Plus: Azure Kubernetes world and Army cash for services
Roundup While last week the Microsoft headlines were all about bonzer financial results, storage problems and, er, Microsoft Paint, other things were afoot in Redmond.
It has been a while – over two weeks by our reckoning – but the Windows Insider gang has finally given its loyal army of volunteer testers something to chew over in the form of build 18885. The build, which arrived on Friday 26 April, follows hot on the heels of a fix for Insiders still running on 19H1 to allow an update to the Windows 10 of 2020.
Something lurking within the May 2019 Update, when patched to build 18362.53, left the 20H1 installer with a serious case of indigestion, and Microsoft to throw up a block to stop the OS trying to slither its way onto some Insiders’ desktops.
With Friday’s update, 19H1 users should now be able to make the leap to 20H1, having first patched to 18362.86. However, they are likely to be a little disappointed because, at this point in the development cycle, there just isn’t much to get too excited about.
The company is, after all, still a year or so away from release.
That said, the team has gotten around to adding more languages to the built-in dictation support in the operating system. Current versions of Windows 10 struggle to accept that there might be a world of people without English (United States) voices. With 20H1, Brits, Canadians and Australians can now get in on the action. The gang has also added support for Germany, Italy, Spain and France among others.
The build also includes a fix for that whole pesky external storage thing as well as a wonderful bug whereby Windows Hello would immediately sign a user back into their PC after the unlucky punter had locked the thing (which resulted in some impressive keyboard gymnastics to stay out of the camera’s view during the locking process.)
However, Microsoft continued to point the finger of blame for PC crashes at game developers who had failed to update their wares to deal with the long-running anti-cheat code issues. The team cheerfully said «most games have released patches» and urged gamers to ensure they are up to date before attempting an operating system upgrade.
Windows Insiders (or some of them, at least) were also gifted a Your Phone update, as Microsoft’s Director of Program Management for Mobile ‘eXperiences’, Vishnu Nath, announced some new toys were inbound.
