GADGED GURU
T3’s tremendous tech tinkerer solves more of your pesky probs
Give it a little push… and let the chips fall where they may
ILLUSTRATIONS: STEPHEN KELLY
Q
I’m tired of x86. Is Windows-on-ARM worth trying?
JOWAIN JONES, BARRY
A Not yet. Oh, dear reader, not yet. Guru has recently tested a Samsung Galaxy Book Go, which pushes Windows 11 onto the most unwilling frame of the Snapdragon 888 processor, and there just isn’t enough power there for your £350. While there’s a translation layer that will do its darndest to get every app running, it’s dog slow. Also, and this has nothing to do with Windows-on-ARM, but the screen on the Galaxy Book Go is just about the worst panel GaGu has ever used – and he’s old enough to have worked with the original colour LCD displays on laptops.
This is part of the problem Windows, and the PC market in general, will always face. There’s literally no opportunity for an all-hands-on-deck Apple pivot, the most recent of which allowed the company to completely revise its platform for the fourth time and utterly eclipse the performance of x86 by using ARM instead. The PC grows, it improves, but it is based on fundamentally the same architecture as it was in the late ’70s. Changing the formula – see Windows RT, which somehow managed to make Windows 8 even worse – has not yet worked.