Tarting up a ThinkPad T520: Inaction is Conspiracy

They say you learn something new every day. Today I learned that the cover photograph of The Supersuckers' 1995 album The Sacrilicious Sounds of the Supersuckers was a homage to the cover of Paul Weston's obscure 1960 light pop album The Sweet and the Swingin', viz:

Do you remember Citizen Kane? There was a monologue about seeing a girl on a ferry for a moment a long time ago. Never meeting her, never seeing her again, but remembering that moment forevermore. The internet doesn't remember the name of the lady model on the cover of Sacrilicious, but whoever she is I wish her well. The man who played the Devil was a lucky man.

Now that I've got that off my chest, let's have a look at the ThinkPad T520. It's a laptop from 2011, but such is the incremental pace of change in the computing world that it's still perfectly usable nowadays unless you want to play modern games, in which case it's not usable at all.

Most versions of the T520 relied on Intel's built-into-the-CPU HD 3000 GPU, but some T520s had a separate Nvidia 4200M that could be switched on and off as necessary. There's a dearth of solid information about the 4200M's performance on the internet but I surmise that eight years later it's probably more trouble than it's worth. One extra source of heat; one more component to fail.

Status: Malignant

It's been a while since Half-Life 2 was a state-of-the-art benchmark. It runs just fine on the T520 with HD 3000 graphics, continually butting against the game's native 60fps cap in the admittedly spartan early levels. Playing Half-Life 2 makes the laptop's fan start running.

A T520 recently fell into my hands, so I thought I'd write about it. Back in 2011 it was Lenovo's standard desktop replacement laptop, sitting above the less-robust L520 but below the W520 mobile workstation. It was aimed at employees who needed a computer but didn't warrant a permanent desktop machine. I have the impression that a lot of T520s spent their lives in a ThinkPad dock, chained to the desk, connected to the corporate network with an ethernet cable, running exclusively from mains power, which probably did nothing for the batteries.

T520s are widely available on eBay for very little money because the businesses that used them in 2011 have since upgraded. They mostly belong to the modern age - they have SATA III hard drives and can use SSDs without any issues, they take up to 16gb of memory - but a few things date them. They don't have USB 3.0, there's no touchscreen, and by modern standards they're very chunky. Even in 2011 they were very thick. On the other hand they're well-built. I have an ancient ThinkPad 600X from 1999 and it was interesting to compare them:

The 600X feels denser, as if it was a rubber brick, whereas the T520 has a hollow feel. The 600X has smoother hinges, impressive for something now twenty years old. They're both fingerprint magnets, but beyond that I don't have any complaints about the build quality.

Some T520s have a fingerprint sensor in the top case. Mine doesn't. It does however have a colour sensor that can supposedly be used to calibrate the monitor properly. It sounds oddly esoteric for a business laptop and I haven't tried to use it.

I have to admit I lost touch with CPU architectures when Intel switched to the i3/i5/i7 generation in 2008. I don't have the inclination to memorise the difference between Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake. Instinctively I think of the Core 2 Duo as "behind the curve but still usable in 2019 at a pinch" and the i5 and beyond as "the modern era". Desktop i5s are generally quad-core, but laptop i5s of 2011 were dual-core, as is mine.

The T520 has a 15" screen. It was sold alongside the T420, which had a 14" screen. Beyond the screen size, the only significant difference between the two was that the T520 could be specified with a quad-core i7. Most of the information in this blog post applies to the T420 as well. They share batteries and even use the same keyboard. The only notable physical difference, beyond the size, is that the T420's hard drive slides out, whereas the T520's doesn't, but read on.

When it was new the T520 was typically supplied with a 64-bit installation of Windows 7 Pro, although Windows 7 Home Premium was an option. Lenovo arranged the hard drive with a recovery partition that can reinstall the operating system. My laptop came with a fresh recovery install, at which point I had to spend an afternoon installing masses of updates.

This is the T520's 1600x900 15.4" panel, the middle of the three screen options. It's matte, visible in daylight, with decent but not spectacular angles. The odd purple cast on the text is from the lens I used to shoot this image, not the panel.

Microsoft will drop support for Windows 7 early next year, but luckily the T520 runs Windows 10 without breaking into a sweat. A while back Microsoft offered a free upgrade for Windows 7 users via a downloadable tool. In theory this shouldn't work any more, but just for fun I tried it, and it upgraded Windows 7 into Windows 10, seemingly without any problems. EDIT: I wrote this post at the end of 2019, and Windows 7 has now been abandoned. Can you still upgrade it to Windows 10? Good question. END. The T520 comes installed with a bunch of Lenovo utilities that are mostly useless, although the battery manager is pretty good. You can set it to maximise the life of the battery by limiting the charge, and you can easily see the maximum number of discharge cycles for example.

Other operating systems? I haven't tried Linux but I can see no reason why it wouldn't work. The T520 can apparently be hackintoshed into a Hackintosh quite easily, although the wifi card might have to be replaced. I'm not sure if units with the Nvidia graphics chips are harder to hackintosh. Yes, hackintosh is a verb. It a verb now. Again, I haven't tried this, because I already have a MacBook.

Sadly no amount of tinkering makes the TrackPad good. Usable, but not good.

Historically the T520/T420 replaced the Westmere-powered T410/T510 (2010). The T520 was in turn replaced by the Ivy Bridge-powered T430/T530 in 2012. In terms of CPU performance the T430/530 generation is around 35-40% faster than the T410/T510, but they were not universally beloved by ThinkPad fans because they introduced a new keyboard design with smaller keys.

The T520 on the other hand has Lenovo / IBM's old-fashioned desktop-style keyboard. It's great - it doesn't flex, the keys feel nice and spring back easily, you can train yourself to get used to the odd position of the FN and CTRL keys. The T520 doesn't have a backlit keyboard - that was introduced with the T530 - but it does have a ThinkLight that shines down from the screen bezel.

The ThinkLight in action. If I was in charge of ThinkPad development I would make the light more yellow - the cold white daylight balance looks harsh.

The TrackPoint is an acquired taste. I love it, but the T520's TrackPoint feels less sensitive than other TrackPoints I have used. With my X61 I can whizz the pointer across the screen with a nudge, but with the T520 I have to press the TrackPoint continuously.

The touchpad isn't very good. Lenovo probably has a special name for it. I'll have a look. Oh yes. TrackPad. TrackPad.

I own a late-2008 MacBook Pro. It's three years older than the T520 but has a far better touchpad. It's large, two-finger scrolling gestures respond perfectly, it's glassy-smooth - it literally is glass, the touchpad is covered with glass - it hasn't worn down after eleven years of use, it's a superb touchpad. The T520's touchpad isn't in the same league. It has a knobbly texture that rubs my fingers the wrong way. Multi-finger gestures are jerky and intermittent. Perhaps it's a Windows problem, I don't know. I use the TrackPad as little as possible e.g. never.

The blue ThinkVantage button brings up support information, although in reality its only genuine use is to activate the BIOS screen when you boot up the laptop. It's a legacy of the days when laptops had special buttons that opened a link to a website. It was eliminated from the ThinkPad range circa 2013 or so.

The T520 was available with three different screen resolutions, poxy 1366x768, considerably better 1600x900, brighter and generally superior 1920x1080. Mine has a 1600x900 panel. The panels are interchangeable and are essentially drop-in replacements. The laptop will recognise them all and they have the same connectors.

Let's have a look at the ports:

From left there's a DisplayPort monitor connector, a VGA port, two USB 2.0 ports, a third USB 2.0 port - it looks different because it can be specified as an eSATA/USB port - a FireWire port, and a switch that turns off the wi-fi and Bluetooth.

Around the back is a powered USB 2.0 port and a blank for what would have been an internal modem. Even in 2011 modems and VGA ports were old-fashioned, but ThinkPads have traditionally been conservative. What was FireWire? It was an Apple thing. What was eSATA? It was essentially an external SATA port. Some T520's have a combined eSATA/USB port - an eSATAp port - that can supply power to SATA drives. Regular eSATA ports don't supply power, so you have to plug external drives into the mains. This was eSATA's major limitation. It never really took off and was superseded by USB 3.0.

The UltraBay. The empty screw hole - with the brass thread - was for a security retention screw that locked the UltraBay's contents in place, handy if you had a second hard drive in the bay. Originally the screw was supplied with the laptop but from 2009 onwards it became a special-order item.

The right side of the laptop - the other side, not the correct side - the starboard side of the laptop has an ExpressPort slot, an UltraBay, ethernet, and a headphone jack. ThinkPads haven't had audio input ports since the IBM years. If you want audio in, you have to use a USB audio stick.

The UltraBay will take a variety of optical drives up to Blu-Ray, and also a hard drive caddy. It doesn't support an extra battery. The hard drive caddy strikes me as the most useful option. The T520 also has an mSATA slot underneath the keyboard, so in theory you could put the operating system on the mSATA card, put all of your data on an internal HDD or SSD, and use the removable hard drive in the caddy for bulk data transfer, or a second operating system. The sky is your playground.

Let's open up the T520:

That covers all the easy user-replaceable stuff. The T520 was sold with either a 6-cell or a 9-cell battery. The 9-cell battery extends beyond the back of the laptop; mine is a flush 6-cell battery. There was also a 9-cell "slice" battery that plugged into the base of the laptop and doubled the battery life. The hardware manual mentions a 4-cell battery, but I can't find any evidence that this existed. Perhaps it was an option for the slimline T420s that could also be used with the T520. I don't know.

The T520 has a standard 9.5" drive bay. I cloned the original 500gb hard drive onto a 120gb solid state drive with Macrium Reflect. Gone are the days of messing around with Norton Ghost. After chopping out most of Lenovo's pre-installed applications - good riddance, Corel MovieFactory - Windows takes up about 16.5gb.

The T520 uses 204-pin DDR3 PC3-10600/PC1333 memory. One or two sticks, up to 8gb per stick, to a maximum of 16gb, which is extravagant for a laptop. They don't have to be installed in pairs. Higher-speed memory is fine, it'll just run at 1333mhz.

The T520 has two memory slots. The easy one is in the base of the machine. The second slot is underneath the keyboard. To remove the keyboard you need to take out the two screws circled in red - you might need a magnet to lift the one at the top out of its channel. The odd metal object to the left of the picture is the base of the CPU cooler.

Incidentally this is a good spot to blow out dust. I blew some air across the CPU cooler, at which point a cloud of fine dust ejected from the left side of the laptop.

Once those two screws are removed you flip the laptop over, slide the keyboard gently towards the LCD, then lift it up from the front, taking care not to rip out the cable:

What a nice, simple layout. As you can see the second memory slot is hidden under a frosted plastic cover. In the top-right, underneath the copper-coloured keyboard cable, there's a black rectangle - this is the cover for the mSATA drive. This T520 doesn't have one. Towards the front of the laptop is the wifi card:

It's an Intel Advanced-N 6205. ThinkPads have a whitelist and so the only way to use another card, or at least a card that wasn't supplied by Lenovo, is to install a custom BIOS. I don't have a problem with the 6205 card so I'm not going to touch it.

Is that it? The T520 is something of a minor modern classic, because it was part of the last generation of ThinkPads with a desktop-style keyboard. The CPU can be removed and replaced, in fact Lenovo even tells you how to do it, but I suspect that for games the graphics chip is the limiting factor. For everything else a quad-core i7 is good enough. The W520 supported more powerful CPUs, but they ran hotter and drew more electricity, and in 2019 my hunch is that it's not worth pushing the T520 to its absolute limit.

The other popular "power user upgrade" is the screen, but in my opinion the leap from 1366x768 to 1600x900 is much more significant than the jump from 1600x900 to 1920x1080, so I'm not going to do that. On the used market in the UK T520's vary widely in prince, from around £70 without a hard drive or memory but with a charger to £150 or so in working order. ThinkPads tend to go through phases, and although they were common a while ago they're starting to become rare, as the more powerful T530 isn't much more expensive.

Is that it? I think I've said enough. Do you remember the parrot's last words? "You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you." Well, dear reader, I hope you are good. I will not see you tomorrow, or ever, but I love you all the same. Goodnight.

Windows 10 on an old laptop

It won't be easy, no, it won't be easy without you, no no no, in the words of Justin Heyward

Way back in October 2012 I upgraded my old 2ghz ThinkPad X61 from Windows XP to Windows 8. I still use that machine quite often - most recently as a musical instrument - and although it's eight years old it's still pretty good. I've upgraded mine with extra memory and a solid state drive. It's useless for games but otherwise it works just fine as a kind of Windows-powered Chromebook. Now that Windows 10 has come out I decided to test it out, and my X61 was close to hand.

Windows 8.1 - the much-reviled Start screen (top), and the desktop (bottom)

The machine came into this world in 2007 with Windows XP Pro. I've upgraded it to Windows 8 Pro (£25, a special offer) and then 8.1 Pro (free) and 10 Pro (free). There is also a Home version of Windows 10. The Pro version doesn't have any killer features that distinguish it from Home, but Home is for women. I'm not a woman, for heaven's sake. I'm not telling people that I have Windows 10 Home.

This raises the question of whether you can get hold of the Pro version of Windows 10 by picking up a crappy old XP Pro laptop and upgrading it. It's an interesting proposition although I don't think that it's viable, because you have to upgrade to Windows 7 or Windows 8->8.1 first. You can't upgrade straight from XP. This adds anything from £50-100 to the cost depending on how legitimate you want to be - Windows 7 upgrades are actually more expensive, because they're no longer available new - in which case why not spend a little extra and buy a laptop with Windows 7 Pro already installed? Hmm? Note that whereas my XP-Windows 8 upgrade essentially wiped XP, the 8.1-10 upgrade kept everything as it was.

Windows 10 is being rolled out via Windows Update progressively, but you can beat the queue by going here and downloading it from Microsoft. You have two options - an in-place install, or an ISO that you can burn / write to installation media (in which case you have to be careful to pick the right version of Windows 10).

The most powerful XP Pro laptops came out in 2007 and perhaps 2008, "the year of the Vista-XP downgrade". XP devices were sold for a couple of years after that, but they tended to be low-cost, low-power netbooks. The cream of 2007's crop were late Core II Duo laptops running at 2.6ghz or thereabouts, with 4gb or 8gb memory ceilings and 1440x900 screens if you were lucky. Nowadays these machines are, as with the X61, still competent if you can find them cheap enough. The T61p, which had a 1920x1200 screen and a separate graphics card, is not bad at all. I prefer the X61 because it's smaller; it was unusually small in 2007 and has aged well.

But I digress. Microsoft's attitude seems to be that you already have Windows, so you might as well upgrade. There will be boxed versions of Windows 10, but not until August. Do you remember when people queued up for boxed versions of Windows 95? Do you remember when PC software was sold in shops?

Star Cops was pretty much symptomatic of Britain's dysfunctional... look, I always thought that although Red Dwarf was a sitcom, it was a better sci-fi show that most sci-fi shows. The first series in particular had a philosophical, melancholic tone. The writers were obviously huge sci-fi nerds but they could do characterisation and storytelling as well.

You know, there comes a time in a man's life when he looks deep into his soul and instead of seeing Clint Eastwood peering back at him, he sees Arnold Rimmer. "An incompetent vending machine repairman with a Napoleon complex who commanded as much respect and affection from his fellow crew members as Long John Silver's parrot." Isn't that all of us? Lister was the hero, but I suspect that Rimmer was how the writers saw themselves; Lister was an ideal.

Inevitably Microsoft wants to own your life, like diverticulitis - but whereas diverticulitis requires antibiotics and/or surgery, Microsoft's clingyness can be dismissed with a few boxes.

But can it be dismissed entirely? We are all pawns in a great war between the forces of Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Google. Where once there were nation states, now there are giant data farms, vying with each other to own our souls, so that they can sell us shopping machines that help us shop for more shopping machines, and smartphones that help them sell shopping machines to us. "Our children will live, Mr Beale, to see a perfect world in which there is no war or famine, no oppression or brutality - one vast and ecumenical holding company, for which all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused."

I'm digressing here. Back in the early 2000s Apple came up with the idea of launching OS X and then gradually upgrading it, without making major changes to the core OS, or at least without making major changes to the interface. I have used OS 10.4 Tiger (2005), 10.6 Snow Leopard (2009) and 10.10 Yosemite (current), and they look and feel basically the same. As far as I'm concerned an OS should be a transparent thing that gets out of the way; I have a MacBook so I can use Logic, not so I can use OS X, although as it happens I like OS X. It gets a lot of stick in the computing world - hardcore Linux fans don't generally get along with Apple, and in any case they would prefer it if OS X didn't exist; Windows people never use it and pooh-pooh it because it's an Apple product; the great mass of humanity never uses it; Macintosh owners aren't aware of it, because they don't care about OSes. But it has never let me down and it just works.

During most of OS X's lifespan Microsoft generally maintained the Windows look and feel, although you often had to do a lot of clicking to get back the standard taskbar and start menu, and some things were changed irrevocably. But the rise of the smartphone and the tablet and the market for apps in the 2010s threw a spanner in the works. Apple decided to develop a new operating system for the iPhone/iPod/iPad - iOS - and Apple apps are written for it. It must have been tempting to port OS X for mobile devices, but Apple decided not to, and although the company is often dismissed as a shallow bunch of fashionable hipsters creating fashion trinkets for hip fashionistas, its OS strategy was simple and effective.

And... it looks a lot like Windows 8.1, with some tweaks. From start to finish it took about forty minutes, not counting time spent downloading it.

"A shallow bunch of fashionable hipsters creating fashion trinkets for hip fashionistas", that's quality writing you know. It has rhythm, it flows off the tongue. The overuse of fashion- and hip- was deliberate. It's supposed to imply that I'm tired and bored with the kind of people who dismiss Apple users as fashionable etc, because their stance is tired and boring.

Yeah but right in contrast Microsoft initially had a separate mobile OS in the form of Windows CE, which was joined with but not replaced by Windows Mobile which was replaced by Windows Phone and meanwhile there was Windows RT which was a bit like Windows but for ARM and also there was Windows 8, which could run on desktop machines and tablets but not smartphones. Got that?

The duality of Windows 8 irritated a lot of people, although over time I have grown to ignore it. Windows 10 is an attempt to gather some of this together, although there is still a separate Windows 10 Mobile which hasn't been released yet. I just don't care about this section of the article any more.

10 - can I call it 10? - has a new Action Centre, roughly analogous to the old Charms menu.

I wonder what they've done with the Start screen. Let's hit the Windows key and bring up the Start screen. Let's see how they have tweaked the Start screen. I can't wait:

Oh. They've got rid of the Start screen. There's no more Start screen. You can enable an imitation by fiddling with the personalisation features, but it's not the same. Like Joffrey Baratheon from television's Game of Thrones the Start screen reigned briefly, no-one liked it, no-one will miss it. To be fair it works fine on my Linx 10 tablet. It's not so much the interface that angered people but its ubiquity on non-tablet devices. A rare case of Microsoft having the right idea, but too soon and too much instead of too late and not enough.

You can expand the new miniature start screen / start menu out to the right. If you want shortcuts to the rest of your apps you click "all apps", in which case you get a straightforward alphabetical list. Unless you have more than 512 shortcuts in which case it breaks, apparently.

Cortana is Microsoft's new digital assistant. When I envisage digital assistants, I think of Jane Wiedlin's Singing Telegram Girl from Clue, which pleases me. Clue is one of those films that isn't very good but everybody remembers it, like Innerspace or Explorers. Men remember Clue for Colleen Camp, who played the french maid, and at this point all the male readers of this blog are nodding. I'll save you time, just highlight "colleen camp" clue and right-click and search google for and images.

Microsoft has a new browser, which as you can see is called Microsoft E

It's a "start screen app" - apps launch in a window now, and although the X61's 1024x768 screen is behind the curve it's a shame Microsoft didn't test this out more thoroughly.

Will I use Edge? Why?

Hearteningly my existing setup is retained intact. Windows 10 doesn't crash or throw a wobbly. There was a time when each new version of Windows required a more powerful computer, but that seemed to fizzle out with Vista, which was widely panned for its bloat.

Over the last few years there has been a general emphasis on low power consumption and light weight, and Windows 10 has surprisingly modest system requirements - 1gb of memory, a 1ghz CPU, an 800x600 screen, around 20gb hard drive space. In theory that covers late Pentium III machines(!) but in practice I understand that BIOS, CPU and graphics problems mean that it won't work with pre-Pentium M devices, or at least not without hacking it.

 

There is a new Tablet mode that also emulates the Start Screen and is entirely optional. Microsoft should have implemented this back with Windows 8. Presumably from now on Windows 8.1 will have security updates but will otherwise be left to wither on the vine. Shed a tear for the concept of Windows service packs; the last one was Windows 7's first and last service pack back in 2011. Note that although the X61 has rubbish integral Intel graphics, it still copes with transparency, and in use Windows 10 feels fast and snappy. The Samsung 840 probably helps.

Returning to the topic of a cheap laptop, if the X61 copes then any late Core II Duo upgraded to Windows 10 with the hard drive replaced with a cheap 120gb SSD (about £50) should be just fine as a general productivity machine under Windows 10. I would pick one in tip-top condition. Does Windows 10 work on Macintosh hardware? I have a Macbook, but I'm not minded to try it out; I use it for music and I have it set up just right.

Controversially, updates are now downloaded without your say-so. The Pro version of Windows 10 lets you schedule restarts and I believe the Enterprise version lets you defer them. After installing Windows 10 there were two small updates as above.

The modern trend is for text-based searching rather than hunting through menus. Linux fans are generally smug, but wasn't it Ubuntu that introduced the idea of searching Amazon when you just want to open the device manager, hmm?

The install also added some Lenovo rubbish that seems to just run Disc Cleanup. I got rid of this. The X61's hardware is mostly generic although it has some oddities - a fingerprint reader (unusual for 2007), a TrackPoint nipple, a ThinkLight in the bezel that points down at the keyboard, and some kind of whitelisted wi-fi card. All of this worked. A while back I upgraded the BIOS with a special "Middleton BIOS" that enables SATA II, and Windows 10 either doesn't notice or doesn't care about this.

On Windows 8.0, SuperPi calculated Pi to 2m digits in 1m 02 seconds (right at the bottom). With Windows 10 it performs the same sums in 57 seconds! My hunch is that this is some kind of quirk rather than a genuine performance improvement. The new DirectX 12 is apparently faster than its predecessors, which may or may not influence the CPU's ability to calculate Pi. Subjectively the X61 seems to run slightly cooler than before; my recollection is that XP ran fairly cool, Windows 8 and 8.1 blew the fan more often, and after a few hours of trying Windows 10 seems to be cool again, with the machine idling at around 40c vs 50c as before. The X61's compact case is notorious for heating up quickly. The battery life seems much the same.

So, Windows 10. It introduces a lot of new features that you have already read about elsewhere. My immediate impression is that it's Windows 8.1 with a tarted-up menu system. No doubt under the hood a lot of clever stuff is going on, but from the perspective of this user, the upgrade process is quick, and it works. And I have demonstrated that an eight-year-old but well-maintained ThinkPad X61 will run Windows 10.

The big quandry; do I upgrade my desktop machine from Windows 7 Pro to Windows 10? It seems painless but I have far more installed on my desktop machine. Not yet.

Navigating the Asteroid Belt

More music, with Logic Express 9 running on a 2008 MacBook Pro. On the left is a ThinkPad X61 running the wonderful M-Tron Mellotron simulation, and towards the middle is a strong cup of tea. Here's the result (the tea was the most important thing):

A while back I bought an old G4 PowerBook, just to see what OS X was like in the early years of this century. I also wanted to check out Logic, which is the standard Macintosh sequencer. Logic was developed in the 1980s for the Atari ST, and was eventually ported to Windows; for a while it was available for Windows and OS X, but eventually Apple latched on to it and brought it inside the company's walled garden. Now it is an OS X exclusive.

Perhaps because of this it tends to be pooh-poohed by the cognoscenti. The latest version is Logic Pro X, and word on the street is that Apple has tried to dumb it down for the app market as part of a general shift away from the professional market. I don't know. I like Logic; on a conceptual level it's similar to Cubase and Pro Tools, and it has a few irritating quirks, but I don't have a problem with it and it runs well on my MacBook.

My old, circa 2002 G4 PowerBook is very limited, so I decided to try an experiment. My ThinkPad X61 is a traditional PC laptop, but it can be turned into a "hackintosh", and with an afternoon's worth of work I had OS X 10.7 running on it. Logic Express 8 worked fine but the whole experience felt a bit wonky, so I bit the bullet and bought a 2008 MacBook Pro instead. Why not simply buy Cubase for my Windows PC, and cut out the Macintosh entirely? Why indeed.

On the used market, 2008 MacBook Pros are an interesting proposition. The 1440x900 screen is still better than most entry-level modern PC laptops, which seem to have setted on 1366x768. The reliability problems that bedevilled the G4 PowerBooks had been mostly solved, although there are still issues with the aluminium case attracting dents and the internals overheating. Performance-wise modern laptops are undeniably more capable, but over the last few years there has been an emphasis on power-saving and miniaturisation as well, and so the six years of progress since 2008 are not as apparent as the six years separating 2002 from 2008. The 2008 MacBooks have two graphics processors (an on-chip card and a separate unit which kicks in for games) but poor games performance is one thing that definitely separates 2008 from the modern era.

The 2008 MacBooks are easy to work on. I've swapped my MacBook's original hard drive for a cheap SSD, taken out the DVD superdrive, and inserted a second drive bay. Reason being that Logic Express is flakey with OS X 10.10 Yosemite. It runs, but becomes unresponsive for seconds at a time, seemingly whenever I plug in my keyboard. So I bought a copy of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and installed that on the second drive.

Snow Leopard is the Macintosh analogue of Windows XP - old and sturdy - if Windows XP had been built on UNIX, and part of me wonders if Apple reached a peak with its Macintosh range circa 2008-2011 and has been regressing since then. Perhaps the company no longer cares much for its computers. I often wonder if the failure of the XServe range finally convinced Apple that it did not have a future as a computer company. Still, a 2008 MacBook with Snow Leopard is fast, reliable, and relatively easy to fix if it breaks; the post-2008 MacBook Pros had a non-replaceable battery, and later models progressively became sealed units with everything glued-and-soldered to the motherboard. I have seen nothing in OS X Yosemite that I prefer over Snow Leopard, or indeed OS X 10.4 Tiger.

Ah, I hear you say, but what about the music? Why are you waffling on about laptops and hard drives, why not tell us what was going through your soul as you poured raw emotion from your musical heart? I like to think that good art has a core of humanity underneath it, but in practice the act of creation involves a tonne of hard, uninteresting work. Whenever films show an artist in the act of creation, they imply that it just happens, but someone has to sharpen the pencils, put ink into the typewriter and load the film etc. You have to be quite far up the chain before you have minions to do that kind of thing, at which point you have to master a new set of skills. Until you are the King, at which point you just have to look good in robes.

Windows 8.1: Candy and a Currant Bun

And so it came to pass that on the day Morrissey's autobiography was released, Microsoft chose to update Windows 8. The company has added a couple of arrows and a button that doesn't do much and point one. Windows 8 was a shock when it was new, and some people thought it should be bludgeoned in its bed, but I've grown to mostly forget about it. Has it changed, or have I changed?

I'm looking forward to the next edition, Windows 8.11, which will add support for Workgroups. What are Workgroups? Well, Workgroups are a kind of peer-to-peer network along the lines of Apple's AppleTalk. Imagine this scenario - you've got a room full of PCs, and a very expensive laser printer in the corner, and you want to send something to it for printing. Ordinarily you'd save your work to a floppy disc and transfer it to the machine connected to the laser printer, but what if you could hook all the PCs to the laser printer with a cable, wouldn't that be great? You wouldn't have to walk across the room any more. You could be in another room. You could print out a sheet of paper that says YOU ARE A POOPY-HEAD and no-one would know it was you.

Tomorrow morning we'll be miles away / on another continent and another day

In theory you could buy a room full of Macs instead, but they're expensive. And different. Now imagine that instead of being connected to a laser printer, your Workgroup is connected to the telephone line - and on the other side of the world there is a room much like your own, and your Workgroup is connected to that Workgroup, and you can share files and things with people on the other side of the world. Which is Australia. Right now, the cost of international telecommunication is too expensive for this to be a reality, and of course there are political barriers, but one day all of humankind will be one race, one creed, and information will be free. In the far future we won't need to transmit things to the other side of the world any more, because they will already know everything we know, but until that comes to pass, information will be clumped, and unevenly spread.

The future of humankind will not be a boot stamping on a person's face forever, because all complex systems fall apart, and the world of 1984 was a very complex system. Good and evil both require energy to keep going, and the more extreme the regime the more energy is required, until the energy that might have gone into advancing the regime is instead wasted on perpetuating it. Tyranny and utopia are doomed to fail, in the long run; the future of humanity is a kind of middling averageness, which is at least preferable to a nightmare of torture and brutality.

And if life cannot be a dream, at least we might get a good night's sleep. But that is enough of Morrissey's autobiography. Sorry about the "Windows 8.11" gag up there, by the way, that joke isn't funny any more. Ere long gone last year I do done did stick Windows 8 on an old ThinkPad X61, a 2ghz Core II Duo machine from 2006. Despite the generally horrified reaction that Windows 8 received in the specialist press it works surprisingly well in a mobile context - it's easy to forget that it was touted as a faster, slimmer alternative to Windows 7, and it feels fast even on such elderly hardware. Windows 8.1 doesn't add much of substance, but at least it doesn't hurt. Let's see what it's like.

But first, Windows 8. Look at it:

Let's imagine that I'm on the desktop, and I want to launch Windows Paint, so I fuck around with the Charms menu and there's a search box and let's try that and oh shit it tries to open the fucking store:

Well, Windows 8.1 is better, because it doesn't fuck around. It just takes you to the store straight away and fails to find Paint slightly quicker than before:

So how do you find Paint? Please, Windows 8, let me get what I want. This time. The odd relationship and interrelationship between the start screen and the desktop and the search functionality were a concern that lots of people discovered when the pre-release versions of Windows 8 came out, and unfortunately Windows 8.1 does very little to fix them. It's as if Microsoft really didn't care about the criticism. Windows 8 wasn't like any other post-95 incarnation of Windows, it was different.

But first, let's install Windows 8.1, as an upgrade from Windows 8.0. Windows 8.1 is also available as an official stand-alone DVD, unlike 8.0, which was only available as an OEM product. This was problematic; it seems that the OEM installation was tied in perpetuity to the machine on which it was first installed[1], but I am not a lawyer.

8.1 is available via the store, rather than Windows Update:

At this point the machine needs to restart. Linux fans will probably chuckle, because Linux never needs to be rebooted, which is important if you're running a nuclear reactor. Less so otherwise. Installation is really nothing. A rush and a push and it's finished. It would seem that Windows downloads a complete fresh operating system rather than a big patch, which might explain why you can't simply download the update on one of your machines and then transfer it to different machines.

By default Microsoft acts a bit like Overly Attached Girlfriend, which is worrying, because where do Microsoft's intentions lie? It's good that Oscar Wilde died a long time before he had a chance to see "let apps use my advertising ID for experiences across apps". He would have given up with writing if he had known that this was the future of the English language.

Microsoft should stop trying to make Bing happen. It's not going to happen.

Here's the new start screen. During installation it bugged me about my Microsoft account, but I've forgotten my password, and I guess that it reset my visual settings in retaliation. Hey, what's this thing in the corner?

There's a new arrow. Is it new? I can't remember it from before. Let's click on it:

Well, that certainly makes it a lot easier to get to the Apps view that I will never use. Let's see if we can find Paint from here:

I was looking for Paint and then I found Paint, and heaven knows I'm actually quite pleased. Well done, Microsoft! Seriously, this is frustration for no reason, and frustration for no reason is irritating.* An upgrade to 8.1 reinstalls all the apps you deleted, so that you can delete them again. I kept the calculator, because the thought of an app that turns my sophisticated dual-core laptop - the X61 is still a good piece of design, even seven years later - into a calculator amuses me.

* Sorry, that one was awful.

There used to be a group called The Lovin' Spoonful. Snap view is now slightly more flexible. As before, it doesn't work on the X61's old 1024x768 LCD, but with higher resolutions you can have have up to four apps per screen (as opposed to two beforehand), and you can position them arbitrarily across the screen rather than fixing them in a 75/25% ratio. Nonetheless it's still a usability nightmare and of dubious use.

It makes a bit more sense with multiple monitors, shown here with my ThinkPad X61's screen on the left, an external monitor on the rise right, two Snap apps at the top, desktop+Snap at the bottom:

It looks as if Paul McCartney is coming out of a psychedelic coffin. If we're being honest - I would never be anything less than honest with you, dear reader - this is the kind of thing that people do once, so that they can illustrate a blog post about doing it.

Here's the desktop, with the much-anticipated (cough) "start button":

Windows 8.1 takes away the Windows Experience Index score, by the way. The "about this computer" screen no longer has it. It was nice as a rough guide, at least to check if my system had acknowledged installing an SSD (for example). You can run it by opening an administrator's DOS prompt and entering winsat formal but there's no obvious way of actually seeing the results.

But let's click on the new (cough) "start button". Let's see the old start menu pop up! Yay! I can't wait. Deep in the cell of my heart I really would like to see the start menu again.

It's not strange, Microsoft just wants you to live your life this way-hey

Oh. No start menu. The new (cough) "start button" (air quotes) just duplicates the functionality of the Windows key. What a swizz! For most people the other reason for updating to 8.1 is that it can bypass the Start Screen entirely, although it's not obvious how you go about this. You need to right-click on the taskbar, like so:

And then you select "when I sign in or close all applications on a screen, go to the desktop instead of etc".

At this point it's a good idea to install Classic Shell. The combination of booting-to-the-desktop plus Classic Shell basically gives you The Windows 8 You Always Wanted. Classic Shell could boot to the desktop beforehand, but in my experience it wasn't as smooth as 8.1's implementation.

There are already a few updates:

Microsoft, so much to answer for. I wanted so badly to include more of Morrissey's solo lyrics, but not enough of his songs lend themselves to garnishing an article about Windows 8.1. Why does Windows bury its options away when Microsoft knows it makes things hard for people?

For a lark I decided to see if 8.1 knocked the machine's performance at all, so I loaded up HyperPi, and it actually took seven seconds less time to calculate Pi to two million digits than before. I'm guessing that this is down to shoddy testing on my part - I ran it once each time - but my subjective impression is that there is at the very least no obvious drop, no bloat, no juddery windows and constant fan noise.

Is there any point to 8.1 in that case? The (cough) "start button" is a LIE, there are updates to the apps that you will never use, and as before you have to install Classic Shell to get back the start menu, at which point you have something pretty good, faster than Windows 7 but not really worth the money. Unless you have a touchscreen PC, but I haven't got one. I haven't got one. I was tempted to buy one but a strange fear gripped me.

'cause it's not £25 any more. Back when I installed Windows 8.0, I upgraded from XP Professional - all the above malarky is actually built on an XP-Windows 8.0 upgrade - and the cost was £25. The kind of pricing model that Apple uses for OSX. Sadly it was a short-lived thing, and it's now £75 for an upgrade or £125 for the gooey kablooie full thing.

Put another way, if you have an old Windows 7 PC and you want to give it a new lease of life and you have £75 to spare, you can either upgrade to Windows 8.1 or you can buy a decent 120gb SSD for the same money, and install that instead. It'll be fussy depending on how your computer is set up, and you might have to spend a while shifting things off your boot partition to make space - assuming you have a boot partition - but unless and until Microsoft abruptly ceases support for Windows 7, I know which option I would prefer.

Postscript: Five Things Microsoft Could Do to Get Back its Mojo
In the words of The Pet Shop Boys' Neil Tennant, successful pop groups tend to go through an "imperial phase", during which they are at the height of their powers. It can only be recognised when it has passed, and it always passes.

The group puts out a much-anticipated, hugely popular album, preceded by a string of top singles, and then there's a cash-in film which has a limited cinema release. Slade had a film, Slade in Flame, the Spice Girls had Spice World, even the Pet Shop Boys had one (It Couldn't Happen Here, written about at great and fascinating length here for The Quietus). Usually the film is the high water mark, the peak of folly, and although the band might remain popular after that point it never recaptures its imperial phase.

The imperial phase becomes a pesky ghost, like Jacob Marley from A Christmas Carol. Or Krapp's younger self, captured forever on tape. You can't go back and it will never be the same again. The mighty fall. Skip back to the previous post, and the Kodak-Fuji film price war of the 1990s; they were masters of the world, but the world changed.

Microsoft had an imperial phase too. There was a time when Microsoft was the company that everybody loved to hate. Bill Gates was both the richest and most evil man in the world. Windows was the worst thing ever. But Microsoft was top bastard. The company saw off IBM and Lotus and Corel and everybody and it was master of the world. Nowadays Microsoft is still massively successful and wealthy, and only a fool would write the company off, but the imperial phase has passed.

So how could Microsoft make something of Windows 8, and perhaps regain some of its mojo? Some of the evil glamour it used to have. Let's imagine that I'm completely amoral. When I see a device with a screen on it, my first thought should be "does that run Microsoft software? If not, why not? If it runs something else, how can I change that?"

1. Pricing and Editions. Windows 8 upgrade £15. Boxed retail copy £24.95. Boxed Windows 8 Server £175.50. No excuse not to have it. Have two editions of Windows 8 - Windows 8, which duplicates the current Windows 8 Pro, and Windows 8 Server, with extra functionality available as downloadable content from the store. The ultimate goal is to move to a model where Windows 8 is a modular system fed with downloadable content, so that over time £15 becomes £50, and £24.95 becomes £75, and £175.50 becomes... well, no upper limit for the server edition, the client is paying for it. DLC has been a smashing success in the computer gaming world, it can be a smashing success in the operating system world as well. You want to print a bunch of RAW files you've downloaded from your camera just by right-clicking on them and selecting send to printer? That'll be £4.95 please, for the Camera RAW Media Suite.

2. Own the Platform. Get on the phone to the world's motherboard manufacturers. The long-term goal is to come up with a standard UEFI BIOS interface that has a kind of cut-down Windows 8 start screen, that boots instantly and has basic internet functionality. Some motherboard manufacturers already make something similar - they call it a pre-OS environment - why not slap a Windows 8 Start Screen interface onto it? In fact this is something that Windows 8's Start Screen interface should have been written for in the first place. People wouldn't mind if it booted instantly and was sold explicitly as a taster of the "real" desktop. Gigabyte, Asus etc could sell motherboards with Windows 8 Start! Ready stickers on the packaging. The long-term goal is to either control or at least become the driving force behind the UEFI BIOS and thus the hardware. Microsoft seems to have started something like this already, with Secure Boot, which is more like the old Microsoft that we knew and loved.

3. Linux: Sleeping with the Enemy. Too far gone to destroy. Instead try to associate the free software movement with Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and the like, so that businessmen and system builders are suspicious. One classic tactic used by guilty-as-hell politicians is to accuse their accusers of the exact same crime. Make it so that free software advocates come across as hysterical clowns who can't be trusted. Hippies who hate the world of business, who want all information to be free - including your company's private information. Imply very loosely that if the choice is between the inevitability of having your data tapped by the NSA, e.g. Jack Bauer, Jason Bourne, James Bond, upstanding professionals, versus a bunch of badly-dressed Judean Popular People's Liberation Front of Judea types who will sell your stuff to The Guardian, you'd be mad not to go with the former. Okay, Linux might be secure; but Linux people... can you trust them? NB This approach would go down well in the US and the UK, where the population are pro-US; in France it would be a bad idea. France is a big market but on the other hand it costs money to translate Windows into French, besides which what's the point? Spanish is the language of the future, not French.

4. Embrace and Extend Steam. Get on the phone to Gabe Newell of Valve. Pretend to be his friend. Be humble, tell him that the Windows games store is okay but Steam is even better, and you want to make the two of them compatible with each other. So that people can buy games from either the Windows games store or Steam and have the game appear in both stores. And you'll share revenue and perhaps let Steam use XBox hardware for the Steambox. Microsoft will need to know a bit more about how Steam works, of course, and will need a seat on the board whenever decisions are made. The ultimate goal here is to latch on to Steam, add things to Steam, and eventually either gain control of Steam or push it over a cliff - the classic embrace, extend, exterminate model. Mr Newell is no dummy and this is unlikely to work, but it gives some of Microsoft's people something to do, and perhaps they might learn something.

5. Windows 8. Last and least, make it so that Microsoft's salesmen can tout Windows 8 without having to qualify their statements or lie. Take a look at Ubuntu, and try to make it so that the general public associate all of Linux with Ubuntu, because Ubuntu's interface is just as problematic as Windows 8 (look, they're fighting amongst themselves). As for Windows 8 itself, rejig it a bit. At installation the user is given the choice of booting either to the Start Screen or the desktop, with prominent instructions given on how to change this. If the user decides to boot to the desktop, the Start Screen will become a bit like the Windows Media Centre or full-screen Steam, e.g. a portal that desktop users dive into. Give a team of half a dozen developers a week to copy Classic Shell, but strip out most of its functionality. Make a big song and dance about this in the media. Make it look as if you're "de-Stalinising" Microsoft now that Steve Ballmer has left. Make it so that installing Windows 8.2 disables an existing installation of Classic Shell.