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Yesterday, Microsoft released its latest beta test build of Windows 10 “Redstone” — the version of Windows 10 that’s widely expected to roll out in June or July. Dubbed Build 14257.rs1_release.160131-1800, it’s available to those in the Insider Program on the Fast ring. It follows Build 14251, which was released a week ago.
Redstone is expected to land this summer with a host of new features. In the old days we’d have called it a service pack or even (whispers) Windows 11. Now with ‘Windows-as-a-service’ it’s just an incremental, if major, upgrade.
That said, Insiders shouldn’t get their hopes up as this is just a foundation for most of the features which are still works in progress.
Windows Insider guv’nor ‘Anne of Green’ Gabe Aul said in a blog post:
“Teams are still early in their new feature work, and changes in this build are mostly about laying the foundation for those features to start coming into builds. So you won’t see many visible changes quite yet.”
There are quite a few bug fixes, including a cure for an ongoing problem with memory management leading to app crashes. It also shores up the correct proportioning of the desktop icons after changing DPI, plus there’s a fix for pasting into zip files which had broken.
Now the nasties. If you reset your PC to factory in this build, it will bork. You’ll have to reinstall. Intel RealSense doesn’t work and as a result neither does Windows Hello. Airplane mode will show as ‘on’ sometimes when it shouldn’t. But that’s all part of the fun.
This marks a beginning point. Even if you are not actually in the Insider programme, you’ll want to keep your eye on this because we’re going to start to see exactly what cool stuff Redstone will bring when it becomes Windows 10 in a few months.
Windows 10 is now on over 200 million machines, according to Microsoft, and its market share has hit double figures for the first time to jump over Windows XP which has remained stubbornly static at just over 10 percent.
The number is expected to grow next month after Microsoft announced that Windows 10 will now be a ‘recommended’ upgrade for 7 and 8.1 users that they will need to actively opt out of.
Agencies/Canadajournal
