Microsoft have released a new Windows 10 Redstone 2build for Windows Insiders on the fast ring. Build 14942 has a few UI changes and some under the hood changes. On the UI side there is an option to hide the apps list on the Start menu which Microsoft say is an often requested feature (not sure why myself) plus there is a new Windows Update icon:

The photo app has been updated with a new light viewing mode and new transitions in full screen mode.

The “under the hood” changes include improved touchpad recognition:

Refining your precision touchpad experience: Based on the feedback we have received, we have made some adjustments to our gesture and click detection on precision touchpads. This includes enhancing detection and disambiguation of left and right clicks, making two finger taps and clicks a bit easier, reducing false positives in our two-finger tap detection and improving our pinch to zoom detection. We have also made algorithm changes in an effort to reduce inadvertent zooming when panning. If you have a precision touchpad on your device, please take the opportunity try out with this build and let us know how it feels with these changes.

Plus the way Windows manages memory for background services has been changed splitting out the task. So if your PC has 3.5GB or more memory services will be put in to an increased number of processes making it easier to see which service is doing what and making the system more reliable.

Other changes are a large range for Active Hours for when your PC automatically reboots after updates. Here are the other fixes and the know issues and look out for my hands on video soon:

Other improvements and fixes for PC

We’ve updated Narrator’s reading order for Windows 10 apps which display an app bar on the bottom of the app, for example OneDrive, so now the contents of the page will be read before the contents of the app bar.

We fixed an issue where running sfc /scannow in an elevated command prompt would fail at 20% with the error “could not perform the requested operation.”

We fixed an issue resulting in certain areas of Windows 10 app notifications not doing anything when clicked, rather than opening the corresponding app.

We fixed an issue resulting in Personalization > Background Settings page crashing or showing a blank context menu when right clicking one of the recent images .

Fixed an issue resulting in Windows Defender’s Antimalware Service Executable sometimes using an unexpectedly large amount of CPU.

We fixed an issue resulting in the Devices and Printers page in Control Panel loading slowly for users with certain audio devices.

We fixed an issue resulting in a small set of users seeing the NTFS partition of their external hard drive incorrectly showing up as RAW format.

Going forward from Build 14942, custom printer names will be preserved across upgrades. We’ve also addressed an issue where the printer queue name wasn’t preserved across upgrade for some printers.

Improved framerates when Game Bar is enabled for full screen games.

Known issues for PC

Insiders doing web development may find themselves their local intranet server unreachable, as service host separation will leave the IIS World Wide Web Publishing Service (W3Svc) unable to start successfully. To fix this issue:

Run the following from an admin cmd line (or edit the registry accordingly):

REG ADD HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W3SVC /v SvcHostSplitDisable /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

REG ADD HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WAS /v SvcHostSplitDisable /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

Reboot the system, so that the W3Svc and WAS services share a service host process.

Read more on Microsoft’s blog.

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