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Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to take a look at some new features coming to Windows 1124H2.
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This is Twit. Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Thurat and this week we're going to take yet another look at Windows 1124H2. I know we've talked about it a lot, but it kind of has dominated the past year. It's one of the biggest releases of Windows in recent memory. Honestly, a lot of the changes under the hood are pretty foundational and fundamental. And of course they also released it twice. Right? So there was the mid year release for Copilot Plus PCs running on Snapdragon X chips from Qualcomm and then the broad release in October, November at the end of the year. And because this is Microsoft and Windows 11, there's been new features almost every month in between as well. And go figure, there have been new features since they released 24H2. Some of them are out, some of them aren't. It depends on your computer, where you're at in the world, what the phase of the moon is. It's kind of hard to say. So I'm going to go through these. This is not a complete list, but these are things you could probably expect to see sometime between January, February 2025, depending on Microsoft and how things go. So that's the nature of this particular beast. Some of these things here in the December Patch Tuesday update, so the second Tuesday of December, and I'll just kind of go down the list. In fact, I'm going to jump into the middle of the list because one thing I noticed right before I started recording this episode is one of the features I was going to mention but didn't have yet has appeared on my computer and it's going to be super obvious when I open the Start menu. So this is my actual computer. It's got a bunch of junk on it. It's not as clean as I like, but I have it here today because it has a bunch of these new features. And you can see this kind of pane over here on the right of the menu is related to the Phone Link app and in this case my Pixel Android phone. So there's this new pane that you get, and I'm not enabling this right now, but you can access a lot of the features in Phone Link without having to launch the app. Okay, we'll get back to Phone Link in a bit. I just had to Address that because it's there and it looks weird and I'm sorry. So you may be familiar with the fact that applications in Windows support jump lists. So you right click the. The shortcut here and you get this list of recent apps in Windows 11. They've supported that in the taskbar, I think, since the initial release, but not in the Start menu. Now post 24H2, they're supporting it in the start menu as well. So I'll go back to the same app, right click. See the same list handy. So if you use jump lists, that stuff is available. So that's kind of cool. They're working on a shortened date and time display down here for the corner. This isn't it. This is the old one. But there are two changes occurring here. There's the. The shortened date and time and then the removal of that little notification bell. I have the removal of the notification bell on this PC, but not the shortened date and time. If I did have it, I could go into this interface and configure it back to the old way if that's what I wanted. If I want to configure it to always have that bell, I can do that in here somewhere. I'm not going to try. Here it is. Yeah. So I can show the bell if you want that back. So two separate interfaces for that. When this is complete, this will just be a cleaner looking area down there in the corner. So that's kind of cool. And we'll minimize that because I'm probably going to need it again. If you were paying attention last year or not paying attention, you probably would have noticed that we had about, I don't know, 17 different changes to Copilot. There's been another change since. In fact, there's been a couple of changes. So as far as the app itself goes, Copilot now is a new app. It's a native app, but it's kind of a native app, meaning it's really still a web app, but it's in a native app container. So there's going to be some stuff going on here in the near future, but for now, this looks a lot like the previous version of the app, but they made some changes that are just related to how things are going to work under the covers and for businesses. We're going to get to that in a moment. But as far as you're concerned, just as an individual, as a user, the app basically looks and works a lot like it did before. But the big change now is you can go into personalization this will take a second. I'm having settings, app issues today and text input. And once this loads, you'll see this new customized Copilot key. So there's three choices here. The default if you have Copilot installed is Copilot. Obviously that's for the Copilot key on your keyboard if you have one. If you don't have Copilot installed, it will default to search. So the Same shortcut as Windows key + Q or Windows key + S. Or there's this custom option which seems promising, but it's not. So you only get these two options. Copilot is obvious enough. And then Microsoft 365 Copilot is a new app I'm going to talk about in a second. Ideally, what you would do is either turn this thing off completely if that's what you want, or have it launch arbitrarily any app. So there are ways to fix this. I'll talk about one at the end of the show. But for now, these are the built in options that you get. Better than nothing, but not much better, right? Okay, so that new app, the other new app, if you look in the start menu here and try to ignore this weird pane over on the side, you can see this Microsoft 365 copilot app. And it looks a lot like the Copilot app, right? Same basic icon. But this M365, when you launch it, it acts like I've never launched it before. But when it comes up, what you see is what is clearly the Microsoft 365 app from before, which used to be the Microsoft Office app. So this is that all in one experience for Microsoft 365 Online, all of the documents you've accessed recently, all of the apps you have, there's been some changes over the past year or so, where in the past, if I launched Word this way, it would launch the web version, which is not great. But now if you have that app installed, it actually installs the app, which is what you want. So that's pretty good. They made this change primarily for businesses, but you'll be able to come in here and eventually what you're going to see over here on the side are Copilot experiences as well, related to like the chatbot or some of the things you can do to, you know, create things using AI. So that's not here yet, but this is the, the beginning of what will become. I'm going to call this the Microsoft 365 copilot experience, mostly for businesses, but for the consumers that are paying for Microsoft 365 Copilot Pro or Plus whatever that's called, the paid subscription, this will be the front end for that as well.