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Hands-On Windows 193: Windows 11 Update Overhaul (6/2026)
00:14:58
Major Changes to Windows Update and Taskbar
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Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to look at two major updates coming soon to Windows 11, to Windows Update, and to the Taskbar. This is a big one.
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Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit.
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Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Thurat, and last week we talked about changes to the Windows Insider program. Tied to this are other changes coming to Windows 11 that we can test in the Insider program. Microsoft had that pain point announcements a couple of months ago. They've started implementing changes. We've been talking about this for months. It's. It's actually kind of a big deal. I think we're going to be talking about this for a long time. So for this episode, what I wanted to do was look at two of the changes that Microsoft has shipped to the Insider program, which is giving people a chance to test it before it goes out in stable. It's possible by the time you see this video, it might even just be generally available. But if not, you can join or enroll any computer in the Insider program and test this for yourself if you want to come see this stuff. So the first of the two is tied to Windows Update. So if you open the Settings app and navigate to Windows Update, this basically looks the same as it did before. So in this system, I've enrolled it in the Insider program. It's in the experimental channel. I enabled all the feature flags, so I see all the changes. If you're familiar with Windows Update, this should look almost the same. So you can still get those preview updates automatically if you want, still get update history. All the same advanced features as before, including optional updates, delivery optimization, etc. And then the Insider program stuff. So looking at this, I mean, hopefully most people don't look at this per se, but people like us, you know, we check for updates, we do this kind of stuff. The goal here for Windows Update with Microsoft is to reduce the interruptions, allow you to skip updates during PC setup. So when you first bring up a computer, if there's a feature update to install, you're actually going to be able to skip over that. I've seen this now, I think twice. That saves up to 40 minutes depending on your computer. It's kind of cool. You can install that later. Just get to the desktop, fewer automatic restarts and notifications. Although, again, if you go into advanced options, you can kind of control that to some degree already. But the goal here is a single reboot every month, which I've never seen, but that's the system. So once you install the feature flag, if you're an insider program or once this is just updated in Windows, you will come to Windows Update. And the obvious change, the big change is this thing here. So this is the Pause Updates interface. So before what you could do is click this, I think seven times, six or seven times, and extend the pause out one week each time you clicked. And once you did that, this would change into an unpause button essentially and you could click this just to go back to normal. So the promise here is that you will be able to pause updates essentially forever. That's not technically true because obviously at some point there'll be a zero day something or whatever, some, you know, very serious security problem and you'll have to install that update and your system will have to reboot. But what they are doing here is just giving you kind of a nice calendar control where by default I'm recording this on. Let's see if I can figure out how to scroll through this thing. So it set it to. Oh, that is the date. I'm sorry, let me do that again. So this is the date I'm recording this on is May 21st. And they're giving me this calendar here where I can go out to here. But the way that this works in effect is that if I choose that date as we get closer to that date, I can then keep extending it. So it's technically, you know, better than it was before in the sense that it doesn't hard stop at the sixth or seventh week. You can just keep going again, not really forever, but you can do this for months. Potentially. They've just implemented this, so there's no experience yet with how this will or will not really happen. But the idea here is that for those people that really just don't want to install updates, just want to keep that thing running and pretend they're using Linux or something. I guess this will give you that opportunity. So it's too soon now to, you know, see how well it does work with that further extension thing. But, but you can do that. That's the theory anyway. So that's, that's nice. And we will be right back after this message.
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This episode of Hands on Windows brought to you by Thinkst Canary. Did I tell you, Paul, about our tale of woe? We got a notice from Google saying that somebody had stolen our workspace credentials and was in our workspace. Google had gotten rid of them by then. But here's the thing that really terrified me. We found out that they got Access to our workspace in January, it was 121 days before we found out they were in the workspace. 121 days that they could do anything they want. Now, fortunately, they seemed occupied, probably hacking other people. They got so many credentials, they didn't get around to us. They looked at a few emails, that's it. So we dodged a bullet. But man, it reminded me how important Thinkst canaries are things. Canaries are honey pots, easy to deploy, a hundred percent secure, but they can do something nothing else can do. They will let you know if there's somebody in your network. If we'd had, well, one of the things you do with ThinksCanary, you put it on your network. You should probably have one for every network segment. So a big bank, you know, might have hundreds of security operation for a casino, might have hundreds. Small business like ours, just a handful. But the other thing that the Thinks Canary can also do is deploy something called Canary tokens. These are files, or they look like files. They could be almost anything. A spreadsheet, a, you know, word document, a PDF. They can be oddball things, they can be a wire guard configuration. There are hundreds of different things they could be, but they aren't really right. So this, if I had done this, I would be. Okay, you can put on your cloud. If I had done this on our Google workspace. Fake files, they're like trip wires. Things like. Well, I had one. I don't know where it's. I think it's on my workspace, not in the company's workspace. That's my mistake. Where they said payroll information looked like a Google sheet, a hacker sees that, they go, okay, I gotta get that. They either try to download it or open it and boom, you know there's somebody in the network. If somebody's accessing your Lora files, your fake phony files, or brute forcing that fake internal SSH server, your Thinks Canary will immediately tell you you have a problem. No false alerts, no waiting 121 days to find out there's somebody in the network. You'll learn immediately because that's why the hackers are there, to snoop around, to try stuff. My Thinks Canary can be anything. A Windows server, a Linux server, it can be a SharePoint server, it could be an Exchange server, it could be a SCADA device, it could, I mean, it could be almost any kind of hardware and it is indistinguishable from the real thing. You just choose a profile for your Things Canary device. It's so easy to do you could do it every day, every five minutes if you want. It takes nothing. You register with the hosted console for monitoring and notifications and you sit back and wait. These things to Canary Honeypots are indistinguishable from the real thing. They have the actual Mac address. You know, those tokens look exactly like the real thing and they connect back to the Thinx Canary. So they even look like they're connecting to the internal network. These guys know what they're doing. But once this militia's insider or the attacker accesses that thinks Canary or access is one of those Canary tokens, you're going to get the alert. No false alerts, just the alerts that matter. And you get it any way you want. Email, sms, Slack webhooks are supported API. There's a great API, syslog, of course, anything basically. So you'll get those notifications and when you do, pay attention because it means there's somebody in the network shouldn't be there. You need these things. Visit Canary Tools/Twit. If you wanted, let's say you just wanted five, $7,500 a year, you get five things Canaries, you get your own hosted console, you get upgrades, you get support, you get maintenance. And if you use the code twit in the how did you hear about us? Box, you will also get 10% off the price. And that's not just for the first year, but forever. Now here's the other thing that should reassure you. There's no risk. You can always return your things Canary, they have a two month, 60 day money back guarantee for a full refund. But I have to tell you this, this is their 10th year. The 10th year I've been talking about thinks canaries on Twit. In all that time, that refund has never been claimed, not once. Because you know what? Once you realize what you're. What you got here, you're not going to let it go. This is such an important device, part of a truly effective layered security setup. Visit Canary Tools Twit. Enter the code Twit in the how did you hear about us? Box. You need this thing. The Thinkst Canary. All right, back to hands on Windows. Paul.
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The bigger update, or really set of updates is for the taskbar. So I think I have. Let me see if I have a shot of this. Yeah, if you look at. Well, we looked at this before. So Microsoft had promised to allow you to move the taskbar to other parts of the screen, meaning the sides. So the top, the left to right, side, Right. Not just on the bottom. This was, you know, something a lot of enthusiasts, especially power users, was asking for. I'm not really sure how many people were using the taskbar like this, but in Windows 11, the taskbar has always been stuck to the bottom of the screen. It's just been the way it is. So they're going to change that. And I think I showed this shot earlier. Hilarious. But the other thing that we lost, and this gets talked about a lot less, and this was a bigger deal for me, is that they used to be able to make the taskbar smaller. So all of the icons would be smaller, the taskbar itself would be shorter, and it would take up a lot less space on screen. If I go out of here and you look at this taskbar, you can see it's pretty big, it's tall, it's taller than I want. And I've tried different things. You can hide the taskbar, obviously, but then you can't see the time. So I've done different things over the past couple years to try to get around this. Microsoft recently added the ability to make the icon smaller, which can be automatic, or you could just do it manually and say, I want them always to be smaller. But here's a shot of what that looks like. So this is the normal taskbar here. So, yeah, the icons are smaller, but the taskbar is the same size. It's like, what is this thing? So to get around this problem, I used utilities. One of the better ones is start 11 also has some taskbar controls. And one of the things you can do with Start 11 is make the taskbar smaller in Windows 11, which is something that should just be built in. But the good news is that's actually going to happen. So if you're familiar with this, you know, you can go into the Settings personalization taskbar. And like the Windows Update interface we just looked at, it looks the same, right? It's basically the same thing. But if you go in to a little further. Oh, here we go. Taskbar behaviors. You're gonna see some new things. So the first one is this task. Taskbar position interface. So you can put it over on the left, right? And this is that interface that kind of showed off. But now you can test it if you're inside a program, right? Move it to the top. You know, same deal. You know, everything works. It. The animations occur from the right places. You know, they're walking through this to make sure that it's right. But, you know, it looks pretty good to me. You Think about the way the flyout works here. It's not horizontally laid out, it's vertically laid out. That makes sense. It's pretty good. But as you can see, the problem here is that the taskbar is still humongous. So they have said that they're going to make or give you the ability to make the taskbar smaller. They haven't changed the text. It still says show smaller taskbar buttons, but this actually makes the taskbar smaller now, which is what everyone wanted, right? So if you change this to always just so you can see it, you can see now, not only are the buttons on the taskbar smaller, but the entire taskbar is smaller. It's not quite half, but it's almost half the height. And that to me, that to me is the greatest thing that's ever happened. This is such a huge improvement. I've wanted this so bad, I had to disable it to start the recording here. But I've got to leave. This is how my computers are always going to look. I mean, there's just no doubt about it. So you can really get an idea of, you know, this is what people have been asking for, some of them Anyway, since Windows 11 first came out. Microsoft has steadfastly said, nope, we're not doing that too. But too few people do. It's not worth it. But as part of this pain points initiative that they're doing in 2026, they are making this change. You can test it now on the Insider program and you should be able to get it stable soon. And so as I record this in very late May 2026, this is in the experimental channel, so it's reasonable to expect June, July, somewhere in that timeframe, it will head into the beta channel. If it's not already there by the time you see this, it will make its way into the release preview channel and then it will ship out as a preview update at some point. So I would say probably June ish or July. And then you'll be able to get this in stable and it will just happen and we'll finally have what so many of us wanted for so long. So it's good news. Hopefully you found this useful. It's possible you found this exciting enough that you're joining the Insider program now. So I certainly did.
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I.
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This is something I don't really care about where the thing is, but I want it to be smaller. This is wonderful. So thank you so much for watching. Thank you especially to our club Twit members. If you're not a member please consider joining. You can find out more about that program at TWiT TV Club TWiT. You can learn more about this podcast at Twitt TV HR we have a new episode every Thursday, so I'll see you next week. Thank you.
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Hey everybody, it's Leo laporte. Are you trying to keep up with the world of Microsoft? It's moving fast, but we have two of the best experts in the world, Paul Farat and Richard Campbell. They join me every Wednesday to talk about the latest from Microsoft on Windows Weekly. It's a lot more than just Windows. I hope you'll listen to the show every Wednesday. Easy enough. Just subscribe in your favorite podcast client to Windows Weekly or visit our website, Twit tv. WW Microsoft's moving fast, but there's a way to stay ahead. That's Windows Weekly every Wednesday on Twitter.
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