As you head towards the weekend, the Windows Insiders team at Microsoft has just dropped Windows 10 Insider preview build 17017 for PCs. This build is available for both Windows Insiders in the Fast ring as well as for those who opted in to Skip Ahead.
Now that the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update (Redstone 3) is just about done, Microsoft has shared that the company will now release new builds for RS4 (Redstone 4) from the RS_PRERELEASE branch to Insiders in the Fast ring and those who opted in to Skip Ahead at the same time.
This build introduces a few new features… thankfully, because it’s been a while since we saw any of those.
Cortana Collections
Cortana now saves you time and stress by noticing and remembering things for you and putting them at your fingertips. Cortana can gather things you’re interested in such as items you shop for, restaurants, recipes, and books you’d like to check out, movies and TV shows you want to watch – and puts them all into neatly organized lists from which you can pick the ones you like best.
The Cortana Collections feature is available for EN-US Insiders only, mind you.
Simplified actions between Cortana and Action Center
In the previous feature updates of Windows 10 (including the Fall Creators Update), there were two places to go to see the next action you might need to take: Cortana and Action Center. We heard feedback that this was confusing as it wasn’t clear where to go. The fact that Cortana’s insights and recommended actions lived outside of Action Center also made it impossible to focus Cortana’s user interface on Cortana’s natural language and search capabilities. To fix both of these problems, Cortana’s proactive content is going to migrate to Action Center so that you have one place to go to find out what action to take next and to see the important insights Cortana has for you. This frees up Cortana’s user interface to provide tips, educating customers about what can be said to Cortana, and to provide tools for search so that you can get the information you need as quickly as possible. You will see the first part of this change starting with this build with Cortana no longer offering proactive content. Over time, you will see the proactive content that used to be available in Cortana show up in Action Center.
Startup Settings
The list of apps that are configured to run at startup or user log-in is currently maintained via the Startup tab in Task Manager. As part of our ongoing effort to consolidate our settings experience, now you can configure them in Settings! In our new Startup page under Settings > Apps, you can see all startup tasks installed for the current user, and enable/disable each of them. We will also display the impact they have on your startup time, as shown in the below picture.
The build also brings a bunch of general fixes and improvements, along with a few known issues. Make sure you read about them here before making the plunge.
Slight chance, you might run in to an issue with the download. Windows Insider has just tweeted about the update not being ready for some users. The team is investigating – we’ll keep a watch on this, and update the post when we learn more details.
#WindowsInsiders trying to download 17017: we’re seeing reports of “update being prepared” coming in. Teams are actively investigating!
— Windows Insider (@windowsinsider) October 13, 2017
Have a great weekend exploring the new features, and if you’re an active Windows Insider, do share your feedback about those with Microsoft.
