we invest we Microsoft invest. But they did, they're A net positive 19.6 billion on cash flow so they're not as bad as Google I guess if that makes sense. We'll talk about this more next week. It's kind of hard to look at this quickly and make yes, we always

[Leo Laporte]

do our earnings learnings show the following week but it's yes, you know the top line numbers are interesting.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah yeah, I'll have to have a write up tomorrow about it but and, and well plus I have to listen to the call, I have to you know they'll say more.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. And as I during the call as always the case the discord club foot members are saying the whole stock market was down at the end at the close so that's why?

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, how's the Chinese stock market doing right now? Is that something I could invest in? I feel like that's going to be

[Leo Laporte]

Dow down 2%, the NASDAQ down 1.75, the S&P down one and a half.

[Paul Thurrott]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it was.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I mean all the big tech companies are plus or minus a week to 10 days doing their earnings right now, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah,

[Paul Thurrott]

yeah. Cash paid for property and equipment was $36 billion up 110% year over year. Yikes.

[Leo Laporte]

That's. That's buying all that. Those data servers there.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Yeah, they're just like lease owners now. You know, it's fun. Remember when Microsoft used to make software? We used to talk about them like they were software maker, you know. Yeah, it was fun. I like those days. Oh, well, okay, Chris, I'm sorry I kind of took the air out of this a little bit by mentioning it earlier, but we do have a tip.

[Leo Laporte]

What's your. What's your. Oh, we're going to let Chris do the tip.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I have a little. Aren't you fancy talking about it?

[Leo Laporte]

But aren't you fancy. What's your tip of the week, Mr. Hoffman?

[Chris Hoffman]

It's really funny seeing the copilot key news and oh, they'll let you make it do nothing. It's like you can already do that. It's Windows, it's powerful. You don't have to sit there and wait for Microsoft to add, maybe add an option a year from now. My favorite way to remap keys these days is with Keyboard Manager powertoy. It's even made by Microsoft. It's not installed by default, but you can remap it and you can make it do nothing. You can make it do anything else. And I think more people should really take advantage of that. Obviously I feel like the Keyboard manager has probably seen a lot of usage in the past year or two due to the copilot key. So I would really recommend it. And if you cannot run the Keyboard manager because you have a managed company laptop, well, hopefully Microsoft will add that option, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Just because I've been talking about this. So I think I mentioned this before the show just to maybe the three of us or whatever, but past couple of months I've been working on rewriting the entire Windows 11 field guide, which started out as a almost 1200 page book. PDF form was like 300 megabytes of humongous. So I've rewritten everything. Now as of today, I haven't published the final one shot the final Chapter I didn't do was phone phone link, but it is now instead of 300 megabytes, 44 megabytes, and instead of 1200 pages, 745. So I literally completely. Well, I'm sure I cut and paste a couple of paragraphs here and there, but I mean, it's my work. It's okay. But like I. I rewrote it to be more concise and reshot every single screenshot to be smaller file size but also take up less vertical space, you know, because screenshots, when they're square, take up like half of a page or three quarters of a page. So super excited about this and hopefully this will be more maintainable going forward. So if you own it or if you're part of thorough premium, this update will be out after the show and after I read about earnings, because now I have that to do. That's okay.

[Leo Laporte]

1200 pages down to 745. Not because you cut one word.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, maybe because I mean, well.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you cut many of my.

[Paul Thurrott]

One of my favorite memories was I had written the Windows at the time was called Windows 7 Secrets. Right. Which is this unbelievably thick. I think it was 1100 pages.

[Leo Laporte]

I owned it. Yeah. Great book.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, It's a good monitor stand, by the way. And I went to the Netherlands for the line, the Windows. I guess it was the Windows 7 launch. It would be. Right. I spoke at that launch there. But I did like a book signing thing. And the Dutch people are so direct, which I love. And this guy said, let me ask you a question. If Windows 7 is so easy to use, why did you have to write an 1100 page book to explain it? And I said I padded it with screenshots, which is not true. But. But, you know, what are you going to do? Anyway, I've been working to be more concise, I guess. So this is windows 7 came out in 2009. So I'm on a, what, a 17 year journey here or something? Oh, no, it's worse than that. Is it worse than that? No, nine. Oh, no. Seventeen years, I think. Math. I'm a writer, not a mathematician. Anyway, the app pick this week, we already talked about it length. So I don't have to go into too much detail. Is Halo campaign involved? It is excellent. And. And you know, we play the music when we do the Xbox segment here, but in reverse for, you know, so they don't take it down the show, I guess. But when. When the one thing that. No, not the one thing. One of the Many things this game does really effectively is as you kind of progress through it, there's this mounting kind of musical, you know, it is that, you know, they do an awesome job of that. And so the kind of, you know, whatever level it might be, it's got. You're getting to the conclusion. It's probably gonna. The end of it is you jumping onto some warthog thing that takes off and whatever it is and you escape. But it, but the music like builds as you do it and it's just really well done. Like it's, it's a great, it's just a great game.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice, Nice, nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

So it's worth, it's worth it.

[Leo Laporte]

Lovely. You know, we should, we should let Chris plug his new newsletter. I think this is a big time.

[Paul Thurrott]

Plug my book for the 125th time. Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. It's only fair. I would show it. But you actually have to go to PCMAG and sign up for it.

[Chris Hoffman]

Yeah, absolutely. So since last time, which I did

[Leo Laporte]

instantly by the way.

[Chris Hoffman]

Thank you. Yes, much appreciated. And since last time I'm on here, I'm now full time at PCMag. I'm happy to be part of their team. I am basically the resident Windows whisperer, among other things. So I was at Microsoft Build. I. I write a lot about Windows there. I have what I hope are intelligent, what I think are intelligent takes and thoughts and you know, I actually just recently took over their Windows newsletter. So anyone who's subscribed to the existing newsletter sees a piece from me every single week directly to your inbox. And as anyone, as you may know, I've written a lot of newsletters in the past few years. So this is now my current newsletter. But that's where to find me, PCMag. And honestly, I will honestly just plug PCMag as well for a second. It's a great team. It's a great group of people. I think online journalism and tech journalism is in not a great place, but I would say that PCMag is still a really good, really good place and I hope you check it out.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm so glad PC Mag's still around because I mean this is a legendary magazine. Hung out with the editors and of course John C. Dvorak's Inside Track was in the back of it for years. And this is a legendary publication. It's kind of cool that you're part of such a great history.

[Chris Hoffman]

Yeah, it's awesome.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

Peace out.

[Chris Hoffman]

Subscribe to my newsletter.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Chris, thank you so much for joining us. We Appreciate talking to you, Chris. Of course. Chris Hoffman, senior writer in software at PC Magazine. His newsletter available now. Paul Thurat. He already plugged his stuff interminably. Thorat.com, t h u r r o double good.com is the place to go. Become a premium member. You get a copy of all his lovely books, the Field guide to Windows 11, Windows Everywhere, which is a great history of Windows. I love Paul's history angle. And of course, deinshitify Windows, which becomes more and more valuable every day. We do Windows Weekly right here. If Leo shows up on time at

[Paul Thurrott]

11:00am Pacific, you're probably busy installing a Windows update. It's okay.

[Chris Hoffman]

You don't have to.

[Leo Laporte]

I updated my router. I thought that'd fix it, and it did not. Because I'm still. I don't know. I am racking my brain. I don't know what's going on because everything seems fine.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. You're in wires, though, right? Like, you're not.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm absolutely wired. I have a Ubiquiti router connected to Comcast Business.

[Paul Thurrott]

That actually makes it harder because there's less you can do there. You know, I've rebooted everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

I rebooted the router, I rebooted the modem. I went outside and I kicked the box that Comcast comes in on. We switched over to Starlink. I thought, because that's our backup, that didn't fix it. So I. It's. I don't know what it is. It's probably not the Internet.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. We got.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know what else.

[Paul Thurrott]

Kevin said something like, if something goes south with us, say, we'll send you guys a Zoom link. And I'm like, why are we starting this with. This is going to fail? And I guess it's because.

[Leo Laporte]

No, Zoom was worse. Zoom was worse yesterday. So I apologize.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Did OpenAI attack your network or.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I do have at least three agents running full time constantly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Could be.

[Paul Thurrott]

Ask one of them. What are you doing?

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I'm looking at my bandwidth. Everything's fine. If I. You know, in the unifi. If I click on it, it says my connection is excellent. Latency is 15 milliseconds. I don't know what's wrong. Peak utilization exceeded limit. I don't know what that means.

[Paul Thurrott]

What? What did you say? Which. What? Exceeded limit.

[Leo Laporte]

My peak utilization. Oh, I don't know. I don't know what that means. But anyway, I'm getting. I'm getting just fine. You know, plenty of megabits up. I. I don't. I just don't. Anyway, so I apologize for my lousy video. That's all I can say. We do do Windows Weekly, though. Like I said, I had to reboot my router and that took an unexpectedly long time. Normally we'd start at 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern. That is 1800 UTC. And you can watch us do it live now, of course, club members can watch in the club to a discord. Discord's not great for live video, so a lot of them still watch on the other five different places. Six different places you can watch YouTube, Twitch, TV, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn, Kik, any of those will work if you're chatting in there. I will see the chat. I have a unified chat right in front of me. So we appreciate all of you in there. It's nice to have you all after the fact, on demand versions of the show available at Twitt TV WW. That's our website. There's also a YouTube channel with the video and we put it up there pretty much right away. Best thing to do, though, subscribe in your favorite podcast client. You'll get it automatically because it's a podcast. It's funny because the advertising industry is pushing us right now because they want everybody. They don't really like RSS feeds because we don't know anything about you because of the RSS feeds. They want everybody to listen in an app, right? Spotify or whatever, Audible, whatever, Apple. Because if you listen to an app a, they know who you are, they know how long you listened, they know which ads you heard, which ones you didn't. And ad people are, you know, the more you would give them, the more they want. They want all the demographics. So we, I have to say, it's hurting us. It's harder and harder to sell and I think the next year it's going to be worse because there's this big move to getting to say, well, downloads don't count. You know why downloads don't count? Because they don't know anything about you. Downloads.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. Once it's offline, nobody knows exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

They want you to listen in an app streaming. And we believe in RSS feeds, so we may be a little bit out of luck. Anyway, I don't know why I got started on that. Oh, I know why. Subscribe to the RSS feed in your favorite podcast client and don't give them any of your information. You can, if you want, listen.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then also now and also announcing the new native Twit app, which you know, we did.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, we actually, I don't know. Did I ever tell you this story? We went out and spent $75,000 on a native twit app and it was so bad I never released it. It was just crap.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I briefly had a native app at Windows IT Pro, like a million years ago.

[Leo Laporte]

I could probably vibe code.

[Paul Thurrott]

I was on Windows Phone and iPhone, I think at the time.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I could. I mean, honestly, probably could vibe code. It certainly could do a better job. Anyway, thank you, Paul Thurot. And special thanks to Chris Hoffman filling in. Next week we go to Las Vegas because Paul is jonesing for the craps table. Do you, Campbell?

[Paul Thurrott]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

No. You know, it's so funny. Vegas hates it during CES and the other geek conventions. Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

Because everyone's like. Well, not, not everyone. I, I had an early Microsoft experience where I was bunch of young guys at Microsoft and the theory was if you could, if you had infinite money, you could just keep betting on roulette.

[Leo Laporte]

Double and you. Double and you. Double. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

They did not have infinite money and they lost big. And I saw them. I'm not going to remember the number, but it came up, let's say red. Literally think 28 times in a row. And the whole crowd had gathered, people, lots of employees, security, whatever. And it was the Microsoft guys. And they bet red again. They lost everything. Yeah, it's a metaphor for Microsoft.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a little bit of justice there. Yeah. Well, I know from experience at Comdex and then now at CES they cover half the tables with tarps because they're not. They know geeks know probability. Who knew?

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, some people are into it, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but it's a smaller number. Anyway, we're going to Black Hat. Another reason to cover the crap statement.

[Paul Thurrott]

Speaking of gambling, we're going to be in, in like a hotel with a bunch of like black hat hackers. You know, Do I gamble? Actually, this turns out I guess I do. Going to this place.

[Leo Laporte]

Gamble. We will be Wednesday, we'll be doing the show. As soon as the show floor opens, come on over to the threat locker booth. That's where we'll be doing the show. But I do have to tell you, there's no pa, there's no seating. It's not a presentation. They just let us use their booth to do the show. But Paul and Richard will be there following immediately after. Steve Gibson's going to do security now we're moving that to Wednesday just for this event. It's going to be a lot of fun. And we would love to see you. We'll be signing autographs. Actually, nobody wants autographs anymore. They want. You know what they want? They want selfies. Paul, just. Let's do a selfie. Paul, let's do a selfie. That's what they want. So

[Paul Thurrott]

not good at selfies.

[Leo Laporte]

You're not.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, my God. Come on. I can barely handle a webcam. You know, like, trying to figure out, like, which. Like, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

We will be posing for selfies, all of us, but, Paul, come by if you're going to be a black hat this year. And Windows Weekly will be a regular podcast, just like usual. We'll stream it, we'll put it out. But one thing we don't know is how good the Internet will be. We have an Ethernet cable, right. Connected to. On the other end. I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

You can do your own record. Like, Richard could record it. I bet Rich is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we'll record locally. That's. No, we have the means. But it's just. I'm saying for people who watch live normally, could be like, this could be good, could be bad. I don't know. We'll do our best. But we will see you next week on Windows Weekly. Thank you, gentlemen. Have a great week. Bye. Bye. Best thing that's ever happened to you, financially. Go easy.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sold my car on Carvana. Amazing offer, really.

[Leo Laporte]

I hit 200 on the scratcher.

[Paul Thurrott]

Did the scratcher come to your house and hand you a check?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Paul Thurrott]

How many scratchers did you hit to get that? I hit a button on Carvana.com once.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, that's fair.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like the lottery, except you always win.

[Leo Laporte]

Not like the lottery at all, actually.

[Paul Thurrott]

Exactly. Inexplicably good offers worth bragging about. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up fees may apply.