Microsoft pushed new builds of Windows 10 to Release Preview members of the Windows Insider Program on Monday. That ring of the program is currently split between people using Windows 10 19H1--which is the Windows 10 May 2019 Update--and the Windows 10 19H2 release expected to arrive in October. The builds released on Monday contain the same content, however, and Microsoft is slowly pushing these Insiders to 19H2.
Release Preview members are either the scaredy-cats whose need for stability outweighs their desire for new features or, more charitably, the last line of defense an update must overcome before reaching the hundreds of millions of systems running Windows 10. For example: The builds released yesterday (19H1 Build 18362.385 and 19H2 Build 18363.385) have the same features as a build that reached Slow ring members on September 5.
Anyone looking for some flashy updates will likely be disappointed by these builds. Microsoft said it updated several notifications settings, streamlined the addition of calendar events from the Taskbar and made "a change to enable third-party digital assistants to voice activate above the Lock screen." But most of the changes are behind the scenes; we've collected some of the more interesting updates arriving with these builds below.
- 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.
- We have enabled Windows Defender Credential Guard for ARM64 devices for additional protection against credential theft for enterprises deploying ARM64 devices in their organizations.
Microsoft said that 10% of the Release Preview members still on the 19H1 development branch will automatically receive the 19H2 update alongside these builds. This suggests that the 19H2 update will arrive sooner than later, but the company technically has until the end of November to release the next major update to Windows 10. It originally said that it wants to ship those updates every six months, after all, and the last one arrived in May.
