Hands-On Windows 98 transcript

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0:00:00 - Paul Thurrott
Coming up next on Hands-On Windows. We're going to go hands-on with the first CoPilot Plus PC I've been able to get my hands on. It's coming up next Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands-On Windows.

I'm Paul Thrott and this week we're going to take a look at a Copilot Plus PC. I can't remember what we've said about this in the past, but I know we've talked about AI PCs and that's just a PC that has an integrated MPU. A Copilot Plus PC might be seen as a superset of that. It's an AI PC that has a very specific type of MPU. It has to be 45 tops or better of AI accelerated performance. It's kind of a strange way to describe it, but that's basically what it is and also some other hardware requirements around RAM has to be at least 16 gigabytes and storage has to be at least 16 gigabytes and storage has to be at least 256 gigabytes and it has to be SD storage. So those are both significantly higher than the normal Windows 11 hardware requirements the minimums, but there are also minimums for this kind of computer. You really want 32 gigs or more of RAM, I would say, and I would go with a terabyte a terabyte, rather, of SSD storage, and the reason is twofold. There's going to be small language models 40 of them or more built into these computers or pre-installed in these computers. They take up a lot of disk space. Locally run AI tasks take up a lot of RAM and storage. So that explains that stuff. Ai tasks to take up a lot of RAM and storage. So that explains that stuff. And then when recall ever happens, if it ever does, that controversial feature, that's going to suck up some disk space too. So plan ahead if you're going to be looking at one of these computers.

Okay, so this particular computer is a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7X14. Great name. It's kind of hitting on the minimums there. 16 gigs of RAM it's the lowest end. Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processor, 512 gigs of storage, and if you just look at the desktop here, you can see it's just your basic Windows 11 computer. Right, it has Windows 11 24H2. And that brings all the good stuff you get with that. There's a Copilot key on the computer, so let's hit that to launch Copilot. So Copilot as an app. If you right-click on things, you get an icon now Instead of just the name. Right, that context menu. You know all that stuff we kind of talked about before. So that's the baseline context menu. You know all that stuff we kind of talked about before. So that's the baseline. Beyond that we have all of the issues and benefits of ARM right. So hopefully a lot more efficient, better battery life, cooler and not quite silent, but almost silent running depending on the PC. This one's been basically silent almost the entire time. And then compatibility big improvements over previous versions of Windows 11 on ARM.

And looking, this is my actual user account. I'm not using a test account here. I've been testing different things. I don't actually usually use Microsoft Edge and Word, but these things are native apps on ARM. Visual Studio Code and full Visual Studio Code Native on ARM. Obviously all the inbox apps like Notepad and Paint are native ARM. Photoshop 2024, the latest version, native on ARM. Affinity Photo 2, native on ARM Pretty good.

So in my testing of hardware and software I only ran into one thing that didn't work at all and that was Google Drive. On the software side and the hardware and I don't have a lot of stuff here, but all of the peripherals, I mean all the things I need to do this show, the microphone, the webcam, the external display, hubs and docks, and all that including a Thunderbolt 4 dock. Everything works. So that's great. But what differentiates a Copilot Plus PC from an AI PC or a normal Windows 11 PC? And it's basically aside from the ARM stuff for now although there'll be Intel and AMD based co-pilot plus PC soon it's locally run AI tasks and that's why I've got a task manager running down here in the corner. You can see when we hit the MPUs We'll run through some of these. Actually, I'm not going to do the first one yet.

One of those is something called AutoSR, which is Automatic Super Resolution, and what this does is it works with the emulator that Microsoft built into Windows 11 on ARM to run X64 and X86 games and apps, and you can run games on this kind of lightweight computer pretty well. You run games on this kind of lightweight computer pretty well. You run them at lower resolution and auto SR will super scale them like it gives you kind of a fake bump. So you run the lower res that pumps up the performance, the frames per second, the speed at which it runs, and then you get this visual quality that is better than the resolution you're running. It's pretty good. So the way you look at this is inside of display settings. There's this part of display settings. Most people don't actually ever access all this much called graphics, but in Windows 11 on ARM with Snapdragon X processors, we've got the auto HDR configuration stuff.

So I installed several games by this point, actually, but one of the ones I've been playing is the original well, the 2016 remake or the 2016 version of the Doom game, right, and so this thing is set up to use auto SR. I'm not going to run that with the recording software and all the stuff I'm doing here. I tried that earlier today. It wasn't a great experience, but I did make a video where you can see a selection of the gameplay. So the thing to look at here is just the frames per second up in the corner. It's usually above 30. It's sometimes well above 30, which is exactly what you're looking for. The thing you're not seeing is the visual quality. The recording has the original 1280 by 720p resolution recording, but when you play it it actually appears to be much better than what you're seeing in the video. But that's a native x64 Intel-style app, in this case a game running in emulation on Windows 11 on ARM, and you know, the experience is pretty incredible. So that's neat. Setting up games is not great.

We'll talk more about Copa plus PCs in the future. There's a lot of gotchas there, but the fact that you can do this at all is pretty incredible on this kind of computer. So the second locally run AI task I wanted to look at is something called co-creator. It's up here in the paint app ribbon. Everyone can access image creator any version of windows 11 and 10, probably as well. And if you look at the MPU here if I tell this thing to I always do the same thing you know a purple unicorn flying through space. We've done this before. But just to show you that it's no different on a copilot plus PC. It's hitting the cloud. It's going up to the Microsoft copilot LLMs in their data centers and it will eventually come up with some drawings or paintings or whatever. For me you can see the NPU hasn't been hit at all right, so we've kind of gone over that before. But so the point remains and you can select different styles and so forth and that's fun. But we can also use this other thing called co-creator if you have a copilot plus PC and this thing does actually run off of the SLMs that are installed locally on the computer. So same thing. I can use the same prompt In this case, because it's a co-creator.

What it wants you to do is draw along with it, if that makes any sense. So you can't just fire the prompt. You actually have to draw something as well. So I will draw a oops, I will actually have to select the drawing tool. I will draw something that looks a little bit like a child's drawing of a horse, but it's a unicorn, so I'll add a little horn there and then, as I do that, it will start its work over here. So this is running locally and actually, if you look down here, you'll see we're starting to get a little bit of the whole thing on there.

Here we go A little bit of MPU action, right, that looks nothing like what I drew, of course, but that's what you want. The idea is, most people can't draw very well, so there's a creativity slider. If you want to bring it back closer to your original drawing, you can do that. You can also, which is pretty terrible, and you could just turn it up all the way and at the 95% range of the 95 square you get this really kind of awesome looking image. You can also select from styles, like you could before. So if you want this to look like more of an oil painting or whatever, you can do that. Right, and so you can see as we're doing this, the MPU is being accessed. Right, so you can see that this thing is running locally off of the local hardware. Right, so that's cool. I don't need to save that terribleness and move on to the next one. So the Photos app, as you would expect, also has some local AI capabilities in addition to the stuff that was there previously. Right, so I will just go to the pictures folder. You see some reasonable looking photos.

So there's two things going on here, aside from the background blur replace features that are available to everyone in photos. The first one is this image creator feature. This has that name. So you think, well, I know exactly what this is and you do, sort of I can do the same sort of prompt. This one will actually be pretty decent because it's a simple concept, right? The differences between this and the feature that's in paint is that it actually will just keep creating renditions of this, if you let it. So you can see the MPU is kind of firing up there a little bit and as I scroll down it will just keep making more versions of this.

The problem with this is that none of these images are actually very high quality, so you can generate more variations of this or just save it, but actually I'm just going to open it and so this opens it in a new window and I don't know if you can tell, but it's not big, it's only 512 pixels by 512 pixels, so it's kind of limited at this point. It's also not 16 by 9, right, I pay for Copilot Plus and I should get a higher quality and different aspect ratio image, but this feature does not yet do that, so not that great. The other thing you can do is we can go in and look at some photos, like a picture of my wife at a restaurant and maybe I want to edit this and in photos to date I could do things like go to here and remove or replace the background. This would run off of the cloud and not impact the MPU at all. Or there's this new restyle image photo where I can kind of add basically style right to the image. So an impressionist image is going to give you that kind of light feathery, you know, light greens and light blues kind of thing, and you can see the prompt that they're actually using behind the scenes to create this effect and it's pretty cool looking. The only thing is it has not impacted my wife at all. It's done actually a really nice job of the edge detection, but it's only impacted the background of the image and that's on purpose. It will tell you if you try to go in and say I want the whole thing, it will not let you do it with a human face. They don't want to distort people and cause problems, right? So that's kind of understandable. So to get around that, I will not edit that photo of my wife anymore. But I grabbed a couple of other photos that I thought were kind of cool, so you could go in here. Same thing picture of an egg on a plate. We could try. I'll just do impressionist again, I guess. So you apply the same kind of effect. You can see it hitting the MPU and then you get this really cool image and actually these are really neat.

I would say, as of today this is early days, but this might be the best feature that's unique to Cop-pilot plus pcs. You, you have that creative uh, creativity slider, like we didn't paint, um, but this one's pretty neat. Like I, I actually think this one works really well. And then I'll also do the um, just the sunset, because I actually do really like this feature. Um, same deal, just, uh, edit and restyle image. And this time I will go with I don't know Renaissance. It starts off at this 30. You get this idea that it's been hand painted. You know it's got that. Look to it. We could get more creative with it. The more creative you go, the further down the slider, the less like the original image it gets. This is actually a beautiful image. That's beautiful. So, like I said, this is a really cool feature. It's not a reason to spend $1,000 to $2,000 on a new computer. Cool, but it's, you know, but it's good, okay.

There's also some other stuff. I'm not going to demo this one, but there is a live captions add on for Copilot plus PCs. Live captions is one of the best features in Windows 11. It will take any audio source, whether it's an audio in an audio file or a video, and it will translate or caption it live in real time in any of I think it's up to 100 languages or so. Really neat on a, a CoPilot Plus PC. What they've done is added real-time language translation from over 40 languages into English, so it's limited right now to English. The demo or the test I did for this was I found a Spanish language YouTube channel and I know a little bit of Spanish not very much, but enough to see that it was getting the right words and so forth. So it does work, but early days it's not a lot of languages, it's only into English. I think that's going to change over time.

All right, so the last one is Windows Studio Effects, and that's a feature we've talked about in the past. All AI PCs support it, but if you have a Copilot Plus PC, you actually get a full set of effects. So you get some effects you do not get on lesser AI PCs, if you will. So this will be interesting. But I'm going to run the camera app and, yeah, so I'm on. This is angled because it's coming off of the camera that's built into the laptop, right? So this button up here is Windows Studio Effects. If you don't see that in the app you're using for video, you can actually go down to settings and you'll see a Studio Effects button here and that will bring up a floating toolbar that will give you the basic same pieces, right. So I'll just click this. And a lot of this is straightforward. We've talked about some of this before Automatic framing, eye contact, background effects those are things we've all seen before and you have different types of blur.

Portrait light might be new. It basically lights it up a little bit better although I don't really see too much of a difference there, but I guess a little bit. But this one here is really really cool. I love this one. So this applies creative filters. So you've seen like AI image creation or AI image editing tools, where a still image is put into a style like we just did in the photos app.

But this does it on the fly with video and it hits the MPU. But it's not horrible, right. It's kind of interesting. I mean I could turn on all of the different effects and that would go up a bit, but this thing is hitting the most efficient chip that's in the computer and it's doing it in real time and you could be on a video call for two hours or whatever it might be, and this thing would just sit here doing this. Now I would do that for a work call or whatever, but there are different effects. So this is watercolor, which is pretty good too.

This is my favorite. It's it's kind of weird. It's like if you've ever watched any of the AI remakes on YouTube of famous movies, they'll do like short versions of Star Wars or some classic TV shows. It has this look to it Super smooth, like kind of weirdly de-aged in some ways. Super whites, you know, the eyes and all that stuff. Not a lot in the way of wrinkles, which is not very realistic for me, but cool, you know.

So the neat thing about Windows Studio effects, other than how little it impacts your system efficiency, is that third-party developers can now add these effects into their own apps and add their own effects as well. So I think we're going to see an explosion of this kind of stuff in apps like Zoom and Teams and all that kind of stuff. So let me stop looking at myself because it's horrible. So that's most of it, and if you've been paying attention, it's not a big selling point, and part of the reason is that Microsoft had this big bang feature called Recall that I alluded to earlier that they pulled out of the product at the last second. They're going to test it in the Insider program, release it in preview, and it's the type of thing that probably won't be broadly available in stable until the very end of the year, maybe even early next year.

But this is a system that uses snapshotting to record what you're doing on the screen so that you can later go back and say I was working on something and I can't find it, and you can ask it questions. And instead of searching metadata, it will use local AI to do inferencing based on what it knows about your activities, right, which obviously raises some privacy concerns, and that's why there's a bunch of security around it. But it's one of those features that I think a lot of technical people are a little nervous about and a lot of mainstream people will be really excited about. Somebody sent me a PDF file or a PowerPoint presentation that had a blue code in it, that kind of thing. It will allow you to find that stuff very quickly and that will be a fun demo someday, just not today.

In the meantime, this is what we've got the first generation of Snapdragon I'm sorry, copilot Plus PCs are all based on the Snapdragon X processors, which are ARM-based. Intel and AMD, like I said, will be coming out with chips that meet the CoPilot Plus specification, specifically that 45 plus tops rating on the NPU, and by this holiday season in 2024, we should have a lot of choice. So for now, what we've got is Qualcomm-based hardware running Windows 11 on ARM Soon. We'll have Intel and AMD X64 native systems right, and we'll make the best chip win. I guess we'll find out. So hopefully you found this interesting and even educational. We'll have a new episode of Hands-on Windows every Thursday. You can find out more at twittv slash HOW. Thank you so much for watching and thank you especially to our club, twit Numbers. We love you and see you next week.