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Hi, thanks for the article. I’ve recently purchased some NUCs for home and was delighted to find they support Thunderbolt. The Intel NUC11 Pro Kit I bought for my wife a little while back supports Thunderbolt 4, as does a NUC12 Pro kit I bought later for my TV entertainment system. Intel NUC support has now transferred to ASUS and I’m typing this on an ASUS NUC14PRO+ Kit (“AI Ready”). It has “2 x Thunderbolt 4 Type-C w/ DisplayPort 1.4” on the rear panel, and yes, I’ve tested them to displays. So I’m pleased to see that Thunderbolt is becoming more common.

I do have these NUCS (all on Win 11 24H2 now) powered through UPS to save the data from brownouts which the laptops they replaced were somewhat immune from. But the laptop batteries were swelling badly (out of warranty and no original parts available) and after I replaced one battery from a web source then the replacement battery started swelling even more within a year, so there’s that.

Thanks for the article. I’ve been on Win 11 Pro 24H2 with my several machines (two Intel NUCs and an ASUS NUC) for a while now with no real problems, although there was a little nitpick with SMB just now.

I have a blind local user account set up on my host machine which I never log into, I only use it so that my other machines can validate and access the shares to that account on this PC. It’s worked well until now. The problem started when I reset the firewall … not a good idea! Anyway, my android phone file manager could no longer validate with the PC via SMB on the network over the Wi-Fi. It was confused by the fact that I have a new phone (Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra 512 GB), but the phone wasn’t the problem because it could SMB to my QNAP NAS happily enough.

Checking the Windows firewall settings on the PC showed that the “File and Printer Sharing over SMBDirect” was disabled, so I checked the boxes, saved the settings, and all’s good again.

… OR LINUX … or PC Sticks or NUC PCs?

I’m a little surprised that linux wasn’t mentioned as a way to refresh the existing PC instead of lashing out with green dollars to buy a mac and get lured into Apple’s walled garden instead of Microsoft’s. From my perspective, trading Windows for Apple is trading the OS you know for the OS you don’t know, and the devil is in the details.

Consumer Linux costs nothing. Nothing to try, zero dollars ever, works on almost any old PC hardware that turns on, and there’s heaps of support on the web. Some linux distros look so much like windows that users will feel right at home after installation and setup.

So if users want to abandon Windows 10 altogether because they don’t want to pay the hardware upgrade cost, there’s free options for their existing hardware.

OR

there’s cheap PC Stick hardware or NUC PCs that will run Windows 11 happily for the budget conscious folk as well. Then they don’t have to learn a whole new OS ecosystem.

 

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Fred

This should be raised to DEADCON or THEFT-PRO status. Because a day after 24H2 installed “smoothly” on my Win 11 Pro / ASUS NUC 14 PRO+ Intel(R) Core(TM) Ultra 9 185H PC, MS then deactivated my licensed Win11 Pro key and told me something about how my hardware had changed, when it clearly hadn’t. It then asked me to buy a new license. Fortunately, I kept the license key from the disk and tried that and it did accept the 23H2 key from this disk to reactivate my license. So installers beware. Make sure you have a license key handy before you try this install or the spooky man is going to get you!

 

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Cybertooth, rbailin, DLivesInTexas, Propje, Carl D

I have Win 11 23H2 and it unzipped it happily natively.

For those who forget to elevate the executable, you can right click on the unpacked “Toolbox v5.6.exe” file and select the Properties tab, then select the Compatibility tab, then check the “Run this program as an administrator” check box and hit the Apply button. Then every time you run the app, it’ll start elevated with admin rights. Microsoft Defender Smart(alec)Screen pops up, but just click on More info, then Run anyway.

 

 

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b

We users sure “Cop-a-lot” of what we don’t ask for and often what we don’t want from MS.

Last week I purchased an ASUS NUC14Pro (Intel Core Ultra i9 185H up to 5.1 GHz) barebones kit (plus 4TB SSD & 32 GB DDR5 & Win 11 Pro, photos attached) and it’s a good bit faster (double everything) than my 5 year old Lenovo Legion. But the NUC says it’s “AI Ready”. Whatever that means. Nobody ever says what that actually means to the end-user experience, the UX. Seems like smoke and mirrors a bit, while AI still gets installed uninvited by cloak and daggers elsewhere. Anyway, this is the third time I’ve installed a barebones NUC (the other two were from Intel itself), and when I get to the Windows installation part, Windows can’t find the built-in 2.5 Gbps LAN or WiFi6 and stops dead in its tracks. Refuses to install. There’s workarounds involving Shift+F10 to install the drivers but you have to go hunting for them. MS doesn’t help at all. Modern OS refusing to install in a modern PC. Typical!!!

It’s almost enough to make me want to upgrade the lot to Linux Mint!

Thanks for your information. Keep up the good work!

Thanks for the warning on reading the EULAs. See this one from Amazon with a Zombie Apocalypse clause…
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-zombie-clause-2016-2

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LH, SueW, Alex5723

Tried it, don’t like it. Pulling it out and cleaning it off with CCleaner after…

Why?

See the screen snip which is what convinced me in the end (maybe took me 10 mins to get to it). While everything else is in English, when I clicked on “Free Office Template Resources” in the Custom links (in the OOBE installation), it took me to a fully Chinese (I think) website that’s completely unintelligibubble to me. Why would MS want to do that? I can’t print what I’d like to say about it.

As for the rest, there’s almost nothing this does that CCleaner doesn’t do as well or better. Except maybe the popup management which CCleaner doesn’t do, but mostly I control unwanted intrusions via uBlock Origin anyway.

 

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wavy, satrow, Cybertooth

By the way, the Drive speed is not necessarily the major bottleneck. Your LAN channel speed is. 1 Gbps sounds fast but it’s not, really when you’re doing large file transfers like backups and such. If you can upgrade to multi-Gig LAN and NAS and PC, your wait times will thank you.

I’m using 2 x 8TB Seagate Ironwolf NAS drives in my QNAP TR-002 DAS configured as RAID 1. They’re about 3-4 years old and work perfectly. I shut it down and take them out occasionally to remove the collected dust.

In my QNAP TS-253D NAS I’m using 2 x 12 TB WD120EFBX WD RED Plus NAS drives, also in RAID 1 configuration. I’ve had them for about 2 years with zero issues. Ditto with the dust cleaning (be gentle!!!).

 

I use Cobain Reflector sparingly. seems like whenever it runs a scheduled job unattended something goes wrong with it, so I can’t really trust it.

Instead, I’m now using Goodsync and I’m pretty happy with that (after a little learning curve). It’s not free, but it was a one-off cost for I think 5 licenses. Plus a license for my QNAP NAS. I can also install it on my iPad and have it on my Android phone. So I backup my Users\<account> folder (minus the system stuff) to my QNAP NAS and also to my QNAP DAS when I need. On a more frequent basis I use it to backup my daily work to my USB drive, and sync that after to the NAS. Every now & then (maybe weekly) I make a clone copy of the DAS and put that in my fireproof security safe. I detach the external drives when not in use. I do have dropbox also (I’ve disabled and uninstalled OneDrive, it was more trouble than it’s worth for me) but cloud storage is just a convenience not a backup.. Since it’s always connected it’s at risk of having malware propagated to it if I get hit with that.

On the android phone, I can transfer to/from the phone’s file system also, by wifi if I want using the GoodSync app on the phone and the host PC. If I’m lazy I’ll use the phone’s Files app instead of goodsync to see and transfer files to/from some shared folders I’ve set up on the Win 11 PC as well. So I’ve lots of ways.

For cloning the PC, I have Acronis True Image (ATI) on a bootable stick. Trouble is you can’t clone the boot disk if it’s bitlocker encrypted. Has to be decrypted first. So be careful with that. I did use Acronis Home Security, the successor to ATI for a long time but it had lots of stuff I don’t need and nothing more than ATI features I did need, so I stopped the subscription because I didn’t like all the security nags I didn’t need.

I tried it a while back. When I discovered what it was lacking, like multiple account support, I couldn’t get back to the classic outlook desktop fast enough. It’s misleading to make people think it’s an upgrade to the existing product by this misnaming convention. At least they should to a check when you click the try it button to tell you what features you’re using that you’re going to lose! It’s not a “New Outlook”. It’s more of a “New LOOKOUT!”

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Mr. Austin, Cybertooth, BobbyB

Really? Then explain this to me please? https://www.future.1password.com/passkeys/

The user’s login credentials themselves *are* sensitive personal information, and if stolen they can be misused without 2FA. Not everyone is as well-disciplined as perhaps we ourselves might be.

I have 4 machines, all were on 1909. One machine got the 2020 update without asking and it got installed on my next boot. The others stayed on 1909. So I downloaded the installation USB stick from MSFT and installed 2020 on all my other PCs, with zero drama. The Intel Compute Stick PC is running on a dedicated wall-mount TV as a smart digital photo frame.

Paul

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woody