Today’s TIL: some people have PC trouble that lasts for years, a sort of daily grind of not-quite-rightness with their PC. And some other people don’t. I’m in the latter category, so this post is an attempt to record what my setup is and general principles of “PC hygiene”.
Hardware
There is always a temptation to spend a lot of money on a dream laptop. But that power would sit idle most of the time if I did. I’m not training AI models every day of the week, and anyway, when I need that sort of horsepower I can fire up what I need in the cloud for exactly as long as I need it. My gaming is done on a PlayStation, so I’m free and clear of the main reasons to drop $$$. Result: my PC budget is lean, and I like it that way.
My 2024 choice is a refurbished Dell Latitude 7490, which cost me $400 and is a joy to use: it’s very light, it’s fast, and Windows runs very smoothly. Perhaps related, older machines that were used for corporate life are stable: probably because I am not testing out some bleeding-edge hardware and exercising new bugs. All the drivers on my PC have already been through several rounds of updates by the time I get the hardware.
It also helps that the machine is from a high-volume supplier to corporations. Microsoft and Dell share the same corporate customer base. A base that doesn’t like surprises. This isn’t
some consumer-grade gamble from Costco. My 2024 buy is actually a replacement for the same
model that I had as my work PC for five years prior: when I surrendered that machine to the
IT people, I immediately went and bought another for personal use. Current specs:
16GB RAM, Intel i7 CPU, 500GB of storage, and real ports: Ethernet, audio, USB, Thunderbolt,
and full-size HDMI.
OS
Surprise, Windows. Windows 11 Pro to be exact. Pro is preferable over Home because the former includes whole-disk encryption via BitLocker. (If you are following along: just make sure that you know what your recovery key is.) Plus, Pro includes better virtualization support, which is something that makes me feel like I could virtualize something if I needed it (although to be honest with myself, there have been better solutions to that problem for a while now).
I’m firmly in the Windows camp for one reason only: 365 native apps like Word and Excel. Sure, there are web versions, but try opening a long document or a complex spreadsheet. Native 365 is better.
Hygiene
There are at least seven (seven!) ways to install software on your Windows PC:
- Use the app installer from the supplier’s website. For example, go to adobe.com and download Acrobat.
- Install the app from the Windows Store.
- Sideload the app using PowerShell or DISM.
- Use the command line
wingettool. - Download the app in portable format, e.g. from Portable Apps and run it from a folder of your choosing, such as a USB stick.
- Use scripted installs from the app supplier, such as MSI packages with various command switches.
- Use meta-installers that wrap the app in a package manager.
The classic complaint with the Windows experience is that it degrades over time. It’s not very surprising, when you consider all the ways that cruft can accumulate. Cruft is the #1 reason why PCs degrade over time. You want PC hygiene? You need to solve for this.
- Recommendation: remove every last bit of optional software that Microsoft throws at you, before you do anything with your PC.
I get rid of the Candy Crush, Solitaire, Photos, Clock, XBox and all the other fluff. They’re basically teaser apps that try to drive users to the Microsoft app store anyway, and I don’t need that stuff. All of it gets removed via the Add/Remove programs dialog.
- Recommendation: be ruthless about what you choose to install. The best software is no software. The best package is the lightest, least invasive one that completes the task you wanted.
For example: WhatsApp and Discord bug me all the time to use their app instead of the web versions. But that’s more stuff on the disk, more cruft in the Registry, and just more fluff all over for very marginal gains. Nope, I’ll stick with the web versions, thankyouverymuch. The native app has to be significantly better to justify living on the disk (see, 365, above).
- Recommendation: use a meta-installer for anything that you install, without exceptions.
Think of a meta-installer as a tool that understands all the apps out there and their quirky ways of being installed. It then hides all that, and presents a single style of adding, maintaining, and removing apps. It is, to put it mildly, a huge improvement.
I like Chocolatey, which allows me to type things like
choco install dropbox# install Dropbox
or
choco upgrade all# upgrade all apps
Apps
For 2024:
- For productivity: Office 365. Sorry web, sorry Google Docs, sorry LibreOffice, but you will pry 365 out of my cold, dead, hands. There is simply nothing like real Excel.
- For video calls: Zoom. Teams in corporate-land is (ignore the haters) very, very powerful, and only getting more so as Microsoft throw more at it. Teams for home users is a pale shadow of that beast and doesn’t hold a candle to Zoom.
- For notes: Notepad++. Text editing, note taking, and generally acting as a Swiss Army knife tool when I need to manipulate some data. Note-taking apps are a deeply personal decision but after years of trying all kinds I’ve concluded that simpler is better. The web ones tend to degrade over time (enshittification, etc.) Moreover, the really important things about a note app are that it runs offline, it starts and runs so quickly that it doesn’t get in the way of your thoughts, and that it doesn’t lose your notes. So buh-bye to OneNote, EverNote, and so on.
- For development: WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux). Remember I said there were better solutions than virtualization? Well, this is one. Gives me a full Linux environment
that lets me do
git,vi, and anything else I can think of. (OK, there is virtualization going on under the covers, but with no effort on my part). - PDF reader: SumatraPDF. Adobe Acrobat is the de facto standard for PDFs, but that program tries and fails to do too much: I want to read PDFs, not be told that half the buttons on the screen won’t work unless I upgrade to Adobe Cloud. SumatraPDF is faster to start up, faster at rendering long documents, and gives me exactly zero problems.
- For backups: OneDrive and Dropbox. As a file sharing service, OneDrive for consumers is…meh. As a seamless backup service, it’s very good. My PC could blow up tomorrow, I could have a replacement in three days, and my Documents folder would hook up to OneDrive and I’d be back in business. The nit is that cloud services have a habit of evaporating overnight. So, Dropbox is my archival service, just in case.
- Security, Anti-virus etc: Microsoft’s own suite is perfectly adequate for your PC. Ignore the desperate calls and back-handed attempts by some vendors to get you to install their stuff. Trust me, once you sign up for a 30-day trial of anything, that cruft is never leaving your PC. Avoid.
- Web browser: Edge with uBlock Origin and BitWarden. Edge does some skeevy things, like continually trying to populate my home page with fake news stories of the “this one weird trick” and “you’ll never believe what…” kind. But, it comes with Windows, supports plugins as well as Chrome, and runs very well on battery power when I’m unplugged. So, in keeping with the less-apps-installed-is-better rule, it gets a place. uBlock Origin is absolutely mandatory for all web browsers: Firefox, Chrome, Edge, whatever. The modern web is a cesspool of ads, and it’s a much calmer and faster experience to browse the web when you’re not losing whole chunks of your screen and your attention to them.
Postscript
Closely related to the concept of PC hygiene is the idea of maximizing the attention you give to productive parts of the computing experience and ruthlessly pruning the rest. There was a time, for example, when I had three screens, each showing different apps. I had the fancy keyboard and the themed desktop and so on. It did not make me significantly more productive. I could argue that having attention stretched across so much of my visual field reduced it.
The most important currency you have to be productive at work is your attention. Before Slack, Discord, Teams, and the rest, you only had to turn off email in order to have periods of complete focus. If you lose that focus, having a six-screen battlestation with a light up keyboard and your favorite vi keybindings won’t help you.
Try this experiment: go cold turkey for a week. One laptop, no external screen, no peripherals except what you need for ergonomic safety. Every app full screen. All notifications silenced. Use Outlook/Teams etc. in offline mode, so that you control when you turn on the firehose of attention-stealing apps. I’m very confident that it will change how your brain works using a PC for the better.
So there you have it. Pick decent but cheap hardware, run as little a possible on it, keep track of what you install, and protect your attention.
Got a suggestion for 2025’s stack? Let me know.