So, the newest Windows 10 feature update has been released by Microsoft, it's known as the
May update, very original, also known as version 21H1, so 2021, first half of the year. However,
even though Windows only gets one of these feature updates twice a year, it turns out
that this one actually does not have all that much in terms of features on the front end. It
looks like Microsoft basically delayed most of the features that were planned that were pretty major
and put it off till 21H2, so the next one which will probably be in the fall.
And from what I've seen, it seems like they are mostly focusing on the core experience, they said,
as well as stability and bug fixes, that sort of thing. So there's still some decent
additions, it's just more stuff on the backend, but we'll go over it all anyway.
First, let me go over a few notes about actually getting the update and then we'll go into the
actual features. You can check the timestamps in the description if you want to get right into it.
Of course, as usual, I want to give a quick shout out to my hilarious Instagram account. Again,
if you have a heart condition, you may die of laughter so be careful when going
on there. I usually just post memes and stuff, it's just @ThioJoe, check it out.
Now apparently, this update is being slowly rolled out randomly to users
over the next couple weeks so you might not necessarily see it in Windows update appearing
right now, but you can get it manually. I'll talk about that in a second.
If it does show up, you'll see a section where it mentions it as an
optional feature update and you'll also see the option to download and install.
And again, this is fully optional so you don't have to worry about delaying any updates or
anything, you could still keep everything else up to date and just not click that download install
if you don't want to. Now, if you don't see the option to download it now in the update menu,
but you still want it anyway, there are a couple ways to do so. The easiest,
fastest way would be to download the enablement package from Microsoft site. I'll put that link
in the description. You see, actually, because there's so few major updates in this new version,
actually, it shares the same core files as the previous two major feature updates. So
Microsoft actually just kind of downloaded a lot of the features to get ready for this 21H1
in previous updates you downloaded a couple of months before this,
and just kind of laid dormant. So all you have to do is download this enablement package
and it takes no time at all. You download it and then run it and it will simply enable the features
that have already been downloaded. So it's really quick, you just restart and there it is.
One quick note is when you go to download this, Chrome will not like it because it's not an
HTTPS download, even though it doesn't really matter. It's secure it's from Microsoft directly.
So basically just right click and hit "save link as", and then it'll warn you that it's
not a secure download, but you can just ignore it and keep it. And then it'll download anyway.
And like I said, then you just run it and then restart and you'll have 21H1.
Although on one of my computers that didn't actually immediately install it,
it just enabled the option to download and install it in the windows update, so just kind of be
aware of that. The other option, which will take a lot longer, is to download the Update Assistant
from Microsoft. From my understanding, that will basically go through and replace all
the Windows files, including the ones that have just been minorly changed for this new update,
but that'll probably take one to two hours. So it's not really necessary. And also by the way,
there's the new ISO for this version of Windows. So if you have any rescue discs,
maybe now is not a bad time to download that new ISO and update the rescue discs.
All right. So now all that being said, we can actually get into the new features and changes.
Basically, if you go on Microsoft's website, they only have a few major changes that they
even mention as being new features. And they all kind of have to do with remote work,
because obviously that's a big part of what we're dealing with now. The first is that Windows Hello
now has multi-camera support. So basically, if you have a laptop or some other computer that has
an internal camera, but then you also went out and bought an external camera, you can now set
the external camera as the default, where I guess before you couldn't do that, but now you can.
The next update that kept being mentioned is that the Windows Defender Application Guard
performance has improved. Basically, this is the security program in Windows that kind of scans for
exploits and stuff. Apparently it's now improved and specifically optimizes for different documents
that might be open and scanned by the program, and now it just kind of works better. So if your
organization has implemented a policy where this is a very aggressive scanning, then you might have
better performance on your computer. The third change that I honestly didn't really understand,
but they kept mentioning it in a bunch of blog posts so I guess they think it's important,
is Windows Management Instrumentation or WMI group Policy Service updating performance.
Now that sounds like a bunch of technobabble, I know. My understanding is basically that
Group Policies is where a organization can define different policies that apply to
all computers in an organization. So if you have a work laptop or something and they want to make
a change to that policy, it'll update faster. So this might just make it more efficient
for companies to manage remote workers and stuff like that. So if they want to update something on
your computer remotely, they can do it quicker. I don't know, something like that. But again,
that's just my interpretation, it might not be fully correct.
Now, there was also a article that was directed towards IT Pros,
and they actually mentioned that Windows 21H1 has some security updates, significant ones,
it looks like. And in there, it says that 21H1 provides security updates for
Windows App Platform and Frameworks, Windows Apps, Windows Input and Composition, Windows
Office Media, Windows Fundamentals, Windows Cryptography, and the Windows AI Platform,
Windows Kernel, Windows Virtualization, Internet Explorer, and Windows Media. So,
it seems like there's actually a ton of security updates, which is pretty cool. It's all just
going to be kind of in the background, but still good enough. Now there is actually one pretty big
new feature that is rolling out called the "News and Interests" widget in the taskbar. However,
it's not technically part of the 21H1 update. However, Microsoft said that they're going
to be rolling it out. So, some of you who do update windows 21H1 may get this new feature.
I was going to try and show you guys myself, but unfortunately all three of the computers
I updated to this did not get this new feature, unfortunately. So I'll just kind
of have to show you some screenshots I found. But basically it's this new widget in the task bar.
You can shrink it to just show a weather icon or it'll show you some more information,
like the actual weather as text. And then it'll open up and show you all sorts of information
that you may want to choose. Like stocks, finance news, regular news, sports scores, even traffic,
and other news headlines you may choose. And this actually does seem kind of cool. So you'll
actually be able to customize it a little bit using the so-called Interest Manager.
So you can basically specifically choose what topics you want to see as well as
which news sources you want to, or don't want to include in there. And if you think this is
completely annoying, there is good news. You can easily disable it by just right clicking
on the task bar, go in the option for it, and then clicking off and it'll go away.
So even though that's not technically part of the new update, it's still kind of cool
that we might see that rollout. And actually, I believe it might even be rolling out potentially
for some users on previous couple updates. So you might even have it now before this update,
I don't know. Back to the actual 21H1 update though, there were a couple other changes we
can mention. One small one that might not apply to everyone is Windows Mixed Reality. So if you
have a VR headset or whatever, apparently you can now set the headset to go to sleep after a
certain amount of time. So maybe if you have to plug it in all the time, you want to pop it on,
it'll go to sleep in the meantime. Definitely not going to apply to many people, but there it is.
And really, it seems like the rest of the changes I found were just a bunch of bug fixes, but there
were a bunch. And if you look at this, I'm not going to read them all out, obviously. Most
of these are going to be completely behind the scenes. I don't even know what half of these do,
but I'm going to assume that they fixed a lot of stuff that just will generally
improve stability and reliability, hopefully. There were a couple of actually that kind of
popped out at me, and I noticed, for example, one that said fixed issue where NVMe drives
might not enter right power state. I don't know what that bug was, but who knows,
maybe if you've been having issues with your NVMe SSD, maybe now it'll perform better.
Another one I saw said "Screen rendering after opening games with certain hardware
configurations." Again, it's not very specific what "certain hardware configurations" means,
but maybe if you've been having games act weird, when you try to boot it up,
then maybe this will help with that. Again, all the other ones though probably are not
going to be much interest to people, but if you do want to read through all
the different bug fixes, I'll put that link in the description too.
Now you might be wondering why this is such a small update and wait a minute,
wasn't even the last update kind of minor? Yes. Apparently Microsoft was, again, planning some
significant features in this, but they pushed it back to the 21H2 update in the fall. And that
one apparently is truly going to be pretty darn big and significant. It's called the Sun Valley
codename, I think, if you want to look that up. But basically it's going to have a redesigned user
interface. Maybe not completely redesigned, but get a fresh look. They might actually have some
improvements to stuff like HDR, apparently to have Auto HDR, where games that aren't
natively HDR may kind of look like HDR, like Xbox got and a bunch of other stuff that,
it probably makes more sense for me to talk about as it gets closer. But in any case, even though
there wasn't a ton of updates, at least now, you know what the deal is with this new update. So
you can better understand whether or not you want to install it or not and you know how to.
By the way, if I did miss any features that you think I should have mentioned,
let me know down in the comments and maybe I'll put a pinnned comment with anything I missed.
So check down there. If you guys want to keep watching, the next video I definitely recommend
is one where I was talking about how to create the ultimate boot USB, where you can basically make
a whole bunch of rescue USBs, put it all on one thing. So if your computer ever has a catastrophe,
you'll be completely prepared. I made that video. You can click on it right
there. Definitely useful. So thanks so much for watching guys. And I'll see you in the next one.