Today Microsoft released Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 19013 (20H1) to Windows Insiders in the Slow ring.

Till now Slow Ring users were only receiving Windows 10 19H2 builds, which of course ultimately did not carry many interesting improvements, except for making calendar entries from the clock widget.

Slow Ring users, in particular, will receive Build 19013.112 which includes a fix for the issue where the Settings app would hang or crash when accessing the System or Ease of Access sections. It also has the following improvements and issues:

More kaomoji

As some of you may know, with Windows 10 version 1903, Microsoft updated their WIN+(Period) / WIN+(Semicolon) keyboard shortcut to not only include emoji, but to also now contain kaomoji and special characters. What are kaomoji? Basically, they’re faces with expressions you can make by combining various characters–for example, you might be familiar with the shruggie:

¯\_(?)_/¯

In any case, based on your feedback, in this build Microsoft is updating their kaomoji list with a few more favourites, including:

And more! Enjoy

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2 will now release unused Linux memory back to your Windows machine

Previously, your WSL 2 Virtual Machine’s (VM) memory would grow to meet the needs of your workflow, but would not shrink back down when the memory was no longer needed.  With this change, as memory is no longer in use in the Linux VM, it will be freed back to Windows, which will shrink in memory size accordingly.

Other updates for Insiders

PowerToys v0.12 now available!

Microsoft has just released its 0.12 release of PowerToys on GitHub. Microsoft has gotten tons of great feedback and suggestions from the community and wants to directly say thank you to everyone.

New features include a great new utility called PowerRename, which makes it easy to batch rename a bunch of files, improvements to FancyZones, and support for Dark Mode.

Check out their latest article for all the details.

Your Phone app–Elevating the Phone screen feature by removing its dependency on Bluetooth connection

Windows Insiders, Microsoft heard your feedback about the Phone screen feature’s dependency on Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity. To address your feedback, Microsoft partnered closely with Samsung to bring you a more streamlined experience across all Windows 10 PCs by removing the peripheral role dependency for Phone screen, which will expand the overall reach of this feature.

Samsung Galaxy Note 10 was the first device to introduce this feature in August. After a positive response, Microsoft has recently enabled this feature across Samsung Galaxy Fold, S10, S10+, and S10e smartphones. You’ll need to update your supported Samsung devices with the recent software update that enables the ‘Link to Windows’ feature. To continue offering this experience to other smartphones, Microsoft is expanding this feature support to Samsung Galaxy A30s, A50s, and A90 smartphones, and Microsoft will continue to add additional devices in the coming months.

With the new experience rolling out, Microsoft will be removing the Bluetooth connectivity option, effective immediately. If you were previously enjoying Phone screen over Bluetooth and you have a phone model that doesn’t yet support Link to Windows, the Phone screen node will disappear automatically within the Your Phone app. Microsoft recommends that you unpair your devices by going to the Bluetooth settings on both your PC and your Android phone, so that you don’t have a connection that is no longer in use.

Thank you for helping us refine the Phone screen experience so far!

Phone screen requirements:

• Select Android phones running Android 9.0 or greater
• PC running Windows 10 October 2018 Update or later
• Android phone must be on and connected to the same network as the PC
• You will need a supported device to use this feature:
  • Samsung Galaxy Fold
  • Samsung Galaxy Note 10/ Note 10+
  • Samsung Galaxy S10/S10+/S10e
  • Samsung Galaxy A30s/A50s/A90

Refer to the Your Phone FAQs for additional information.

Preview new DirectX 12 features

In the latest 20H1 builds, you can preview new DirectX 12 features, including DirectX Raytracing tier 1.1, Mesh Shader, and Sampler Feedback. In this blog post, the DirectX Team explains what each of these features are and how they will improve the gaming experience in Windows 10!

General changes, improvements, and fixes for PC

• Microsoft fixed an issue resulting in frames being skipped, starting with Build 19002, when running games and videos fullscreen.
• Microsoft fixed an issue where initiating “Reset this PC” with the cloud download option wasn’t working when started from Windows RE.
• Microsoft fixed an issue resulting in preinstalled apps (like Calculator) and other UWP apps being missing from the Apps & Features page in Settings.
• Microsoft appreciates your patience while Microsoft worked on their sync engine. As of this build, wallpaper and theme syncing is now up and running again.
• Microsoft fixed an issue resulting in Wi-Fi unexpectedly resetting (turning off and back on) frequently in recent flights.
• Microsoft fixed an issue where Wi-Fi Settings might get stuck saying Connecting, even though the network flyout (correctly) indicated that you were Connected.
• Microsoft fixed an issue where an update being temporarily suspended would result in an 0xc19001e1 error being displayed in Windows Update history.
• Microsoft fixed an issue resulting in the “Open location” search result option not working if the search result was a folder.
• Microsoft fixed an issue where if you moved Cortana’s window to certain places on your screen, and then closed the window, the minimize animation wouldn’t go towards Cortana’s icon on the taskbar.
• Microsoft fixed an issue resulting in File Explorer not rendering correctly sometimes when using multiple monitors with different DPIs on the previous flight.
• Microsoft fixed an issue where you could get into a state where it wasn’t possible to set focus to File Explorer’s search box in order to type your query.
• Microsoft fixed an issue that could result in the app thumbnail disappearing when you right clicked it in Task View.
• Microsoft fixed an issue that could result in the Send Message button in certain notifications not being visible when using High Contrast White.
• Microsoft fixed an issue where the notification following WIN+Shift+S might have a blank space for the screenshot (rather than actually displaying the screenshot).
• Microsoft fixed an issue resulting in Resource Manager unexpectedly not showing any disk activity.
• Microsoft fixed an issue where, if you called SUBST with a path ending with a \ it would give a Path not found error.
• Microsoft fixed a memory leak with running apps that repeatedly sent calls to adjust gamma.
• Some of you have reached out about when trying to shutdown, seeing a message saying that an app named “G” was preventing shutdown. Microsoft investigated and found an issue where windows related to GDI+were only referenced as “G.” Microsoft has fixed this, so going forward, these will now have the name “GDI+ Window (<exe name>)”, where <exe name> will show the .exe name of the app using GDI+.
• Microsoft fixed an issue resulting in speechruntime.exe using an unexpectedly high amount of CPU on the previous flight.
• Microsoft fixed an issue resulting in Bluetooth devices potentially not reconnecting as expected after closing then reopening the device lid for certain devices.
• Microsoft fixed an issue resulting in the Surface Dial not scrolling in recent builds if you switched to something like zoom and then back to scrolling.
• Thank you Insiders who shared feedback about the 2-in-1 convertible tablet experience improvements Microsoft discussed here. For the time being, Microsoft is returning to the current experience in retail.
• Microsoft fixed an issue where Narrator would sometime report focus as the page instead of reporting the actual focused control within Chrome.
• Microsoft fixed an issue where Narrator would not automatically start reading the Narrator user guide webpage and the YouTube webpage.
• Microsoft corrected Narrator’s “Next Table” command so that it would work in Excel.
• Microsoft fixed an issue where the text cursor indicator was visible on top of the lock screen background picture.
• Microsoft fixed an issue where the text cursor indicator preview wasn’t displaying correctly in Settings when using dark theme.
• Microsoft fixed an issue where when using dark theme, the hardware keyboard text prediction candidate window was unreadable due to black text on a dark grey background.
• Microsoft fixed an issue that could result in the touch keyboard flickering when inputting emoji.
• Microsoft fixed an issue where English punctuations were outputted when using the Chinese Pinyin and Wubi IMEs, even if input mode was set to Chinese under the default IME settings. Thanks for your feedback.
• Microsoft has fixed an issue where the character width of alphanumeric characters when using the Traditional Chinese Bopomofo IME would change from half width to full width unexpectedly in some input fields. Thanks for reporting it! If you feel this issue hasn’t been fully addressed in the new version of Bopomofo IME, please let us know your feedback.
• Microsoft has fixed an issue where after successfully updating to a new build, the Windows Update Settings page may have shown the same build needed to be installed.
• Microsoft has fixed an issue where Optional drivers were failing to install.

Known issues

• BattlEye and Microsoft have found incompatibility issues due to changes in the operating system between some Insider Preview builds and certain versions of BattlEye anti-cheat software. To safeguard Insiders who might have these versions installed on their PC, Microsoft have applied a compatibility hold on these devices from being offered affected builds of Windows Insider Preview. See this article for details.
• Microsoft has heard that Settings still isn’t available outside of launching via the URI (ms-settings:) for some Insiders and are investigating.
• If you use remote desktop connection and the target PC is on this build, within about an hour (if not sooner), DWM may start crashing, and the session window will either go totally black, experience black flashes, or you may get signed out of the remote desktop session altogether. Microsoft appreciates your patience.

A full list of other improvements can be found at Microsoft here. Windows 10 Insiders in the Slow Ring can update to the new build by Checking for Updates in Settings.