Windows 10 22H2 and Windows 11 22H2 are in the final stretch before their official release. While Windows 11 22H2 may have some great features that I’m looking forward to, including additional ransomware protection (more on that next week), I realized I hadn’t been paying attention to features to come in Windows 10 22H2. So I looked for documentation on what was included in it and quickly realized why I mightn’t remember anything major – because Microsoft didn’t say much regarding it.
What he said, and actually it’s a good thing, is that Windows 10 22H2 upgrade from 22H1 will be an “activation” package – it uses a bit of code to activate the new features. Users already have the bulk of the 22H2 “features” already on their PCs waiting to be activated. As Microsoft a blogué the July 28 release contains an “extended feature set” which he will share more details regarding later. (The company already offers a preview to validate the publishing process.)
MicrosoftWindows 10 22H2 is not officially released yet, but there are ways to install and test it now.
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You can try it out now if your Windows 10 computer is enrolled in the Insider Channel and you choose to participate in the Release Preview Channel. Click on “check for updates” to put your PC in “finder mode” and offer you Windows 10 22H2. If you are a professional user (Windows 10 professional), you can actually get support for this release preview release. Installation didn’t take long and I didn’t see any visible changes initially. That said, on reboot I got a notification that Windows mightn’t find the Microsoft.YourPhone program. (Note: I was not using this app before installing.)
MicrosoftOops. Windows said it might not find the Microsoft.YourPhone program following an update.
Since this computer is running Windows 10 Professional, I reported the issue to Microsoft. I then restarted a second time and the message did not appear. But that’s clearly why the company is still testing the software in beta. These deployment issues usually do not cause major issues, but the final installation testing process is designed to catch these types of issues.
By the way, these days I don’t recommend anyone to buy or use a system without an SSD drive as a boot drive. Anyone with older hard drives will find that their system is getting slower and slower, with subpar performance.
So what exactly will Windows 10 22H2 bring? Often, for those of us in small businesses, not many features are introduced that we can use. In last year’s 21H2 release, the bulk of the new features were aimed at enterprise users and might only be effective with certain licenses or were only needed for specific use cases.
As a reminder, 21H2 included:
- Support for new WPA3 H2E standards for improved Wi-Fi security.
- Windows Hello for Business support for simplified, passwordless deployment models to get to a running deployment state in minutes.
- GPU compute support in Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and Azure IoT Edge for Linux on Windows (EFLOW) deployments for machine learning and other compute-intensive workflows.
What 21H2 did bring was a cycle of life end date october 2023 and two years of support beyond that date. Microsoft will continue to support at least one version of Windows 10 until October 14, 2025. (It’s unclear if 22H2 will be supported until 2025 or if we’ll receive another version before then.)
The most compelling feature I see in 22H2 is a very annoying extension of the support window. While that might excite those of us who have to fix and maintain systems — we actually want nice and boring updates and feature releases — it won’t excite anyone else.
I will recommend upgrading to Windows 10 22H2 once it’s released, but not right away. For now, I recommend using use local group policy or registry keys to stay on the current version of Windows for now. (I wrote regarding how to do this last year if you want detailed instructions.)
I expect that due to the large number of people still running Windows 10 with hardware that does not support Windows 11, Microsoft will offer extended support for the older OS that will be easy to enable. I know that at home and in my office I have very few machines that officially support Windows 11, so I won’t be upgrading them.
To reiterate: I will encourage users to install Windows 10 22H2, but only following waiting regarding a month to ensure there are no major issues. Because it doesn’t include many changes, this should be a painless upgrade for those of us looking forward to a nice, quiet, and uneventful feature release process.
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