Ask Paul: December 20 (Premium)

Happy Friday and Happy Holidays! But let's not barrel into the Christmas break just yet. We have a great set of reader questions to get through first.
⛵Yacht it up, furball
spacecamel asks:

HBO has been doing a series of music documentaries. The latest one was on Yacht Rock. Have you seen any of these? Any that you liked?

I wasn't aware of this--I don't subscribe to Max at the moment--but this is one of those interesting coincidence things. In this case, several back-to-back coincidences.

I watch a lot of music videos--and videos about music--on YouTube. And Yacht Rock has come up several times recently for whatever reason. I recently watched a couple of videos about Yacht Rock (including this one), and one of the channels I follow, The Hindley Street Country Club, has a growing series of Yacht Rock cover song compilations. (They're incredibly talented.)

Even weirder, my favorite podcast, The Rewatchables--as mentioned in my year-end wrap-up--finally did an episode this past month about one of my favorite 80s movies, Running Scared. And that movie is notable, in part, for its use of a Michael McDonald (of Doobie Brothers fame) song, Sweet Freedom, which has always been a favorite of mine. In the early days of digital music, it was impossible to find, and I recall making that effort many times.

But in yet another coincidence, Stephanie and I watched Running Scared over Thanksgiving with our daughter, and that was before I knew that podcast episode existed.

And though I already knew this, because I'm a Van Halen fan, YouTube keeps recommending a video about how Michael McDonald helped cowrite their song I'll Wait but wasn't originally given songwriting credit. (Off-topic, that video is one of many Sunset Sounds is part of now, and they're always quite good.)

In looking all this up, I also saw the trailer for the Music Box: Yacht Rock episode. I will definitely watch it at some point. Thanks :)
💪I have the power
CharlesVincent2 asks:

Surface 7 snapdragon 15” laptop battery life… getting poor battery life. Feel i recall you maybe mentioning a power setting in windows that you found made a unusual difference? Any power settings advice?

No. And this surprises me greatly: My Surface Laptop gets the best battery life of any Windows PC I currently have, and it's not even close. (Only the MacBook Air is better.) But I didn't change any settings. Looking at the Power mode, it's just set to "Recommended." I'm curious what you're doing that could be causing that. I've never heard of anyone with a Snapdragon X-based PC having battery life issues.

I think what you're recalling is what I had to do with the first Lunar Lake-based laptop I got, which was almost unusable in its default "Balanced" power mode. The advice there was to change that to "Best Performance," which killed the battery life but made the PC work normally. Not so much for you, but for anyone out there wondering about Lunar Lake, the ThinkPad X1 C...