It’s been an interesting last couple of days on the Windows 10 front. Just yesterday, I got word that a new technical preview had become available, so I upgraded both of my test machines to what promises to be the first in a series of builds whose numerical designations begin with “11xxx” instead of the “10xxx” associated with the initial version first released this summer. Later that same day, a new Cumulative update (KB3124200) for production Windows 10 showed up with a designation of 10586.36 (up by .07 from the previous production version numbered 10586.29). Here are the side-by-side Winver outputs from my production PC (left) and Dell VP 11 7139 (right):

The downloads from Windows Update were flying fast and furious yesterday (12/17/2015).
[Click image for larger version]

The New Tech Preview: 11082.1000
I’m not sure where the .1000 suffix in this version number comes from, but there you have it. Installation went without a hitch on both test machines (a Dell VP 11 7139 hybrid tablet, and an i7-2600K homebrew desktop), and quite quickly as well. Total size of the download was on the order of 2.5 GB, and the Windows.old files on the post-install systems were just over 15 GB (Dell) and 18 GB (desktop). I did find some spurious drivers (older versions rendered obsolete by newer ones) in the DriverStore after the update, mostly for graphics devices (Intel and Nvidia), system devices (Intel and others), and network adapters (Atheros and Intel). But both systems kept chugging along nicely after the upgrade was complete, and seem to be working just fine. So far, I can’t tell much difference between the pre- and post-update OS versions, but I haven’t made a detailed pass over the basic system utilities and File Explorer interfaces just yet, either. I’ll report further later as stuff pops up under my eyeballs, or in the news elsewhere.

A New Cumulative Update Takes Production Win10 to 10586.36
As is apparently now typical for Windows 10 cumulative updates, KB3124200 (x64) appeared without explanatory details as to what’s been changed or updated with this code tweak (see Catalog page for complete collection; IE required to view this page as intended). So far, only a few TenForums users are reporting issues with the update (one with PIN vs. password login, some with miscellaneous error codes) and most are reporting modest but noticeable performance improvements, especially in File Explorer and the built-in search function. A handful have reported fixes to some networking and Bluetooth issues. Over at InfoWorld, Woody Leonhard reports that “one bug that caused the WLAN AutoConfig service to crash randomly, bringing down Wi-Fi services in the process” may have been fixed. Woody also provides an interesting list of cumulative updates released since build 1511 first appeared that confirms my gut feeling that we’d been seeing these things at a better-than-once-a-week frequency:

In the five weeks since build 1511 appeared, I count six cumulative updates:

Version 1511 (OS Build 10586), released Nov. 12, is the first version 1511 — the one that raised the old RTM build 10240 version of Win10 to the November Update/Threshold 2 level
*  Cumulative Update 1, KB 3105211, Nov. 10, build 10586.3
*  Cumulative Update 2, KB 3118754, Nov. 18, build 10586.11
*  Cumulative Update 3, KB 3120677, Nov. 24, build 10586.14
*  Cumulative Update 4, KB 3116908, Dec. 2, build 10586.17
*  Cumulative Update 5, KB 3116900, Dec. 8, build 10586.29
*  Cumulative Update 6, KB 3124200, Dec. 17, build 10586.36

None of the other usual sources for good Windows 10 news and details (such as WinBeta.org and NeoWin.net) shed any further light on this cumulative update as yet. Stay tuned for more news on this, too!

Note:

The article was originally published by Ed Tittel @ TechTarget: IT Knowledge Exchange on December 18th, 2015. It is reproduced on this blog with an author’s permission.