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There are many of us who jumped into much earlier release of Windows on Arm. I have the excellent Lenovo Thinkpad X13s laptop - picked up new in the UK for a paltry £400. This is an excellent laptop - it has great screen, superb keyboard, and very lightweight design (1kg in weight). It also has 5G which is brilliant.
So what's the deal with ARM and Windows. Not much to worry about - but there are some gotchas. All the mainstream stuff works just fine (I am a business user, I don't play games). You have to make some minor compromises:
- VPN - there is only one client I could get to work - this requires you use OpenVPN formats and these are available from most VPN vendors (I have 2 and both had these). The UI is ugly, but it works. Alternatively you can run many VPN as plugins to your browser - these work and are more pretty.
- G Drive - you have to purchase a 3rd party app to get this to work. I chose Insync - and honestly it works better than G Drive does! Plus it works on more than Google.
Really old software (I use a task bar launcher) - it failed. No solution until I found 'Superlauncher' app which gives me a good work around solution.
Everything else just works, all my browsers and Office 365 are native ARM, so not much to worry about. All of my other weird software works, and honestly I can't tell the difference.
Battery life - a solid 7-8 hours with brightness at 75-80% running mobile 5G connection and bluetooth mouse. Most important statistic is 5.1w of power consumption on Windows 11 after the boot process and Windows scans are complete. This means 'all day battery' is practical. The battery is 49.5 Wh so not huge.
I want to stress something - this machine is fanless. It has no 'power save mode'. Performance on battery is the same as off battery. So I benchmarked this versus my ASUS Zenbook with Intel 1340P. This little laptop is quicker on battery mode than if I use the Zenbook on battery. The Zenbook can achieve similar run times, but is basically crippled to do so. The Lenovo just operates the same way as powered up.
I found a little trick. I lifted the back of the laptop 0.75cm with added black rubber feet. This allows air under the laptop and makes hardly any difference to machine use. This trick has the machine running cold vs slightly warm if the thing is flat on the table. Do this for a better performing machine - costs a couple of £...
Linux - totally different story to Windows. Very hard to find a distro that works, latest non official build for X13S from an Ubuntu software engineer works but with some issues. You have to work hard to solve the issues and even then you have this left: no working camera, finger print reader only works on 23.04 or lower, camera does not work, audio is too quiet on speakers, and the architecture is not fully optimised. However, I can run Ubuntu 24.04 with KDE frontend (bit of a ball ache to install to be honest) and it looks great. Gotcha with the 5G is you have to send some initiation codes (no one tells you this...) but it does eventually work. With 24.04 Linux matches Windows 11 with 5.3w of power consumption. Browsers work a bit faster, but you have less choice: Brave / Chromium / Vivaldi or Firefox. Firefox runs like a dog. Brave / Chromium have best Speedometer scores just peaking at around 10 (on battery). Some runs I have 11 out of Chromium. I am honestly impressed with my 'nearly' build of Linux - but it took many more hours than Windows 11 to set up and the benefits are marginal over Windows.
So, is Windows on Arm 'new'? No. Is Windows on Arm viable? Yes. Are these devices good on battery - well yes, they use much less power than a X86 laptop (typically 9-10w of power use in my experience). So with my X13s it is realistic to run a whole day with mixed use and good screen brightness. I will for sure get a Snapdragon Elite (or Plus), but I will wait to see which one has optimised their hardware first. Windows 11 ARM is good, but there are a few niggles (explained above). If I was a gamer - not on my buy list... If I want a good business laptop with great battery life, this is the future for Windows just like it was for Apple. ARM fundamentally uses less power than X86 which is a very old architecture that should have been retired 5 years ago. So they squeeze more power from a poor CPU design due to miniaturisation, but not great innovation. ARM is RISC, X86 is CISC computing. This really matters, and industry has known this for decades in bigger computer technology.
I jumped into ARM as an experiment, and this is now my favourite machine (I have a 12th Gen Lenovo and a 13th Gen Asus). I go out with the X13S - it is the best road machine. I use the other 2 on power as desktop machines (and both are better and faster than the X13s in that mode). Best screen = ASUS Zenbook OLED, but my Lenovo 12th Gen is an OLED Thinkbook, it is good too (but no touch / protective glass cover). My X13S has a bright matt screen - lower res (1920x1200) - but it is great for 'out and about' use with less reflections and better in sun performance.
I wrote this on Brave, Ubuntu Linux ARM64, on the X13s. My battery is 75% charged and I have estimated 7hrs remaining, brightness is at 67%, running Wifi and Bluetooth. Mobile is turned off.
So what's the deal with ARM and Windows. Not much to worry about - but there are some gotchas. All the mainstream stuff works just fine (I am a business user, I don't play games). You have to make some minor compromises:
- VPN - there is only one client I could get to work - this requires you use OpenVPN formats and these are available from most VPN vendors (I have 2 and both had these). The UI is ugly, but it works. Alternatively you can run many VPN as plugins to your browser - these work and are more pretty.
- G Drive - you have to purchase a 3rd party app to get this to work. I chose Insync - and honestly it works better than G Drive does! Plus it works on more than Google.
Really old software (I use a task bar launcher) - it failed. No solution until I found 'Superlauncher' app which gives me a good work around solution.
Everything else just works, all my browsers and Office 365 are native ARM, so not much to worry about. All of my other weird software works, and honestly I can't tell the difference.
Battery life - a solid 7-8 hours with brightness at 75-80% running mobile 5G connection and bluetooth mouse. Most important statistic is 5.1w of power consumption on Windows 11 after the boot process and Windows scans are complete. This means 'all day battery' is practical. The battery is 49.5 Wh so not huge.
I want to stress something - this machine is fanless. It has no 'power save mode'. Performance on battery is the same as off battery. So I benchmarked this versus my ASUS Zenbook with Intel 1340P. This little laptop is quicker on battery mode than if I use the Zenbook on battery. The Zenbook can achieve similar run times, but is basically crippled to do so. The Lenovo just operates the same way as powered up.
I found a little trick. I lifted the back of the laptop 0.75cm with added black rubber feet. This allows air under the laptop and makes hardly any difference to machine use. This trick has the machine running cold vs slightly warm if the thing is flat on the table. Do this for a better performing machine - costs a couple of £...
Linux - totally different story to Windows. Very hard to find a distro that works, latest non official build for X13S from an Ubuntu software engineer works but with some issues. You have to work hard to solve the issues and even then you have this left: no working camera, finger print reader only works on 23.04 or lower, camera does not work, audio is too quiet on speakers, and the architecture is not fully optimised. However, I can run Ubuntu 24.04 with KDE frontend (bit of a ball ache to install to be honest) and it looks great. Gotcha with the 5G is you have to send some initiation codes (no one tells you this...) but it does eventually work. With 24.04 Linux matches Windows 11 with 5.3w of power consumption. Browsers work a bit faster, but you have less choice: Brave / Chromium / Vivaldi or Firefox. Firefox runs like a dog. Brave / Chromium have best Speedometer scores just peaking at around 10 (on battery). Some runs I have 11 out of Chromium. I am honestly impressed with my 'nearly' build of Linux - but it took many more hours than Windows 11 to set up and the benefits are marginal over Windows.
So, is Windows on Arm 'new'? No. Is Windows on Arm viable? Yes. Are these devices good on battery - well yes, they use much less power than a X86 laptop (typically 9-10w of power use in my experience). So with my X13s it is realistic to run a whole day with mixed use and good screen brightness. I will for sure get a Snapdragon Elite (or Plus), but I will wait to see which one has optimised their hardware first. Windows 11 ARM is good, but there are a few niggles (explained above). If I was a gamer - not on my buy list... If I want a good business laptop with great battery life, this is the future for Windows just like it was for Apple. ARM fundamentally uses less power than X86 which is a very old architecture that should have been retired 5 years ago. So they squeeze more power from a poor CPU design due to miniaturisation, but not great innovation. ARM is RISC, X86 is CISC computing. This really matters, and industry has known this for decades in bigger computer technology.
I jumped into ARM as an experiment, and this is now my favourite machine (I have a 12th Gen Lenovo and a 13th Gen Asus). I go out with the X13S - it is the best road machine. I use the other 2 on power as desktop machines (and both are better and faster than the X13s in that mode). Best screen = ASUS Zenbook OLED, but my Lenovo 12th Gen is an OLED Thinkbook, it is good too (but no touch / protective glass cover). My X13S has a bright matt screen - lower res (1920x1200) - but it is great for 'out and about' use with less reflections and better in sun performance.
I wrote this on Brave, Ubuntu Linux ARM64, on the X13s. My battery is 75% charged and I have estimated 7hrs remaining, brightness is at 67%, running Wifi and Bluetooth. Mobile is turned off.
