Microsoft today released a new preview for PCs with a retail restart experience. This build is from the RS5 branch, which represents the Windows 10 update the company plans to release later this year. The company is also releasing builds from the 19H1 branch, which, as its name indicates, will arrive in the first half of next year.
Windows 10 is being developed as a service, meaning it receives new features on a regular basis. Microsoft has released five major updates so far: November Update, Anniversary Update, Creators Update, Fall Creators Update, and April 2018 Update.
The Your Phone app, which we thought had arrived with the build earlier this week, is now actually available. As its name implies, Your Phone’s main purpose is to let you access your phone’s content — like text messages, photos, and notifications — right on your Windows 10 PC. Your Phone currently only works with Android devices and is limited to syncing photos, but more features are on the way.
The real change in this release, however, is how builds arrive for Windows Insiders. Microsoft explains:
When you are asked to restart for new flights, you will now receive the same notifications and experience as what we plan to provide to our retail customers. Depending on your ring, you will be asked to schedule your restart for the first couple of days, then we will ask if we could automatically schedule restarts outside of your active hours.
Microsoft wants to improve how builds are delivered before releasing to retail.
This desktop build also includes the following general bug fixes and improvements:
- Fixed the issue impacting WDAG, Remote Desktop and Hyper-V. Remote Desktop Client (mstsc.exe) users should no longer see an error dialog complaining about low virtual memory when a connection is being established. And users can use enhanced sessions in Virtual Machine Connection (vmconnect.exe) again.
- The “Block Suspicious Behaviors” feature recently added to Windows Security has been temporarily removed to address reported issues.
- Fixed an issue resulting in the volume slider in certain apps performing poorly with touch in recent flights.
- Fixed an issue resulting in certain apps, like the Twitter app, not rendering content when navigating after a while.
- Fixed an issue where expanding the Driver Updates dropdown in View Update History in Settings didn’t list anything (even when there were items to list) in recent builds.
Today’s update bumps the Windows 10 build number for the RS5 branch from 17728 (made available to testers on July 31) to build 17730.
This build has 13 known issues:
- Clicking a link to launch one app from another app may not work for some Insiders. We’re investigating.
- You may see some unexpectedly light colors in these surfaces when in dark mode and/or dark on dark text.
- When you upgrade to this build you’ll find that the taskbar flyouts (network, volume, etc) no longer have an acrylic background.
- When you use the Ease of Access Make Text bigger setting, you might see text clipping issues, or find that text is not increasing in size everywhere.
- When you set up Microsoft Edge as your kiosk app and configure the start/new tab page URL from assigned access Settings, Microsoft Edge may not get launched with the configured URL. The fix for this issue should be included in the next flight.
- You may still see the notification count icon overlapping with the extension icon in the Microsoft Edge toolbar when an extension has unread notifications.
- On Windows 10 in S Mode, launching Office in the Store may fail to launch with an error about a .dll not being designed to run on Windows. The error message is that a .dll “is either not designed to run on Windows or it contains an error. Try installing the program again…” Some people have been able to work around this by uninstalling and reinstalling Office from the Store.
- When using Narrator Scan mode you may experience multiple stops for a single control. An example of this is if you have an image that is also a link.
- When using Narrator Scan mode Shift + Selection commands in Microsoft Edge, the text does not get selected properly.
- A potential increase in Start reliability and performance issues.
- After setting up a Windows Mixed Reality headset for the first time on this build with motion controllers, the controllers may need to be re-paired a second time before appearing in the headset.
- When using a Windows Mixed Reality immersive app, saying “Flashlight on,” may fail to activate the flashlight feature even though the status appears as active on the Start menu.
- If you install any of the recent builds from the Fast ring and switch to the Slow ring – optional content such as enabling developer mode will fail. You will have to remain in the Fast ring to add/install/enable optional content. This is because optional content will only install on builds approved for specific rings.
As always, don’t install this on your production machine.