Microsoft is today releasing not one, but two Windows 10 Insider Preview builds to the Slow Ring. These builds are the latest from the 19H2 development branch, the version of Windows 10 that will be released to all users sometime later this year. The reason that there are two builds today is that the company is testing the ability to ship builds with features turned off by default for a set of users, which it can turn on through controlled rollouts depending on feedback.
19H2 build 18362.10012 heads to users in the Slow Ring running build 18362.10005 and will have the new features turned off by default – something that has been the case with the .10005 release. Build 18362.10013 heads to users running build 18362.10006 and will have the features turned on by default. Users that are coming from the Windows 10 May 2019 Update (version 1903) that have just joined the Slow Ring in the Insider Program will receive either of the builds through a virtual “coin toss”, meaning that it will be rolled out randomly with the features either off or on.
These builds contain a few new features such as the ability to create calendar events right from the calendar flyout, something that was introduced with build 18936 of the 20H1 development branch. There also are a few performance improvements to “certain processors”. Again, users on build 18362.10012 may not see these features for a while, since the features are turned on by default only for users that were served build 18362.10006.
Here is the full changelog:
You can now quickly create an event straight from the Calendar flyout on the Taskbar. Just click on the date and time at the lower right corner of the Taskbar to open the Calendar flyout and pick your desired date and start typing in the text box – you’ll now see inline options to set a time and location.
The navigation pane on the Start menu now expands when you hover over it with your mouse to better inform where clicking goes.
We have added friendly images to show what is meant by “banner” and “Action Center” when adjusting the notifications on apps in order to make these settings more approachable and understandable
Notifications settings under Settings > System > Notifications will now default to sorting notification senders by most recently shown notification, rather than sender name. This makes it easier to find and configure frequent and recent senders. We have also added a setting to turn off playing sound when notifications appear.
We now show the options to configure and turn off notifications from an app/website right on the notification, both as a banner and in Action Center.
We have added a “Manage notifications” button to the top of Action Center that launches the main “Notifications & actions” Settings page.
We have added additional debugging capabilities for newer Intel processors. This is only relevant for hardware manufacturers.
We have made general battery life and power efficiency improvements for PCs with certain processors.
A CPU may have multiple “favored” cores (logical processors of the highest available scheduling class). To provide better performance and reliability, we have implemented a rotation policy that distributes work more fairly among these favored cores.
These builds also contain the features introduced with the previous 19H2 builds and fixes from the cumulative update build 18362.267 that was released to users running the Windows 10 May 2019 Update.
As a reminder, the 19H2 release is slated to arrive in Windows 10 for all users later this year and will be a minor update that will be rolled out in the form of a cumulative update. Those that wish to test these builds will have to sign up to the Insider Program in the Slow Ring, as that is the only ring that 19H2 is being tested on currently.
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