Windows 10 22H2 and Windows 11 22H2 are in the final stretch before their official release. While Windows 11 22H2 may have some great features that I'm looking forward to, including additional ransomware protection (more on that next week), I realized I hadn't paid attention to the features coming in Windows 10 22H2. So I looked up documentation on what was included and quickly realized why I couldn't remember anything important, because Microsoft didn't say much about it.
What he did say, and it's actually a good thing, is that the update to Windows 10 22H2 from 22H1 will be an "activation" package: you use a (*11*) of code to activate new features. Users already have most of 22H2's "features" on their PCs waiting to be activated. As Microsoft posted on its blog on July 28, the release has an "extended feature set" that it will share more details about later. (The company already offers a preview to validate the publishing process.)
Microsoft
Windows 10 22H2 is not officially released yet, but there are ways to install and test it now.
You can try it now if your Windows 10 computer is enrolled in the Insider channel and you choose to participate in the Release Preview channel. Click "check for updates" to put your PC into "finder mode" and offer you Windows 10 22H2. If you are a professional user (Windows 10 pro), you can get support for this release preview build. Installation didn't take long and I didn't see any visible changes initially. That being said, upon reboot I got a notification that Windows could not find the program Microsoft.YourPhone. (Note: I wasn't using this app before I installed it.)
Microsoft
Oops. Windows said it couldn't find the Microsoft.YourPhone program after an update.
Since this computer is running Windows 10 Professional, I reported the problem to Microsoft. Then I rebooted a second time and the message did not appear. But that's clearly why the company is still testing the software in beta. These deployment issues do not usually cause major problems, but the final installation testing process is designed to detect these types of issues.
By the way, these days I don't recommend anyone to buy or use a system without an SSD as a boot drive. Anyone with older hard drives will find that their system is getting slower and slower, with lackluster performance.
So what exactly will Windows 10 22H2 bring? Often, for those of us in small businesses, there aren't many features that we can use. In last year's 21H2 release, most of the new features were aimed at business users and could only be effective with certain licenses or were only needed for specific use cases.
As a reminder, 21H2 included:
- Support for the new WPA3 H2E standards to improve Wi-Fi security.
- Windows Hello for Business support for simplified, passwordless deployment models to get to a running deployment state in minutes.
- Support for GPU computing in Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and Azure IoT Edge for Linux on Windows (EFLOW) implementations for machine learning and other compute-intensive workflows.
What 21H2 brought was an end of life date of October 2023 and two years of support beyond that date. Microsoft will continue to support at least one version of Windows 10 until October 14, 2025. (It's not clear if 22H2 will be supported until 2025 or if we'll get another version sooner.)
The most compelling feature I see in 22H2 is a very annoying support window extension. While that might excite those of us who have to repair and maintain systems, we actually want nice, boring updates and feature releases, it won't excite anyone else.
I'll recommend upgrading to Windows 10 22H2 once it's released, but not right away. For now, I recommend using local group policy or registry keys to stay on the current version of Windows for now. (I wrote about how to do this last year if you want detailed instructions.)
I'm hoping that because of the large number of people still running Windows 10 with hardware that isn't compatible with Windows 11, Microsoft will offer extended support for the older OS that will be easy to enable. I know that at home and in my office I have very few machines that officially support Windows 11, so I will not update them.
To reiterate: I will encourage users to install Windows 10 22H2, but only after waiting about a month to make sure there are no major issues. Because it doesn't include many changes, this should be an easy update for those of us who expect a nice, quiet, and uneventful feature release process.
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