Windows 10 September Update will feature a number of improvements to barely used features
Microsoft’s September Update to Windows 10 will be released in October, the company has confirmed.
Following on from the March Update, which only made it by one day, Microsoft has moved to ‘manage expectations’ by scheduling its second twice-yearly update for October.
In keeping with Microsoft’s tradition of giving its products boring names, Microsoft will be calling it ‘The Windows 10 October 2018 Update’.
After testing with the Insider Community over the past six months, they should get the release candidate build in early October, with normal users getting it a few weeks later.
Features (that most people won’t use) include a cloud clipboard that syncs across devices, a Dark Theme, a better Snipping Tool (currently, a very handy tool that enables screen snapshots to be taken by pressing Shift-Windows-S), tweaks to the barely used Game Bar and Edge browser, and a whole bunch of under the hood stuff.
Speaking at Microsoft’s IFA keynote, Erin Chapple, corporate vice president at Microsoft said: « I’m pleased to announce that our next feature update to Windows will be called the Windows 10 October 2018 Update.
« With this update, we’ll be bringing new features and enhancements to the nearly 700 million devices running Windows 10 that help people make the most of their time. We’ll share more details about the update over the coming weeks. »
That’s a long way short of the two billion devices that Microsoft had claimed would be running Windows 10 by now – partly due to the collapse of Windows as a mobile operating system for smartphones and tablet computers.
Microsoft hopes to make good this deficit on mobile devices with imminent arrival of a number of Windows-on-Snapdragon (WoS) devices, coming soon, but these will still require a much scaled down version of Windows.
One thing the October update won’t have is Sets – the tabbed File Explorer window feature which was announced and then pulled again from the last version.
This is the last Windows Update to have a Redstone code name. The Spring 2019 update will have the equally banal name of 19H1. It’s already testing in the Skip Ahead channels.
