New Preview Build for Windows 10

The Windows Blog tells us a new build for Windows 10 Technical Preview is available. The new build, build 9860, has some issues, but brings in a few new additions as well. As usual, it’s a work in progress and shouldn’t be considered a fully functional OS for production systems.

To get the update manually, go to PC Settings, Update & recovery, Preview Builds, and check for updates. The new update will download and install automatically. For those that want to wait for it to update automatically, it will do some at night, and be ready for you in the morning. Just leave your PC running.

A lot of stuff coming in from user feedback, using the feedback tool, forums and the new Windows Suggestion Box program.

• Action Center for Windows PCs. As we shared when we announced Windows 10 in September, we aren’t limiting our view to one specific device type. We are looking across our entire product family to look at ways to bring great experiences to our customers across different devices. So with this build, we’re bringing “Action Center” from Windows Phone over to the PC as the place where you can see and follow up on all actionable items. This build is focused ONLY on enabling basic notifications – quick actions and cleaner UI will come later. You’ll see notifications from the system and apps – from new emails and invites to IMs, Facebook posts and more – all in one place, so you don’t miss a thing. Click on the new Action Center icon in the notification area of your taskbar to check it out.

• Move apps easily from one monitor to another. When you’re working on multiple monitors, use WIN+SHIFT+<arrow> to move the active app to another monitor. You can find a list of new keyboard shortcuts for navigating and managing your multiple desktops here in this blog post.

• Animation for switching desktops. One of the pieces of feedback that you gave us was that it was hard to know when you were switching desktops. We addressed your feedback by adding an animation to make it clear that you are switching. Check it out by creating some new desktops and moving between them.