A.I. News Copilot on Windows is no reason to buy a new PC

vtqhtr413

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AI is everywhere. It’s being used to develop new medical treatments, to track climate change, to address world hunger and to fight against malware. However, we also have AI-powered toothbrushes, pillows, mirrors and “mood lighting.” And on your PC, Microsoft wants everyone to use Copilot and even upgrade to a new PC so you can run it locally. But like Cortana, and Microsoft Bob before it, the Copilot on Windows is more spectacle than solution: an answer without a question.

In the past week, Microsoft showed us more than ever that it is super-eager — some would say desperate — to get you to use Copilot and build your computing experience around it. At an Intel press event, the chip-giant announced that Microsoft would be building local Copilot processing into a future version of Windows. To take advantage of this upgraded Copilot, you’ll need to buy a new genre of computer, the “AI PC,” which will need to have a new CPU with a neural processing unit (NPU) and a Copilot key on the keyboard. For consumers holding onto 5-year old laptops that still run modern software well, this could be an incentive to finally upgrade.
 

TairikuOkami

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Windows 12 will most likely require AI supported CPU, just like TPM on 11, till then I am fine without it. I do not get the hype, fake/suggested results proposed by an algorithm?! :unsure:

capture_03312024_190815.jpg
 

CyberDevil

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I wonder how a small NPU chip can be better than a video card? I don't know much about AI chip architectures, but can't the same tasks be done at least on modern 4080 and 4090? It looks very strange.

In general, the integration in Copilot now is really so terrible and useless that it is no better than the free Open Source application Noi, which gives convenient access to popular AI from the tray. I would like to be able to voice select files and tell what to do with them, but just type requests ... I have a subscription to Gemini at the moment :)
 

Nevi

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Windows are going the wrong way. I get more and more happy for The Mac system. I wouldn't be surpriced if I stopped using Windows, if they continue their BS. Also their ways to "promote" their "new ideas." Britech (Brian) is also scared by the new rumors about Windows 12. I understand him very well. 🤢


I admit openly I am close to stopping using Windows, and all their forced "ideas". Maybe people are being forced to buy a new computer, like with Windows 11? F... Windows. :)
 
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Captain Holly

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Windows are going the wrong way. I get more and more happy for The Mac system. I wouldn't be surpriced if I stopped using Windows, if they continue their BS. Also their ways to "promote" their "new ideas." Britech (Brian) is also scared by the new rumors about Windows 12. I understand him very well. 🤢


I admit openly I am close to stopping using Windows, and all their forced "ideas". Maybe people are being forced to buy a new computer, like with Windows 11? F... Windows. :)
I agree 100% on this. I feel the same way about Windows. I have posted here a couple of times before, I am not interested in AI and do not want it on my laptop and I will not let MS force me to use AI. I also do not like how MS goes behind my back after a Windows update and resets or turns on settings that I had previously turned off. I had tried to stay with MS, I really thought maybe I could stay if they didn't get any more invasive but this weekend there was an update that turned a bunch of stuff back on that I had spent a lot of time to turn off or edit in the registry. I have had enough too with playing whack a mole with the MS settings. I turned them off, MS turned them right back on again in the name of an update. Enough. I have made my final permanent switch to Linux Mint. I am finding there is nothing I could do in Windows that I cannot do in Mint, and even at that some apps functions are even easier to use.

C.H.
 

TairikuOkami

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I had tried to stay with MS, I really thought maybe I could stay if they didn't get any more invasive but this weekend there was an update that turned a bunch of stuff back on that I had spent a lot of time to turn off or edit in the registry. I have had enough too with playing whack a mole with the MS settings. I turned them off, MS turned them right back on again in the name of an update.
MS changes services, reg names to avoid people from disabling them. I turn off PC with tweaks so in case MS changes something, I get it back ASAP, but MS decided to punish me and it forced a repair upgrade on me 4 times this year alone and that forces me to change certain settings manually afterwards. It is like playing cat and mouse game with MS. It is getting tiresome.
 

Trident

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I wonder how a small NPU chip can be better than a video card? I don't know much about AI chip architectures, but can't the same tasks be done at least on modern 4080 and 4090?
GPUs are not power efficient so on a laptop, for a simple, cloud-assisted task like assistants (even into locally processed models some cloud info will be plugged) npu will be preferred. GPUs will be preferred where heavy models need to be ran.

As to Copilot, the Windows integration is useless. Like ChatGPT, it remains useful only for content generation purposes, after a proper fact check as it makes things up.

Similar AI, supposedly smaller and faster is rumoured to be coming to Mac and iOS as well.
 

CyberDevil

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GPUs are not power efficient so on a laptop, for a simple, cloud-assisted task like assistants (even into locally processed models some cloud info will be plugged) npu will be preferred. GPUs will be preferred where heavy models need to be ran.
Obviously efficiency is an issue, but it is clearly false to claim that NPU is necessary. In fact it is perfectly feasible to run an assistant on a graphics card if one agrees to pay the price. Right now the only gaming laptops with NPU seem very expensive with Intel 9 Ultra.
 
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Captain Holly

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I agree 100% on this. I feel the same way about Windows. I have posted here a couple of times before, I am not interested in AI and do not want it on my laptop and I will not let MS force me to use AI. I also do not like how MS goes behind my back after a Windows update and resets or turns on settings that I had previously turned off. I had tried to stay with MS, I really thought maybe I could stay if they didn't get any more invasive but this weekend there was an update that turned a bunch of stuff back on that I had spent a lot of time to turn off or edit in the registry. I have had enough too with playing whack a mole with the MS settings. I turned them off, MS turned them right back on again in the name of an update. Enough. I have made my final permanent switch to Linux Mint. I am finding there is nothing I could do in Windows that I cannot do in Mint, and even at that some apps functions are even easier to use.

C.H.
I think I should update here, I did find something that does not work as well in Linux as in Windows, I could not find a good MP3 player. I tried a bunch of them from the Mint repo and none of them worked very well. One of the main things I do with my laptop is listen to music, whether it is my own MP3 library or Pandora. Every player I tried had one thing or the other that I did not like or did not work the way I wanted. Mostly it was bad sound quality.

I also had trouble finding a good MP3 tag editor in Linux. Ntag worked ok but MP3 Tag in Windows is a lot better, has more functions and is easier to use. Media Monkey is the best music manager/player I have ever found, but it only works in Windows. I did not want to try using Wine in Linux to run Media Monkey. I tried to read about Wine and learn how it works but I just did not understand it. I did read a lot of threads from people who are a lot smarter than me that said Wine can cause serious problems.

I found a registry edit that helps on the problem with Windows update turning apps back on. In the registry I went to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ and set the DWord for SilentInstalledAppsEnabled to 0. This edit stops Windows from turning closed/removed bloatware apps back on after an update. I tested it too by adding the edit first before letting two MS updates run and none of the bloatware has turned back on after the update was done. So that edit seems to work well.

Windows updates also change the settings I put in Edge, which I don't like but I don't use Edge so I won't worry about that. What does worry me is if MS will force us all to use AI/Bing GPT/Copilot or whatever they wind up calling it. I hope I will be able to keep my settings and keep AI turned off when 24H2 is put in place. Better yet I hope 24H2 is an optional update and I can just ignore it. If MS makes 24H2 mandatory I will go back to Linux and find some other way to listen to music and manage my MP3 collection. Windows is not terrible, there are a lot of good things about it, I just want to use it the way I like without MS butting in every second Tuesday of the month.

C.H.
 
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vtqhtr413

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I think I should update here, I did find something that does not work as well in Linux as in Windows, I could not find a good MP3 player. I tried a bunch of them from the Mint repo and none of them worked very well. One of the main things I do with my laptop is listen to music, whether it is my own MP3 library or Pandora. Every player I tried had one thing or the other that I did not like or did not work the way I wanted. Mostly it was bad sound quality.

I also had trouble finding a good MP3 tag editor in Linux. Ntag worked ok but MP3 Tag in Windows is a lot better, has more functions and is easier to use. Media Monkey is the best music manager/player I have ever found, but it only works in Windows. I did not want to try using Wine in Linux to run Media Monkey. I tried to read about Wine and learn how it works but I just did not understand it. I did read a lot of threads from people who are a lot smarter than me that said Wine can cause serious problems.

I found a registry edit that helps on the problem with Windows update turning apps back on. In the registry I went to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ and set the DWord for SilentInstalledAppsEnabled to 0. This edit stops Windows from turning closed/removed bloatware apps back on after an update. I tested it too by adding the edit first before letting two MS updates run and none of the bloatware has turned back on after the update was done. So that edit seems to work well.

Windows updates also change the settings I put in Edge, which I don't like but I don't use Edge so I won't worry about that. What does worry me is if MS will force us all to use AI/Bing GPT/Copilot or whatever they wind up calling it. I hope I will be able to keep my settings and keep AI turned off when 24H2 is put in place. Better yet I hope 24H2 is an optional update and I can just ignore it. If MS makes 24H2 mandatory I will go back to Linux and find some other way to listen to music and manage my MP3 collection. Windows is not terrible, there are a lot of good things about it, I just want to use it the way I like without MS butting in every second Tuesday of the month.

C.H.
I've just started using Linux on a second laptop, Mint in fact, still figuring out settings and layout and such but I will want to listen to my own music collection eventually. If you find one or two, please post back here (y)
 

Captain Holly

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The only player I found in Mint that was sorta kinda decent was Strawberry. It had no trouble with my music library or any of its tags. It was easy to use and it displayed all of the album info, covers, correct song order, all of that was ok. The main problem I had with it was it sounded bad. It has an equalizer that is hard to adjust because it is too small to move the slides to get the right increase or decrease in the frequency. It's like the eq was in the old school version of Winamp. It sounded like Winamp too. Pretty harsh but different headphones or earbuds might do better. I was using Oneodio A70 wireless headphones.
I was kind of surprised that there are several other players in Mint but they were all just bare bones. No tone control at all and they indexed my music collection all in one single list. Over 6,000 songs with no way to sort by album or artist. Mint has the Pulseaudio equalizer in the repo too. I never could get it to work. It's above my pay grade I guess. I also read some posts that it uses too much memory anyway.

C.H.
 

Captain Holly

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I may have found a solution here, or at least a workaround. I paired my headphones with my Pixel 6 phone and played a few mp3 songs through VLC. The sound was pretty good, seemed better than Strawberry anyway. So I could possibly go back to Mint and just use my phone to play music, sort of like it was way back when I listened to my iPod when I was online with my desktop PC. Playing local music was really the only problem I had with Mint. Everything else worked fine and with everything I keep hearing about MS it may be best to ditch Windows now. Definitely something to think about.

C.H.
 
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Captain Holly

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One last update here, I reinstalled Linux Mint yesterday and it is working out very well. I found a better solution to the problem with using Strawberry to play my MP3 library. This happened pretty much by accident but I hovered the mouse pointer on the edge of the equalizer window in Strawberry and found I could resize it, same as resizing in Windows. So I stretched the eq open and it increased the length of the slides which made it a lot easier to use and adjust. This does not add any extra attenuation in any frequency band but it does make the eq and preamp a lot more manageable. The sound quality is very good now, definitely acceptable. Pandora sounds good in Mint too, I play it through its web player with the "Audio Equalizer" extension in Firefox and Chromium. As it is now I really don't see myself using Windows again. If there ever is something I need that just won't work in Linux I do have another laptop that runs Windows 11. I fire that one up every week or two to keep it updated, but really have not been using it much in the last year.

C.H.
 
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