This article is more than 1 year old

Time to burst out graphing: Get the Windows Insider experience... by taping a calculator to your monitor

Microsoft releases a Windows 10 Fast Ring refresh and previews new calc toys

While 45 years of carbon emissions from Microsoft were being scrutinised by execs last night, the Windows Insider team made an emission of its own, in the form of a fresh Windows 10 build.

Build 19546 continued the "steady as she goes" of recent releases to the Fast Ring of the Windows Insider Program with a few fixes, some external app refreshes and a whole lot of known issues.

The most eye-catching fix is the restoration of Timeline, which had stopped showing activities for the dozen of so people that use the thing. Outlook search has also been fixed and the reliability of the Task View has been dealt with.

Indeed, Search continues to be a bit of a challenge for users, and today's build directed fans to a beta of the Indexer Diagnostics app, purporting to "enhance your understanding of the capabilities of search" as well as figuring out why the thing doesn't seem to be working properly.

The app is a genuinely useful tool, and collates techniques available to anyone with the ability to use a search engine into a single user interface. This includes visibility into what the search service is doing and, more importantly, how much resource it is using as it does so. Sadly, there appears to be no "Dammit, will you just stop!" option.

Insiders also got a look at a preview of the new Graphing Mode of the recently open-sourced Windows Calculator. The functionality permits one or more equations (with variables) to be plotted along with analysis to spot features such as x and y intercepts.

It is certainly a good deal more colourful than my elderly TI-81 (and lacks the battery leak caused by a careless two decades in the forgotten gadget drawer.)

There are also quite a few issues this time around, but hey - this is the Fast Ring after all. The cloud recovery option for Reset this PC isn't working and for some the update process is either taking a long time or failing with error 0x8007042b.

Insiders also got yet another name for Microsoft's new browser as the gang warned that Narrator and NVDA users on the latest release of "Microsoft Edge based on Chromium" could experience problems.

Oh, and Remote Desktop Connection crashes when connecting to multiple sessions.

Heck, it is all preview code after all and, in the brave new world of the Windows Insider Program, it is anyone's guess when and how many of the OS tweaks in the Fast Ring will see the light of day. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like