We’re getting ever-closer to wrapping up 2018, but unlike the year, news doesn’t quite come to an end. Patch Tuesday updates, hardware availability details and more await the curious reader below.
To nobody’s surprise, another week has gone by and thus has brought with it a slew of preview news and various different updates. The latter is due to the arrival of this month’s Patch Tuesday, but it isn’t all that’s happened. Along with it, we found out some details about the next HoloLens and even some potential changes to the Settings app in Windows 10. Here’s all that –and more – in your Microsoft digest for the week of December 8-14.
Pretty much all versions of the latest OS from the Redmond giant got updates, save for the November Update (1511), and the Anniversary Update (1607). Don’t worry, Insiders weren’t left out either.
With the arrival of this month’s Patch Tuesday, here are the different builds and various changes you should be aware of if you’re running Windows 10:
Windows 7 and 8.1 are of course still supported, so here’s what you need to be on the lookout for if you’re still running those operating systems:
For some, running good old regular Windows 10 may be boring, which is why the Insider Program exists. Those in the Fast ring were treated to build 18298 which contains a laundry list of improvements to Narrator, Ease of Access, the Windows setup, Notepad (which now supports even more shortcuts and UTF-8 encoding), the console, the Touch keyboard, a new File Explorer icon, the ability to unpin entire groups at a time from the Start menu, a better sign-in options page and much more. There are of course certain bugs to be aware of, like the ‘view storage usage on other drives’ option crashing the Settings app – as does the opening of Speech settings. Furthermore, the Windows Security app may show an unknown status in the Virus & threat protection area, and if you’re trying to run games using the BattlEye anti-cheat protection, you will get a green screen of death (or bugcheck). That’s not to say there aren’t fixes though, because those are many. Everything form the Narrator to PDF inking in Edge, transparency effects, the Vietnamese Telex keyboard, text scaling in Action Center, the microphone and camera privacy settings pages, Magnifier and a whole lot more.
If you’ve gotten the build above, you may want to check out the look of Search and Cortana, which may be separated. Keep in mind that this change is being A/B tested so it won’t show up for everyone, but you’ll know you have if there are separate buttons for Search and the digital assistant on your taskbar. And while we’re on the subject of Cortana, Microsoft is working on multi-voice recognition for it.
Because older builds have already technically expired – on December 14 -, Microsoft has also provided folks with a brand new set of ISO files, this time for build 18290 of 19H1.
Sticking to the Insider program a tad longer, folks making use of Windows Admin Center will want to check out version 1809.
