Soon Microsoft will release a new feature update to Windows 10, the update is coded named 19H2, labeled 1909 and will probably called the Windows 10 October 2019 Update. Unlike the previous semi-annual updates to Windows 10 this release is a modest update with Microsoft focusing on performance improvements, enterprise features and quality enhancements.

Microsoft will be delivering the 19H2 as smaller cumulative update to Windows 10 based on the May 2019 Update rather than the large 4GB updates of previous feature releases. At time of writing the latest build number is 18363.327.

What are the changes in Windows 10 19H2 (codenamed 1909)?

End users are not going to see a great deal of changes with 19H2 (codenamed 1909). This update is about being stable and enterprise ready so business can rollout the release with confidence that it is not going to eat all their users previous data, not that previous updates could done that!

So what are the changes that you will notice? Well there are subtle little changes like the when you mouse hover over the start menu items like Settings, Pictures and Documents it expands the menu so you can see what the buttons do.

You can quickly create an event directly in the calendar flyout from the taskbar.

With 19H2 you have better control of app notifications and the setting are a bit clearer.

In Notification settings you can now see apps sending notifications sorted by Most Recent so easily control which apps get to send notification. There is also the option to turn off sounds when notification arrive. There is also a “Manage notifications” button in Action Center and a notification setting button on the notification as they arrive. The notification app screen has seen a tweak that improves the setting screen so you can tell the different between banner and action center notifications.

A minor change that could see a bigger change for Windows is Microsoft have enable third-party digital assistants to voice activate above the Lock screen. So you could see Amazon Alexa fully integrated into Windows in the same way Cortana is currently integrated.

The rest of the changes are minor and under the hood:

• There are additional debugging capabilities for newer Intel processors
• General battery life and power efficiency improvements for PCs with certain processors
• A CPU may have multiple “favored” cores (logical processors of the highest available scheduling class). To provide better performance and reliability, we have implemented a rotation policy that distributes work more fairly among these favored cores
• A fix to allow OEMs to reduce the inking latency based on the hardware capabilities of their devices rather than being stuck with latency selected on typical hardware configuration by the OS.
• Key-rolling or Key-rotation feature enables secure rolling of Recovery passwords on MDM managed AAD devices upon on demand request from in-tune/MDM tools or upon every time recovery password is used to unlock the BitLocker protected drive. This feature will help prevent accidental recovery password disclosure as part of manual BitLocker drive unlock by users.
• Windows containers require matched host and container version. This restricts customers and limits Windows containers from supporting mixed-version container pod scenarios This update includes 5 fixes to address this and allow the host to run down-level containers on up-level for process (Argon) isolation.

The update will be delivered via Windows Update and fortunately is a nice small package.

Here is my hands on video: