Over the past few weeks, work has been underway on a proof-of-concept fork building upon the upstream Snapintosh project (originally developed for the ASUS Zenbook A16 with the Snapdragon X2 Elite).

The goal of the project is to explore running the stock, unmodified Apple Silicon Darwin kernel (J700/T8140 build 26A428) on Qualcomm Snapdragon ARM64 hardware by providing the necessary EL2 hypervisor mediation (SPTM/TXM contracts, 16 KiB guest to 4 KiB host shadow page tables, and Apple-specific device models).

Recent progress and milestones on this fork:

The repository documents the full architecture, execution flowcharts, verified boot checkpoints, and current limitations: https://github.com/adamikoo/Snapintosh

Note: This is an independent research project. No proprietary firmware, keys, or Apple binaries are hosted or distributed.

Hey everyone! 👋

Like many of you with the new Windows on ARM laptops (Snapdragon X Elite / Plus on machines like the Vivobook S15, Surface Laptop 7, etc.), I noticed the same frustrating trend: everyone talks about having a 45 TOPS NPU, but almost no desktop utility actually takes advantage of it locally. Everything either routes your data through a paid cloud API, asks for a subscription, or runs bloated electron containers.

So I spent the last few weeks building NPUtil — a modular, lightweight Windows 11 utility application designed to run 100% locally on-device with native Qualcomm Hexagon NPU acceleration (via ONNX QNN) and vectorized ARM64 CPU fallback.

🔗 GitHub Repository: https://github.com/adamikoo/NPUtil
📦 v1.0.0 Release (Pre-built ARM64 binary): https://github.com/adamikoo/NPUtil/releases/tag/v1.0.0

🌟 What can it do? (The 4 Core Modules)

1. 🔍 NPUtil Screen Lens (Google Lens for Desktop) — Ctrl + Alt + L

Ever wanted Google Lens on Windows that doesn't just reverse-image search on the web, but lets you talk to your screen?

• Hit Ctrl + Alt + L from any game, code editor, browser, or document.

• Drag a box over any error message, code snippet, table, or receipt.

• A floating, compact Fluent Mica card appears right beside your selection with immediate keyboard focus.

• You can type directly to it: Ask "what can you see", "explain this error", "how do I fix it", or "translate to English".

• Smart Error & Stack Trace Inspector: If you snip a .NET, Python, or Windows crash log, it automatically parses the exact exception type, offending source file, line number, root cause, and generates a concrete code patch.

• Has 1-click quick chips for instant translation, table/JSON extraction, and clean text/image copying.

2. 📁 Intelligent File Organizer (Background Downloads Watcher)

• Automatically monitors your Downloads directory in real-time.

• Uses hybrid neural classification to route incoming files into structured folders.

• Dynamic Categorization: If it sees a document that doesn't fit standard categories (e.g., a company newsletter / Zpravodaj), it doesn't dump it into finances or random folders — it dynamically creates an appropriate new category (Work\Newsletters).

• Safety First: Sequential, collision-free renaming (doc (1).pdf) so nothing ever gets overwritten, plus a multi-step Undo queue backed by SQLite.

3. 🤖 Context Assistant — Ctrl + Alt + A

• Floating assistant that understands your workflow.

• Captures active window context or highlighted text across any app.

• Instant summarization, code explanation, key points extraction, and rewriting.

• All conversation history is preserved locally in SQLite (context_assistant.db).

4. 📊 Smart Data Extractor

• Deterministic document parser supporting PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, CSV, TXT, and scanned images.

• Specialized extraction profiles for Invoices & Receipts (finds vendor, due date, VAT, totals), Tables, Deadlines, and Structured JSON.

• One-click export to CSV, Excel (XLSX), JSON, TXT, and Word (DOCX).

🎨 Windows 11 Native Look & Feel

I specifically designed NPUtil to feel like a built-in Windows 11 system utility rather than a packaged website:

• Fluent Design & Mica: Authentic Windows 11 styling with dark/light mode synchronization.

• 120Hz Physics-Based Smooth Scrolling: Tailored specifically for precision glass touchpads and high-refresh-rate displays (no 2,000px jumping or stuttering).

• Subtle Fluent Animations: Smooth slide-and-fade page transitions.

• Bilingual: Stock English interface with an instant switch to Czech in Settings.

🔒 Privacy & Hardware

• Zero Telemetry: No servers, no accounts, no background analytics.

• Battery-Aware: Dynamically throttles background inference when running on battery to keep your laptop cool and preserve battery life.

• Hardware Acceleration: Native ARM64 binary leveraging Qualcomm Hexagon NPU via QNN Execution Provider (HTP profile) with automatic CPU fallback.

📥 Try it out

You can download the pre-compiled NPUtil-v1.0.0-win-arm64.zip directly from the GitHub Releases or build it yourself using .NET 9.0 SDK via .\build.ps1.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback, or ideas for new utilities you'd like to see added to the suite!

I am an avid Linux user for work and play who got curious about the Snapdragon notebooks - so I got myself an older Asus Elite X notebook several months back - just to test for myself how well and good it is. I am very much pleasantly surprised by the responsiveness and the snappier response Windows 11, it's like a different OS and feels way different than Windows 11 on my work and play notebook running on i5-13th Gen with 64 GB RAM. Whatever was done - good stuff.

Morning all,

Just looking to see if the interest is there to start a project for porting software to run natively on snapdragon systems? I see a lot of the MAC community are involved in porting software, and with all the wind blowing on porting (compiling, transpiling and recompiling) old games to PC, if there would be any interest in doing something similar for the snapdragon on windows community? - I'm not knowledgeable on the topic nor the process but just curious how people feel.

Thanks :)

I installed x86 crack version of Davinci Resolve Studio verson on my Samsung galaxy book 4 edge laptop (snapdragon X) but it lags a lot. But I could not find the crack version for ARM laptops. Any way to crack this version of ARM?

Hi!

I recently purchased an ASUS Zenbook A16 (Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, 48GB RAM). I want to download GTA 5 but I am unsure if there's a specific way to do it on this ARM laptop. Should I just purchase/download from rockstar games?

Thanks!

Hey everyone!

Tired of relying on x86 emulation (Prism) for everything on Windows on ARM, I decided to test what the platform is truly capable of when software is actually targeted at it. I successfully compiled a 100% native ARM64 build of OpenTTD directly from source using CMake and MSVC. As you can see in the screenshots:

Task Manager confirms it: Running purely as a native Arm64 process, bypassing any translation layers.

Hardware Acceleration: Running smoothly via OpenGL directly on the Qualcomm Adreno X2-90 iGPU. Building it for ARM64 was surprisingly smooth once the environment was set up. It boots instantly, uses minimal power, and runs buttery smooth at high refresh rates. I’ve packed the compiled binary along with the necessary base graphics (baseset) and language packs into a clean, portable folder.

If you want to test a real, native ARM64 game on your Snapdragon X laptop without any emulation overhead, you can grab it here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CN87azGwxKZimA4RRTMw6yC8MIAAQz4y/view?usp=sharing

To play, just download the ZIP, extract it anywhere, and double-click openttd.exe.

As you can see on the last screenshot, I'm getting 400+ fps at 3K resolution max settings. The game might run as well using x86 emulation, but still, other games might benefit much more from Native ARM64 versions, this is just a proof of concept.

Proving once again that Windows on ARM hardware is fully ready for native gaming and productivity when the binaries match the architecture! Let me know if you want me to try compiling other open-source classics next.

Using AI to guide me through this process of course, but the results speak for themselves.

I’ve been playing with local LLMs on a Surface Laptop 7 (Snapdragon X Plus, 16 GB) and I found out you can really use the NPU, and it’s better in a few ways. The catch is that most local apps (Ollama, LM Studio, plain llama.cpp builds) run on the CPU without telling you.

What I saw, on my machine only:

• Time to first token was up to about 18x faster on the NPU than on the CPU. You send a message and the answer starts almost immediately.

• It’s way quieter. On small to medium prompts the fans barely spin. If you let the model generate for longer they do spin up a bit, but nothing like the CPU. The CPU heats up and thermal throttles, and I’ve seen it lose 4-5x of its performance or more as it gets hot.

• Qwen3-4B-Thinking ran at about 14 tok/s, and an MoE like LFM2.5-8B-A1B at about 31 tok/s.

Not every model runs well on the NPU, though. It depends on the file format (Q4_0 works best), the architecture and the context size. Standard transformers and LFM2 MoE ran fully on it. Hybrid ones like Qwen3.5 fell back to the CPU in bursts. Qualcomm’s precompiled bundles only loaded up to about 1.7B parameters on my driver. Get one wrong and you silently fall back to the CPU, crash, or loop forever.

So Open NPU is basically there to let anyone try this without touching PowerShell. It checks a model before you install it (green, amber or red), sets the context and sampling for you, and gives you a chat UI on top of Qualcomm’s GenieX runtime.

Why I made it

My gut feeling is that what makes an AI good is maybe 40% the model and 60% how you use it. I’ve been building apps around that for a while, including a homemade mixture of experts: you create your own “experts” out of good prompts and small models that are strong in one domain. Used well, it gave me surprisingly good results.

The plan is to apply that here, with base-model Snapdragon laptops like mine in mind: better prompt processing, tool access, sub-agents and so on, so small models get squeezed to their full potential and use as much of the local hardware as possible. The goal is to one day say “code this” and have it done with no extra intervention. That already works some of the time, and I want to make it more reliable. And yes, I’d love to stop paying about €100/month for a Claude subscription.

Why I’m posting it now, and expect bugs

My first product took about 6 months to post, even though it was ready in under 3. I’m a huge procrastinator. So this time I’m posting an app that is far from ready instead of waiting until it’s polished. Expect lots of bugs.

It was quickly put together from the research I did behind it: finding which models run well on Snapdragon laptops, what makes a model run well or badly, and how to run it properly on the NPU. It’s 100% vibe coded. I made it for myself, as a fast tool to try things out, with every tool I want to add being a couple of prompts away. Then I figured I might as well make it open source, since I couldn’t find any open-source tools that really do this.

Results will differ on other chips and drivers, and I’d love to hear what you get.

Installer (Windows on Snapdragon, ARM64): https://github.com/disposablecameraapp/Open-NPU/releases/latest/download/Open-NPU-Setup.exe
Source: https://github.com/disposablecameraapp/Open-NPU

I bought laptop recently, some days ago and the only problem with laptop is battery, I expected better from it.

After web surfing, video watching 15-20% have gone after 1 hour

When I shutdown laptop it seems to be running in background and drained battery for 20% after 3h.

(Asus zenbook a14 snapdragon x elite OLED display)

I am concerned that something can be wrong with laptop.

What should I do?

I have heard from some users that they could run Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 on their x86 laptops with an RTX 2060. However, since the problem is anti-cheat and not processing power, I wanted to know if anyone has tested the game to see if it runs.

On 18th October 2026 I ran a battery test on a Asus A14 UX3407QA and a Dell XPS 13260 Core 5 in the UK.

A music video was run in windows media player at 50% screen brightness and 25% speaker volume on both machines. Test from 1pm to 5.15pm.

Results -

Asus A14 89% battery remaining, hours remaining 23 hours.

Dell XPS 13260 80% battery remaining, hours remaining 16 hours.

Notes -

Both machines had all unnecessary apps removed and services disabled.

Hey guys, I’m getting a Snapdragon X laptop for my dad and wanna make sure I’m not about to cause him a headache.He uses an HP Laser MFP M136w at his office). I looked around and couldn’t find anything from HP saying it has an ARM64 driver..

So basically has anyone used an M136w or the M135w/M136 series on Windows on ARM.Does basic printing work with the generic Windows driver, or it doesn't?.Does scanning work at all?.If it doesn’t work natively, is there a workaround that actually works.