We didn’t get Windows 12 this year, but the annual update to Microsoft’s flagship desktop operating system still brings several welcome new features. Some of the splashiest additions, including Live Captions and Cocreator image generation, come to a subset of Windows 11 computers called Copilot+ PCs. These use neural processors to perform AI tasks locally rather than in Microsoft’s cloud. But non-Copilot+ PCs get enhancements as well in the just-released 24H2 version, aka Windows 11 2024 Update. These include a redesigned Copilot experience, more secure underlying platform code, and better phone integration. Here’s a rundown of the changes.
New Platform Code
Microsoft rewrote some of the core Windows platform’s kernel code in the Rust programming language, which should make the OS faster and less prone to memory bugs. This isn’t a minor change, and it’s been four years in the making. Coders can get into some of the nitty-gritty details in the video presentation below. Two additional welcome platform capabilities are hot-patching updates for fewer disruptions to your computer use and support for Wi-Fi 7.
(Credit: Microsoft)
Phone Link has become one of the more useful Windows features, so it only makes sense to add it to the Start Menu. The new panel shows your phone’s battery level, connectivity status, and recent messages and calls. The feature works only with Android phones initially, but iPhone support will roll out later. Of course, if you haven’t connected your phone to Windows, you won’t see the new panel.
Smaller updates to the Start Menu include the ability to drag pinned icons directly to the Taskbar.
New File Explorer Features
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
Context buttons for things like Cut, Copy, and Delete now get text labels in File Explorer’s right-click context menu. The system also now supports TAR and 7z compression, though you can’t password-protect archives you create with this feature. With this update, you can edit the metadata of PNG image files, too. A right-click context menu lets you duplicate a tab, just as you would in a web browser.
(Credit: Microsoft)
You can already wirelessly transfer files back and forth between certain Android phones and Windows, but 24H2 adds an entry in File Explorer just for the transferred files.
New Taskbar Features
You can now scroll down the Quick Settings panel for more options. You could already customize which settings appear on the panel, but it’s nice to be able to access all of the possible settings. You can drag and drop any setting buttons to a new position in the panel to suit your preference.
Updated Power Settings Interface
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
Windows is slowly getting rid of all those legacy interface elements that are surprisingly persistent. I’m talking about the small white control panel dialogs that occasionally pop up when you dig deep into settings. With 24H2, at least one more of these outdated interface elements bite the dust: the power settings. This section now includes an Energy Saver mode, which differs from the longstanding Battery Saver mode in that it reduces overall energy consumption from background tasks rather than just from demanding apps running in the foreground. You can set it to turn on at a specified battery charge percentage and decide whether it should lower screen brightness when it is active. Do your part for the planet!
Copilot Changes for Regular Windows 11 PCs
Copilot’s icon is no longer pinned to the right side of the taskbar. It now gets a regular app taskbar icon that you can place where you like. And Copilot’s window doesn’t take over the right side of the screen in a sidebar panel that blocks other apps either; its window behaves like that of any other app. You can resize it to taste and overlap other app windows with it.
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
I’m disappointed that Copilot no longer has any PC control capability, even though those it had were weak to the point of being almost useless. You could ask it to open an app or switch to dark mode before, but then you needed to approve these actions by clicking a button. Just opening the app the old-fashioned way was quicker. The previous Copilot could open Settings to a specific page, but calling out to a web service for this functionality didn’t make sense. Copilot never equaled Cortana in its ability to control PC functions. The old voice assistant could even shut down your PC via your voice across the room. I still miss that. In related 24H2 news, Cortana is now totally gone from the OS.
Copilot+ PC Exclusives
Some of the new features in Windows 11 are exclusive to the new Copilot+ AI PCs, which, as mentioned, can process AI functions locally. I expect the list of these features to expand, with more AI functions happening locally for faster performance. For a deeper look at the new features available only to this new class of PCs, read Copilot vs. Copilot+. Here are a few highlights:
Click to Do
(Credit: Microsoft)
This is the hottest new feature for the 2024 Windows 11 update. It displays an overlay menu of actions you might like to perform, given what’s on the screen. For example, if you’re in the Snipping Tool, having just snapped a screenshot, you can tap the Windows Key and click the mouse to get suggestions like blur background, visual search, and share. It also works with text, offering to summarize, rewrite, or send as an email.
Recall
(Credit: Microsoft)
Recall resembles the now-abandoned Timeline feature from the Windows 10 April 2018 Update. It lets Copilot+ PC users search back through their activities over a period to recall what they were doing and easily get back to it. The feature uses AI to analyze periodic screenshots, making search for non-text items possible.
Though some testers have found Recall impressive and useful, it has been the target of critics who say it opens the OS to privacy compromises. Microsoft has stated that Recall data is “encrypted, stored and analyzed locally, using on-device AI capabilities to understand their context,” but the criticisms have compelled Microsoft to delay the feature. The latest news is that Microsoft has beefed up its security and privacy protections, and it will be available only as a Windows Insider test build in October. I have doubtls as to whether Recall will fare any better than Timeline did, especially considering that that feature didn’t start out with any controversy.
Local AI Image Generation With Cocreator
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
The Microsoft Paint app now has AI image generation in every Windows 11 PC, but, in a Copilot+ PC, you get Cocreator. With Cocreator, you can draw a simple sketch, tell the AI to complete the image in a certain way and get a creation based on your scribbling. Cocreator lets you enter a text prompt, a sketch, and a selected Style, with choices of Anime, Ink Sketch, Pixel Art, Oil Painting, or Water Color. As you type more instructions, your generated image evolves without the need to press a Create button. The creativity slider adjusts how closely the result hews to your sketch. As with all AI image generators, you occasionally get a bird instead of a rat and other similar errors.
Video Call Enhancements With Windows Studio Effects
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
Windows Studio Effects are enhancements to video calls that work with not only Microsoft Teams but also any major video conferencing app, including Zoom and Google Meet. These effects appear in a button in the Quick Settings panel (previously known as the Action Center). You get choices for Automatic Framing, three Creative Filters, Eye Contact, Portrait Blur, Portrait Light, and Standard Blur. Most of the effects are rather mild and not game-changers.
Live Captions and Translations
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
Live Captions help those with hearing loss, non-native speakers, and anyone in a noisy environment. The version of Live Captions in Copilot+ not only gives you on-screen captioning for any spoken audio on the PC but can also translate them into a planned 40 different languages. When I tested Live Captions, a tooltip told me that it couldn’t translate spoken text into most languages, but it could translate captions into English from 20 languages. You need to download a language pack for any language you want to use. You can specify text size and position, as well as use an optional profanity filter.
Super Resolution
(Credit: Microsoft)
Two super resolutions are now available in Copilot+ PCs running 24H2: Automatic Super Resolution for gaming and super resolution upscaling in Photos. The frame rate-enhancing Automatic Super Resolution performs a similar function to Nvidia’s DLSS and FSR and Intel’s XeSS. It’s available only on Copilot+ PC systems.
PCMag’s gaming hardware analysts found that Automatic Super Resolution is generally successful in testing game compatibility on Copilot+ PCs. It noticeably improved the frame rates and appearance in Borderlands 3, boosting performance by 11-12 frames per second.
Photo super resolution has been available in standalone photo apps for several years, but it now comes to the Windows Photos app. This can make an old, low-resolution phone photo appear less distorted.
Prism for Arm PCs
Most Copilot+ PCs are Arm-based for now, but not all Arm-based PCs are Copilot+ PCs. For either type of Arm PC, Windows 11 24H2 improves application compatibility with the new Prism emulator. The new OS core is built to run faster on Arm-based PCs, too. We tested this on over 30 apps in our labs and found that most ran well with the emulation. The major holdouts were Google Drive Desktop and antivirus software. Gaming performance on Arm still trails what you get on AMD and Intel Windows systems. However, the 24H2 update significantly increases gaming performance with AMD CPUs.
Other New Features in the Windows 11 2024 Update
Share to Android. This adds an entry for your Android phone to the Windows share panel.
HDR Background Support. Or what many call wallpaper. If you have a super-new HDR-capable monitor, why not dress up Windows with all its vivid color capabilities?
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Improved Hearing Aid Support in Bluetooth LE. These new capabilities let you control audio presets, ambient sounds, and audio enhancements.
Sudo for Windows. This one takes a page from Linux, allowing elevated commands in the command line without opening an elevated console. If that’s gibberish to you, you can learn about it here.
Widgets Updates. You can customize widgets in Settings > Personalization and choose which to display on the lock screen.
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
Unified Teams App. No longer do you need two separate apps for personal and work Teams accounts. Notifications get more detail, and you can join meetings without having to sign in again.
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
Voice Focus. This setting can reduce background noise when you’re using your PC’s microphone. Though it uses an NPU when available, it works for both non-Copilot+ and Copilot+ PCs.
How Can You Get Windows 11 24H2?
The 2024 Windows 11 update starts rolling out today, but not all at once. The rollout will occur in phases, “based on when data shows your device is ready and you will have a great experience.” That means avoiding hardware and software conflicts with the new OS. For updates, you can check Microsoft’s Windows release health page. Different features mentioned here may arrive at different times, too, depending on compatibility testing.
If you have a Copilot+ PC, you’re already running version 24H2. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve got all the “24H2” features. For example, on my Surface Laptop Copilot+ PC, I don’t have the Phone Link additions to the Start Menu and File Explorer. The Copilot+ PCs already have new features that are exclusive to them, such as Cocreator in Paint for AI images and Live Captions for real-time subtitles.
The best way to get 24H2 and any new features that Microsoft releases as soon as possible is to go into Settings > Windows Update and slide over the “Get the latest updates as soon as they’re available” option (the top choice in the screenshot below). With this setting active, I’ve even gotten some supposedly 24H2-only features on my desktop running 23H2, such as the ability to compress using 7z and TAR. If you don’t want to wait at all, you can download the Windows Insider preview build of the new version.
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
Can Your PC Run Windows 11 24H2?
If your PC can run Windows 11, it can run 24H2 (also known as the Windows 11 2024 Update). That means you need a fairly recent CPU and a TPM 2.0 security chip. Beyond those, the absolute minimum hardware requirements are a 1GHz 2-core CPU, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of disk space, and Secure Boot capability. As you might suspect, a lot of these requirements are geared toward improving Windows security. You can check whether your system is compatible with the new OS by running the PC Health Check utility. You can download it from Microsoft directly.
For more coverage of Microsoft’s desktop operating system and generative AI tools, read our Windows 11 review and our Copilot explainer.
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About Michael Muchmore
Lead Software Analyst
