Kevin's Blog

Microsoft announced yesterday a significant addition to the Copilot+PC range with the new Surface Pro 11th edition and Surface Laptop 7th edition supporting the Intel Core Ultra 2 chipset. This brings Intel into the Copilot+PC specification alongside Qualcomm. A significant improvement? Yes, the previous chipset used in the Surface Pro 10 and Laptop 6 was Intel's Meteor Lake chipset, while having a Nueral Processing Unit built in it would only achieve 11 TOPS, meaning it fell short of being a Copilot+PC standard. Therefore, this meant these devices did not get the full functionality of Windows 24H2 when released. Improvements in Core Ultra 2 (Lunar Lake) are a NPU up to 48 TOPS, improved power efficiency, and the highly talked-about Intel Arc graphics, and with 12 cores instead of 8 and a clock speed of 5.2 GHz, really lands Core Ultra 2 in the Copilot + PC standard. The new Surface Pro 11th Edition now contains a choice for the user, either Intel or Snapdragon, and each will have ...

Spoiler alert: this is an enthusiast post!  Always keen to see how you can get the best from old tech?, I dug out my gen 1 Surface Go device.  This was an 8 GB model with the faster Intel Gold processor. It came orginally with Windows 10S; I upgraded that to 10 Pro, as most people did, and then finally to Windows 11. First Stop Ubuntu Now it did run Windows 11 but as expected not amazingly fast, good enough for some web browsing and using Office Online. So I looked for some alternatives: Linux, of course, had to be a great choice to start with; I chose Ubuntu, as this is a mainstream distro. Once installed I updated the Surface Kernel through Github and even got my Surface pen to work!  I could install Microsoft Edge, sync to my M365 account and all was good.    By using Microsoft Edge, I could create a Progressive Web App (PWA) of any web page and have it behave like an application. Second stop: Windows 10X Next I tried going back to Github and found the projec...