Flipping through the Windows news this morning, I was tickled. I saw the very same Lenovo P16 Mobile Workstation sitting next to my desk come up first in MS PowerUser‘s rankings of the best i9 laptops for 2023. That’s right: in this story, the P16 Mobile Workstation gets accolades. And it IS a beast: i9-12950HX, 2 TB NVMe, 128 GB RAM and NVIDIA RTX A5550 GPU.

Here’s Why P16 Mobile Workstation Gets Accolades

It’s got a lot of power. The P16 can tackle tremendous workloads. The cooling is enough to keep it going even when taxed (excellent heatpipes & fans). It’s modestly expandable (my grouse: keyboard must come out to access second M.2 slot for NVMe). It’s especially laden with ports and connections (2 USB-A, 2 USB-C, HDMI, as shown in the lead-in graphic).

There hasn’t been anything I’ve thrown at this machine that it hasn’t chomped its way through faster than any of the other PCs around here. It really, truly is a beast of a machine.

What Might Stop Such a Stellar Purchase?

The list price on this monster is US$9,763.00 as configured. But with current coupons and discounts, it could be yours for a mere US$5,369.65, according to the Lenovo Store. I would have to get special permission from the Chancellor of the Exchequer (my wife, Dina) and be feeling quite flush in the bank account to go forward with such a purchase. But man: what a machine!

It’s got superlative USB4 and Thunderbolt 4support. The P16 delivers superfast IO, internally and through those ports. It’s got a great display, and works like a champ. Given its price tag, you’d have to expect all those things. Totally awesome, though: I completely agree with the MS PowerUser assessment, and understand how and why it showed up first therein.

Who needs a machine like this? It’s not a gaming box. It’s aimed squarely at people who need a portable workstation for developing code, creating media, or handling major, intensive workloads (lots of VMs, AI/ML tasks, 3D modeling, and so forth). Those folks will typically look at the price, understand what the PC can do for their productivity and throughput, and think “Good value for the money.” ‘Nuff said…

A little over two weeks ago, I found myself dealing with a suddenly non-functional Caldigit TS4 dock. This morning, I finally figured out what I’d been doing wrong. There’s one and only one high-wattage USB-C connector on the TS4. And there’s one and only one USB-C connector on most of my Lenovo laptops that will accept power and signals. The short explanation is: I hooked the wrong “gozouta” into the wrong “gozinta.” Net result: signals, but not enough power to make things work. Doh! Thus, this gets my recent CalDigit Hiatus finally illuminated.

Caldigit Hiatus Finally Illuminated, Literally

If you look at the lead-in graphic, you’ll see that the leftmost USB-C port on the back of the CalDigit is labeled “Computer.” It’s the port that delivers up to 98W of power to a PC, along with TB4/USB4 capability. I had somehow gotten my ports wrong, and used the middle one instead. Not paying sufficient attention? Guilty as charged. The red-boxed USB-C is the proper gozouta for the Caldigit hub.

Likewise on my Lenovo Yoga 7 14ITL5 (specs are PDF formatted), the left-hand USB-C port is also the only one that accepts TB4/USB4 and power together. Thus it’s the proper gozinta for the laptop in question.

Sigh. Put the right ports together and everything works just fine. Put the wrong ones together, and the PC doesn’t get enough power to run properly, nor for the TS4 dock connections to work as expected. Sigh again: it’s not hard to get the obvious wrong, but it can be challenging to recognize the obvious if one’s wits aren’t entirely engaged.

For This, I  Contacted Tech Support?

Yes, I admit it: I did that. And we all assumed I was using the right ports. Thus, they were as baffled as I was by what the lack of a power light really meant. Now I know: the light comes on when you use the high-wattage USB-C port to run power into a PC or laptop. And when you set the connections up as they should be, everything works likewise. Go ahead: laugh! Once I got over my astonishment at missing the obvious, that’s what I did too.

Last week, I ran an experiment Monday through Friday. Each day, I made sure to use winget upgrade and Software Update Monitor (aka SUMo) to check updates on 9 PCs here at Chez Tittel. I kept track of how many updates each tool found in tabular form. In each daily data cell, the first value counts updates winget found, and the second value counts updates SUMo found. It was interesting and unexpectedly time-consuming (averaged 75 minutes each day). It does give me a better sense of Windows application update rhythms, though.

Checking Windows Application Update Rhythms

The  9 machines in my sample included 1 4th-Gen CPU and 1 6th-gen Intel CPU (both perforce running Windows 10). All but one of the other machines run Windows 11, and all but one are 8th Gen Intel CPUs or higher (the hold-out runs a Ryzen 7 5800X). Each machine runs anywhere from 24 applications listed in SUMo to as many as 62. In the results table, an “at sign” (@) means that either Winget or SUMo recommended an update that I couldn’t install (winget) or find (SUMo). That latter one proved time consuming indeed.

Table of Results

A total of 131 updates were put forward by one or the other tool last week, for an average of about 14.5 for the week for each PC. The range of values went from a low of 8 to a high of 24.

What this tells me is that tracking updates could be a constant effort, were one minded to invest the time and energy. It also shows that the pace of updates is pretty brisk, and somewhat relentless. This makes it very clear why, except for emergency security patches, most organizations of any size prefer to limit updates to scheduled windows of fixed duration.

Otherwise, it’s the kind of rabbit hole into which admins could disappear, never to be seen again!