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Microsoft is rolling out a new Windows 11 23H2 Release Preview build for Windows Insiders. KB5058502 with build number 22631.5409 is now available with the ability to remap the Copilot key and the Win + C shortcut. There is also Push to Talk to Copilot, a new FAQ section in the Settings, and other changes. Here is the changelog: You can find the official announcement here. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of April): 1,811 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

Microsoft has released the final Beta Build for Windows 11 version 23H2. Build 22635.5305 (KB5055636) is out, and it is the last one before Microsoft moves all Beta Channel insiders to version 24H2. Today's release contains the new profanity filter for voice typing (also available in the latest Dev and Beta builds), some fixes for File Explorer, input, Windows Spotlight, and more. Here is what is new: Fixes that are rolling out gradually include the following: And here is one known issue: You can find the official announcement here. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of March): 1,357 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

Microsoft has released a new Release Preview build for those Windows 11 Insiders still stuck on 23H2. The new build, 22631.5261 under KB5055629, fixes touch gestures related to the Start menu, and fixes arrow key direction for Arabic and Hebrew display languages after pressing the Windows key + T. The full changelog is given below: You can view the official blog post here on Microsoft's website. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of March): 1,357 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

Microsoft is kicking off a new week by releasing a fresh build for Windows 11 version 23H2 insiders in the Beta Channel. Build 22635.5235 (KB5055615) is a rather small release that only contains general improvements, small visibility improvements of keyboard focus elements in File Explorer, and a fix for the Settings app hanging in the Accounts section. Here is the changelog: Known issues include the following: You can find the announcement post here. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of March): 1,357 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

Microsoft is rolling out a new Windows 11 Beta build for Windows 11 version 23H2 insiders. Today's release packs more File Explorer improvements, some fixes for the taskbar, lock screen, Windows Sandbox bugs, and more. Here is the list of known bugs: You can check out the announcement post here. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of February): 874 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

In addition to a new Dev and Beta build for Windows 11 version 24H2 insiders, Microsoft is rolling out build 22635.5090 (KB5053649) to Windows 11 version 23H2 insiders in the Beta Channel. This one contains some general improvements, fixes for the Start menu and Windows Update, and more. Here is the changelog: Here is what was fixed: And here is the list of known issues: You can find the official announcement here. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of February): 874 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

Microsoft, today, has released the newest build to Windows 11 23H2 Beta channel Insiders. The new build, 22635.5025, under KB5053661, brings a couple of new interesting features to the Start menu and File Explorer. First the Recommended files option is now available to all Insiders, second, Microsoft has a new feature in the Start menu that will snap recommended apps together when the OS feel that they may be snapped together by the user. Aside from these, a File Explorer performance issue has been fixed. The full changelog is given below: You can find the official blog post here on Microsoft's website. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of February): 874 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

Microsoft, today, has released the newest build to Windows 11 23H2 Beta channel Insiders. The new build, 22635.5015, under KB5052089, fixes several bugs including in the File Explorer, the Start Menu, and OneDrive, among other places. The full changelog is given below: You can view the official blog post here on Microsoft's website. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

Microsoft this week lifted another upgrade block for Windows 11 24H2. Thus if you are looking to do an in-place upgrade from 23H2, you can check out our review to get an idea of what you could expect. We shared those results for Windows 11 24H2 performance last month. While many tests showed margin of error differences, there were two interesting takeaways from that in terms of gaming. First the positive, there was a definite improvement in frame generation performance on Black Myth Wukong. We observed it on all three of our 24H2 runs and the gains were quite substantial too with over 17% improvement in averages and more than 15% in the lows. On the flip side, single-threaded performance on 24H2 was, for some reason, lower and it was highlighted in more than one instance, be it a synthetic test or an actual game. Besides gaming, application start-up performance also took a sizable hit on the newer feature update in PCMark 10. With those in mind, we set out to see if doing a clean installation would reduce these differences, and also whether we would come across other new performance quirks. Thus we proceeded to clean install Windows 11 November 2024 Patch Tuesday (KB5046617) on top of October 2024. Just like last time, our test is not straight-up apples-to-apples comparisons. We are trying to replicate the usage and experience of a general user and as such, all settings would be kept at default. This is how we are evaluating the performance differentials of a clean install for Windows 11 24H2 vs an in-place upgrade. Hence, some of the settings like Core Isolation or Virtualization-based Security (VBS) have been kept enabled. In case you are wondering about the hardware we tested this on, Steven and I worked on this together (remotely), on his test bench comprising Intel's Core i7-14700K CPU and AMD's 7800 XT GPU (provided by AMD for review). The latest GPU drivers were used at the time (Adrenalin version 24.10.1). Again we start with synthetic benchmarks first. In 3DMark's CPU/physics test, we see an immediate improvement with the clean installation. Our 14700K does better in both DirectX 11-based Fire Strike physics as well as DirectX 12-based Time Spy. This time, 24H2 draws nearly equal to 23H2 on Fire Strike Ultra and manages to beat it on Time Spy Extreme. So an 8.2% gain in the more single-threaded Fire Strike Ultra and a 5.87% improvement in the more modern Time Spy Extreme. The same trend continued on 3DMark CPU Profile which measures the scaling performance of a processor across threads on Time Spy. On our clean-installed 24H2 PC, we saw better scaling once the processor thread count exceeded eight. At up to 4 threads, the two systems were identical. The biggest difference was seen at 16 threads where the clean installed 14700K was ~6.78% faster. With all threads maxed, the difference was significant too at ~6.6%. Following that, we have our 3DMark GPU tests. The 7800 XT for some reason did worse on our clean-installed 24H2 system but it is something that may be considered within the margin of error (max. difference is ~2.23%). So we aren't going to sweat it out and are attributing it to run-to-run variance. Hence, in the synthetic tests, the clean PC definitely fared significantly better. Neither 3DMark nor Windows received any specific optimizations in this period and thus the performance differential is likely to be down to the clean install. With that, it's time to move on to some real-world games. On Black Myth: Wukong, we again saw a huge uplift with frame generation (FG) enabled on 24H2. In fact, our results on the clean-installed system were identical to what we saw on the in-place upgrade. Only the 95%ile score was better by 1 FPS in the case of FG off, the average was the same indicating that a clean PC or an upgraded PC hardly matters in this case. We had another eventful result on Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy as the 24H2 clean installed PC underperformed our 23H2 by a large degree. Interestingly, Intel's APO (Application Optimization) actually helped this time as it smoothed out whatever issue it may have been that was bothering the 14700K as we once again saw performance parity between 24H2 and 23H2. Shadow of the Tomb Raider's performance differences were within the margin of error mostly. Another noteworthy point here is that APO did not crash on 24H2 this time. We were able to evaluate its effect, and it most certainly helped on both 23H2 and 24H2. The Callisto Protocol was a boring test run, there is not much going on here. I was eager to see what would happen in Far Cry 6 since it presented an interesting case last time. Unfortunately, for some reason, our clean-installed system did not default to the same graphics settings that it had chosen during the in-place upgrade. Thus, we could not directly compare the results. Regardless, it was still interesting to note this difference between the two cases. We noticed a similar thing in a couple of other games too, Assassins' Creed Odyssey and Final Fantasy XV. We are unsure why our 24H2 clean setup felt our RX 7800 XT was not capable of handling 1080p ultra settings such that it defaulted to a lower preset in these three titles. Regardless, we could confirm that our 14700K was not bottlenecked even at these more CPU-demanding settings since we saw an increase in the FPS output in all the three games. With the gaming portion wrapped up, we move to productivity. Cinebench 2024 shows the exact same performance on 24H2 (clean) and 23H2 in the CPU rendering test, and a 10-point increase over in-place upgraded 24H2. The GPU test also shows an improvement on the clean installed PC but again nothing too exciting. It was a bit disappointing to see that the clean installed 24H2 PC was slower than the in-place upgrade system on 7-Zip's compression test. While it was still slightly faster than 23H2, compared to the in-place upgrade, the clean 24H2 setup was ~3.5% slower. PCMark 10 again revealed interesting results. If you recall, last time, on an in-place upgrade, we noted that the app startup performance was lower in the case of 24H2. Well, that trend continued and in fact, it got worse. PCMark 10 on Windows 11 23H2 Windows 11 23H2 scored 24,096 in the application start metric. In contrast, 24H2 upgrade and 24H2 clean scored 21,376 and 20,813 respectively. Thus they were ~11.3% and ~13.625% slower respectively. PCMark 10 on clean installed Windows 11 24H2 24H2 clean installed device was also much worse in photo editing, spreadsheet processing and writing tests. Overall, the 24H2 clean PC scored 9,999 points vs 10,734 points on 23H2 and 10,460 on 24H2 in-place upgrade. Lastly, we have the memory allocation test on 24H2 vs 23H2. This shows how much system RAM each OS requests for caching page files, prefetch data, game/app data, among other things. Speaking of RAM, we were using TeamGroup's 32 GB DDR5-7600 kit that we reviewed last year. Memory allocation is the amount of system RAM that an app requests and is not equal to the actual memory used up by that software. Regardless, it gives us an idea about the capacity of memory needed. This is a major win for our clean installed 24H2 system. Not only does it do quite well against 23H2, it also massively reduces the amount of allocated RAM compared to what we had previously on our upgraded 24H2 PC. The improvement was seen in every single workload. Perhaps there is a memory leak problem on an in-place upgrade that our clean-installed PC resolved. We can't say for sure, but our results consistently suggested this. Conclusion The idea of this clean installation review was to see if the performance nuances we saw on the in-place upgrade would be eliminated on a clean 24H2 PC and whether the latter would be the better way to upgrade from 23H2. While the initial impressions were great as we saw significant improvements in the synthetic 3DMark benchmarks, they did not quite materialize in actual games. Neither did we see any notable improvements in non-gaming tasks. And in the case of PCMark, we saw a significant regression in performance. Thus if you feel like trying a clean installation of Windows 11 24H2 in hopes of improving the performance, you will likely be disappointed; unless you are getting memory hogged like we experienced on our upgraded 24H2 setup. In that case, a move to clean installed 24H2 could help. Our stance on upgrading from Windows 11 23H2 to 24H2 remains the same, it depends, but in most cases, you are not going to miss out on much if you stick to 23H2. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

Following the release of non-security updates for Windows 11 version 24H2 and Windows 10 version 22H2, Microsoft pushed this month's c-updates for those using Windows 11 version 22H2 and 23H2. The update is now available as an optional release in Windows Update under KB5050092. Here are the changes that Microsoft is rolling out gradually: And here is what is rolling out in normal mode: Known issues in this update include bugs with OpenSSH and compatibility issues with Citrix software (both have workarounds). You can download KB5050092 from Windows Update or the Microsoft Update Catalog. Since the update does not contain security updates, you can skip it and wait for next month's mandatory Patch Tuesday updates. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

If you are a Windows 11 user but your system is not yet on version 24H2, which just received its November 2024 non-security update, you can still get a lot of fixes and some new features in a fresh update. This month's non-security update (also known as C-update) is now available for Windows 11 version 23H2 and 22H2 (Enterprise and Education users only) under KB5046732 with build numbers 22621.4541 and 22631.4541. KB5046732 does not include security patches, which means it is not mandatory, and you can skip it. Here are the changes that are rolling out gradually: "Normal rollout" changes (those that are available right away for all) include these two: And here are the rest of the improvements and fixes in KB5046732: As usual, you can download KB5046732 for Windows 11 23H2 from Windows Update or the Microsoft Update Catalog. As a reminder, Windows 10 and 11 will not receive optional updates in December due to minimal operations during the holiday season. Look out for the next non-security update (or don't) in January 2025. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. 2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of October): 4,832 news posts RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

With the introduction of Windows 11 23H2, Microsoft has modernized File Explorer on Windows 11, bringing a fresher look and feel to the system's integral file management tool. This update is not only visually pleasing but also comes with enhanced features and functions aimed at boosting productivity and making navigation simpler. Among the new enhancements, the redesigned File Explorer now features a modern home page powered by WinUI, which integrates the Fluent Design System into all controls and styles. The modern Windows 11File ExplorerSource: BleepingComputer For those logged into Windows using an Azure Active Directory (AAD) account, recommended files will appear in a carousel with the soon-to-be-introduced support for file thumbnails. Quick Access folders, Favorites, and Recent sections also get a visual overhaul, providing a seamless, contemporary user experience. The new File Explorer has an updated address bar that can distinguish between local and cloud folders, displaying built-in status. Particularly for OneDrive users, the address bar will also indicate your OneDrive sync status and provide a flyout for your quota. Another exciting introduction is the modernized details pane (accessed by ALT + Shift + P). This pane offers a variety of contextual information about selected files, including file thumbnails, share status, file activity, related files and emails, and more. This new feature enhances the user's ability to manage and collaborate on files without opening them A new Gallery View Microsoft is also introducing the Gallery, a new feature in File Explorer designed to simplify access to your photo collection. The photos displayed in the Gallery are the same ones you'd see in the 'All Photos' view of the Photos app. New File Explorer Gallery viewSource: BleepingComputer The new gallery is optimized to showcase your most recent photos, and if you have the OneDrive Camera Roll Backup set up, photos you take will automatically appear at the top of the view. Users can choose which folders appear in the Gallery and can even add subfolders to filter specific content. Overall, the modernized File Explorer on Windows 11 breathes new life into a tool that is central to users' daily interactions with their computers. From smart address bars to detailed file insights and easy photo access, the update greatly enhances user experience, making file management easier and more efficient. If you want to test the new File Explorer yourself, you can install the Windows Insider Beta, Dev, and Canary preview builds. Source