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Paul Thurrott (0:50)
Coming up next on Hands on Windows. It's a day that ends in Y. So we've got some more new Windows 11 feature.
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Paul Thurrott (1:03)
This is TWiT. Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Thurad and this week we are going to look at some new features coming to 25H2. As I record this, we're kind of late in the game. Microsoft has acknowledged the name. We talked about that in our earlier episode. They've released it to release Preview. It should be going into kind of like stable preview, if that makes sense through a preview update. I would say in September. Nope, actually in October 2025 and then probably broadly to everybody by November. So you'll be able to get it soon. Actually you could get it now if you don't mind putting a PC in the release preview. But since they announced the name was official and since they pushed it into release Preview, they've actually started releasing more new features. So these are things that will just go out to everybody on a supported version of Windows 11. So if you have 24H or 25H2 when that comes out, you should be getting these Also. I should just qualify this by saying the unfortunate reality of Windows 11 is that these things don't go out the same time to all computers. So I worked on this list on a different computer, came here and some of the features aren't on here, of course. So I have screenshots for at least some of these and then we can kind of get through it that way. But that's, you know, that's the nature of Windows. So the first one is lock screen customization Now, I know that one's not here, but I'm going to check just in case. And so over time, Microsoft has been allowing people to customers to customize this lock screen in different ways. This one is just the old system. This is if you have widgets, you can have them all, you can have none. These are your two options. So it says weather and more, but I do have a set of screenshots showing the new interface for this. And so. And that is not it. So let me find that. Oh, here we go. So this is what it's going to look like soon, if you don't see this already. And what you get here is the ability to determine which widgets are here, which order they're in. You can only have four. You can add a widget, and if you add a widget, it will replace the thing that's on the bottom. And you can see actually these two options here are kind of oddball ones because those aren't the default items. Usually it's weather, today's moment, whatever that is, finances and sports. Right. And so I did two ads and it's much like the widgets interface. That's right. On the Windows 11 desktop where you see a list of available widgets, there'll be more soon, hopefully from third parties, et cetera. But this is kind of a nice thing. So you can turn it on or off as before, but now you can also determine which ones appear and the order they appear in. Or you will be able to soon if you don't see that. Yeah, there you go. There's also another suggestion thing down here. I recommend turning that off, but I'll leave that one up to you. Okay, so there's that and then this one I don't have a shot for, unfortunately, but they are also changing the widgets interface that's on the desktop. And so basically what you're going to see here soon is a side rail or a nav bar where you get a choice between a widget view or a widget view with a Discover feed. When you go into this settings interface, which is about to be much more streamlined than you see here, you'll be able to select other feeds to add those to the widget board as well as other widgets. Of course, I checked that today, there are still no third party feeds. So this is more theory than reality at this point. But that is coming, so we'll get there. And that's actually a really nice update. So unfortunately I can't show that to you. So over time, Microsoft has Been improving various parts of Windows for people with copilot plus PCs. We talked about semantic search in an earlier episode, Copilot Vision, obviously recall and Click to do and all the other features that are there. But one of the best ones to me is just the way they're improving search kind of across the board. So semantic search, which is available in the file system and File Explorer, it's available through Start Search, et cetera. But also now we have this kind of setting search. And so this one is interesting because there's two components. There's the natural language part. So if I type in, say, something like dark, it understands that maybe, or tries to understand that maybe I'm looking for this kind of thing. Or I can type in like Taskbar. And then what we're starting to see are these AI recommendations at the top. Now this one, I guess it's a reasonable recommendation. That's kind of interesting. But better still than this is a feature that's not yet on this particular computer, which is inline AI based. I think of this as like a do it. You know, instead of clicking on a link to go to a page in Settings where you can look for the setting that does the change, you can actually just do it right here in line. Right. And so this is a. They call this a settings agent for some reason. This uses a small language model that's running on the computer. It's literally customized and optimized just for settings and all of the options that are in Settings. That's all it does. So you'll be updating that thing every month for the rest of your life. But useful, right? This is useful. This is a Byzantine app. You shouldn't have to know where things are. It's. It's not a. It's actually kind of a decent idea. More. It's got a better view here for a little while. More changes to File Explorer. So if you have this default home page on, I'm getting a recommended file. This is because it's something I've been looking at a lot. Apparently this was a feature that was in File Explorer about a year ago, but only for people who sign in with a work or school account. Now it's coming to consumers as well. If I go into the Pictures folder and right click a photo, there's a lot of changes coming to this context menu as well, which you also get on the desktop, right, this style of context menu. But there's more stuff if you do this with a file so subtly. They've changed this a couple times. Remember this Used to just be these icons which were kind of like hieroglyphics. And then they added the words so you understand what they are. Now there's a little line between them. So that's cute, but that's not really all that exciting. They're starting to change the icons over here so that they match the way the icons look over here, meaning they're not square. So actually you do see that here on the other system I was using today, these are still square. And that's what it's looked like since Windows 11 came out. I don't know why, but anyway, they're updating that visually. That's not a big deal. The bigger deal is that actually, let me go back to this right here. What we have is a share item. That's the same thing as this share up here. One of the other updates brings a share with and then you get a submenu with all of the applications that are compatible with that thing. And you might ask, well, I could do open with what's share with? What's the difference? And the difference is that the item that could be in here could not. It doesn't have to be the name of just the app. It could literally be a feature in an app. So if it just says the app's name, you'll actually go to the thing that makes most sense in that app for whatever that thing is, for whatever it is you're trying to do.