Ask Paul: July 12 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Another busy week, another terrific collection of reader questions to kick off the weekend a bit early.
Windows 11 on Arm vs. audio hardware
Olgeezer asks:

I have been looking for a Windows solution which runs silently and cool, and the new Snapdragon may hold the key.  Not so sure about any forthcoming Intel chip but nothing in life is perfect and being in my 70's I now haven't got a youthful zeal interest in starting again with a MacBook.

We're in a weird moment in time.

Yes, the Snapdragon X-based PCs I've tested all run silently so much of the time I feel like I could call them "statistically silent," if that makes any sense. I would almost have to purposefully invoke some processor-crushing workload to hear them. I honestly can't recall the last time I did.

But these PCs also run Windows 11 on Arm, which brings some important caveats, especially for those like yourself who have very specific hardware (and/or app) requirements. And this is where things get complicated…

My main objective is to have a DAW running nearby when recording audiobook type media, and I want to be REALLY sure that running Windows (11-12etc) on the new Snapdragons will NOT have high latency when connecting to Focusrite (or other) typical equipment.

Focusrite doesn't currently support Windows 11 on Arm, so this is a non-starter. I mentioned this in Snapdragon X Copilot+ PC: Hardware Compatibility Update, and this is my one major hardware incompatibility with the platform. I've not yet investigated how I might fix this for myself, but I can't use a Snapdragon X-based laptop with the Focusrite and HEIL microphone in my home office, which means I can't use it to record podcasts (or whatever else) there.

This came up in when I was in New York this past week: I was there for an HP event on Thursday, and my wife and I were planning to come the night before so we could hang out with Mary Jo. But Wednesdays are complicated because of Windows Weekly. Mary Jo recommended that we come in the morning so I could just record it from her apartment, and I could use her setup if I wanted. This made tons of sense, but she has the same Focusrite/HEIL equipment I have, and that means I couldn't use my Surface Laptop or another Snapdragon X-based PC. I considered a few options, but since we were driving, I just brought a second (x64) laptop, an HP Dragonfly Pro, and used that.

This is a long way of saying that I can't speak to the latency issues, if any, when using a Focusrite with Arm hardware because they don't yet work together. I have little doubt that this platform is good enough to handle such a thing perfectly. But without native drivers, there's no way to know. And I don't have any other USB audio interfaces I can test. (I've used an Audio-Technica ATR2500x-USB cardioid condenser microphone connected directly to a Snapdragon X-based laptop and that works fine.)

Finally, I'm writing here because your Windows Weekly input is exce...