Microsoft releases Windows 10 Build 14959, introduces new Unified Update Platform

Last week, Microsoft officially announced the name of the upcoming Windows 10 update: the Creators Update(codenamed “Redstone 2”). Today, the company is releasing with a new update platform, which will make updating to new builds much smoother on your Windows 10 devices.

With Windows 10 Build 14959, Microsoft is introducing a new update platform called the Unified Update Platform (UUP) which will essentially download the bits you need for a new update. For instance, when there’s a new Windows 10 Insider preview, Windows Update won’t download the whole build — instead, it will only update the required bits. In a blog post, Microsoft’s Bill Karagounis explained that the new UUP system on Windows 10 will have a huge impact on the update sizes for PCs. According to Microsoft, UUP will decrease download size by up to 35% when downloading a major new update for the OS. In addition to the UUP, Microsoft is also changing how devices check for new updates — the Check for Update process will be much faster in the future thanks to UUP as most of the processing will no longer be done locally on your device. Of course, all of these improvements are happening behind the scenes which means you probably won’t notice any difference in the front-end just yet.

Windows 10 Build 14959 also brings a very neat feature for power users — with the latest build, Windows 10 Insiders can now control the display scaling for their virtual machines. The update brings a new Zoom option to the View menu in Hyper-V, which will allow users to set the scaling to 100, 125, 150 or 200.

Microsoft is going to add a lot more features over the coming months, and users in the Insider program will be the first to be able to try them out — thanks to the new Unified Update Platform, updating to new builds should be a lot smoother! As for everyone else, the Creators Update is set to arrive in early 2017. In the meantime, make sure to stay tuned to MSPU for the latest news and more on the Windows 10 Creators Update.