Technology Ramblings

Hey folks.. Back in late June of 2021 - I started down the Windows Insider track with Windows 11 and installed build 22000.51 on both an Intel NUC 8th Gen and a Dell Inspiron 2-in-1 laptop. Back then I made the comment that effectively Windows was just a Chromebook/MacOS mashup and that really I had noticed any major performance improvements over the Windows 10 builds I had been running... Okay so here we are some 18 months later and I'm running build Windows 11 Pro build 25267.    So what's changed ? To be honest not much.   Sure there have been some improvements with the overall start menu and task bar, there is now tabs for Windows Explorer and the extremely glacial migration of system settings from Control Panel has continued The biggest thing that Windows 11 had forced me to do is to upgrade my NUC as Intel effectively stopped upgrading the Iris 655 Graphics drivers for my NUC 8 and I didn't want end up with a platform that wouldn't support newer builds. So the goo

Hey folks... As we close out 2022 - figured it was time to revisit my Cutting the Cord analysis.   Over the last 4 or 5 years - I've done an analysis every year or two to see if I could "cut the cord" while will providing my family the entertainment choices they wanted, with the same convenience they were used to and lower my monthly costs. Back in 2017 & 2018 the answer for me was a definite no.  There were simply too many caveats, compromises and complexity to make it work.   My last analysis was in late 2020 and the market had matured quite a bit - with much better offerings and technologies.  My conclusion then was that cord cutting was a very viable option and in fact starting in 2021 I started switching some of my property management customers to streaming, but I still hadn't done it myself... Finally in 2022 I did "Cut the Cord" - albeit a Satellite TV cord vs a Cable TV Cord.   The catalyst for the change was actually a move - we bought a new hom