Microsoft Releases the Windows 10 November 2019 Update

The wait is over: Microsoft officially released the Windows 10 November 2019 Update. 

This release fulfills Microsoft's self-imposed obligation to release two major updates to Windows 10 every year.

Microsoft was fairly explicit about the Windows 10 May 2019 Update's primary job being to improve the experience and offered few new features. The November update follows suit, with few changes. Microsoft's list includes:

• Quickly creating an event directly from the Calendar flyout on the Taskbar.
• Better managing notifications, including a new button at the top of the Action Center and the ability to sort notifications by most recently shown.
• Integrating OneDrive content online with traditional indexed results in the File Explorer search box.
• The navigation pane on the Start menu now expands when you hover over it with your mouse to better inform where clicking goes.
• Using your voice to activate third-party digital assistants from the Lock screen.

There are other changes, too, but those are the ones Microsoft decided to call out in the blog post announcing the Windows 10 November 2019 Update's availability. The company didn't call attention to many other changes in a support document explaining what's new in this version of Windows 10.

Anyone curious about the Windows 10 November 2019 Update can install it by going to Settings > Update & Security > Windows Update, selecting "Check for updates," and restarting their PCs after the update has finished downloading. Microsoft also offers the option of scheduling the restart, too, in case someone needs to do something before the installation would finish.

It's not available to everyone--the company said in its announcement that some people will have to wait because they "might have a compatibility issue and a safeguard hold is in place until we are confident that [they] will have a good update experience"--but people without any compatibility issues can install the update now.

The company did offer a quick caveat: It said in its announcement that "It may take a day for downloads to be fully available in the Volume Licensing Service Center (VLSC) across all products, markets, and languages." Combine that with the compatibility restrictions, which Microsoft didn't outline, and the Windows 10 November 2019 Update's will seem pretty staggered. But having to wait a day to install the latest version of Windows 10 probably isn't the end of the world for most PC users.

Additional changes should arrive in 2020. Microsoft's already testing a version of Windows 10 meant to debut in the first half of next year with almost everyone in the Windows Insider Program. It's actually been working on the update for a while already; Skip Ahead members of the program actually started using the code-named Windows 10 20H1 update in February. Hopefully that means the update will arrive in April or May 2020 without all the issues that affected recent Windows 10 releases.