- Windows 11’s March update is now rolling out
- Microsoft has actioned a whole lot of fixes and reliability improvements
- There are a number of new features, too, but they aren’t overly exciting in the main
Windows 11‘s latest update is now rolling out, and this is a patch you’ll likely want to grab purely for the honing applied to the operating system — even if there aren’t any hugely compelling feature additions (for most folks, anyway).
Windows Central flagged up a full breakdown of what the March update contains, and Microsoft has confirmed and actioned a whole lot of smoothing over and fixing work here (as previously noted with the February optional update, which was a preview of this full release).
For starters, Microsoft now promises ‘improved reliability’ for when your Windows 11 PC wakes from sleep, and that process should happen faster due to the fine-tuning of display-related elements. This speedup should be particularly noticeable when the system is under heavy load, we’re told.
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There’s a good deal of tweaking for File Explorer, which is the app that’s responsible for displaying your folders and files therein on the desktop. Microsoft notes: “You can now open a new File Explorer window more reliably. Holding the Shift key and selecting the File Explorer icon on the taskbar, or using the middle mouse button, now opens a new instance of File Explorer instead of the current one.”
Reliability improvements for File Explorer have been applied in terms of displaying devices across a network in folders, and the search functionality is more reliable when searching across multiple drives (or via ‘This PC’ which shows all the drives in your system).
Microsoft has also added an ‘Extract all’ command for archived (compressed) folders that aren’t ZIPs (which already had this).
Moving onto the taskbar, the behavior when apps are ‘uncombined’ — meaning each instance of an app window appears separately, rather than being stacked under one entry in the bar — has been improved. Specifically, when the taskbar uses its overflow area because there are too many app entries on the bar, it doesn’t shift the entire lot of any given app over to this separate spillover panel; only some of the instances (the ones that don’t fit) are moved. That makes a lot more sense.
Taskbar search functionality has also been tinkered with so you can preview any search result by hovering the mouse over it and selecting ‘Preview’ (so you don’t have to open it). Group headers now show the number of results, too, and on top of this, Microsoft has changed the icon for when searching in Task Manager to show the traditional magnifying glass.
The March update has also introduced improved levels of ‘visual consistency’ across Windows 11. This includes a better experience for the taskbar when the auto-hide feature is enabled, as well as fine-tuning for the print dialog box, and the credential fields in the Windows Security panel.
Speaking of security, the login and lock screens have been made more reliable, as has the projection menu in Windows 11, plus Nearby Sharing now has better reliability when sending big files.
Finally, the Windows printing service has received some attention to “help printing run more smoothly and reduce slowdowns during high‑volume printing” which sounds very useful. And the settings for the Windows Update panel should behave more responsively now.
Analysis: a laudable fixer update, but let’s steer clear of the bloat, Microsoft
That’s a long list of tweaking, and it’s good to see all this rolling out to the Windows 11 computing public. Collectively it represents some useful work on honing existing features, which is something Microsoft has promised will be a major campaign this year — and we’re already seeing the evidence of this. This time around the wake from sleep and printing improvements look particularly handy, as does all the work on File Explorer and the taskbar.
There are quite a few feature introductions with the March update, too, but I’m not feeling particularly excited about them, as for many users, they won’t have much of an impact, if any.
Quite a few of the changes are for business only, and others are rather humdrum, although there are some interesting additions here if you use emoji, as there are new offerings in the emoji picker, or the widgets board — a revamped interface is rolling out with some great customization options, so that’s a major bonus for widget fans.
While a new internet speed test in the taskbar sounds good, I wrote yesterday about how this is a disappointment, and very much a missed opportunity for Microsoft. On top of that, a new option that’s present in the account menu section of the Start menu, which ferries you to a ‘benefits’ page, is essentially just some gratuitous promotion for the Microsoft account, in the same way that the speed test promotes Bing. We could certainly do with less of this kind of bloat, and more of the fixing and honing seen above in the March update, Microsoft.
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