Microsoft
The Windows 11 24H2 update isn’t scheduled to be released until sometime this fall, but testers can get a near-final version early. Microsoft has released Windows 11 24H2 build 26100.712 to its Release Preview testing channel for Windows Insiders, a sign that the update is nearly complete and that the company has gone into bug-fix mode ahead of general availability.
Microsoft generally stuck to smaller but more frequent feature updates during the Windows 11 era, but the annual fall updates are still more important. They’re the ones that determine whether you’re still eligible for security updates, and they often (but not always) come with more significant internal changes than normal feature drops.
Case in point: Windows 11 24H2 includes an updated compiler, kernel, and scheduler, all lower-level system changes made at least in part to better support Arm-based computers. Existing Windows-on-Arm systems should also see a 10 or 20 percent increase in performance when running x86 applications, thanks to improvements in the translation layer (which Microsoft now calls Prism).
There are also more user-visible changes. 24H2 includes Sudo for Windows, the ability to create TAR and 7-zip archives from File Explorer, Wi-Fi 7 support, a new power-saving mode, and better support for Bluetooth Low Energy Audio. It also allows users to launch the Copilot AI chatbot in a regular, resizable window that can be docked to the taskbar, instead of always giving it a dedicated strip of screen space.
Other new Windows features are tied to the 24H2 update, but will only be available on Copilot+ PCs that have their own specific system requirements: 16GB of memory, 256GB of storage, and a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) capable of at least 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS). At the moment, the only chips that meet the requirements are Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Plus and X Elite processors, although Intel and AMD systems with faster NPUs should be released later this year. Microsoft will maintain a separate list of processors that support Copilot+ features.
The biggest 24H2 feature specific to Copilot+ computers is Recall, which continuously takes snapshots of everything you do with your computer so you can look up your own activities later. This comes with obvious privacy and security risks, though Microsoft says that all of Recall’s data is encrypted on disk and processed entirely locally by the NPU, rather than using the cloud. Other Copilot+ features include Live Captions for captioning video files or video calls in real time, and features for generating new images and enhancing existing images.
Taken together, all these changes make 24H2 the most significant version of Windows 11 since the 22H2 update came out a year and a half ago. 22H2 has served as the basis for most new Windows features since then, including the Copilot chatbot, and 23H2 was mostly just a version number change released to reset the clock on Microsoft’s security update timeline.
Despite all these changes and additions, the 24H2 update is still called Windows 11, still looks like Windows 11, and does not change the official minimum system requirements of Windows 11. Unsupported installations will stop working on several generations of older 64-bit x86 processors , although those chips are old and slow enough that they wouldn’t work with Windows 11 very well in the first place.
For people who want to start over, the release ISO files are available from Microsoft’s download page here. You can update a current installation of Windows 11 from the Insider section of the Settings app. Microsoft says it expects the full release “later this calendar year.” Based on past precedent, it’s most likely to be released in the fall, but will likely ship a bit earlier than the first wave of Copilot+ Arm PCs, which will be available in mid-June.
