After releasing the first Windows 10 (20H1) Build, 18836, to the Windows Insiders Skip Ahead ring last week, Microsoft is back on track pushing late stage development builds to Fast Ring Insiders testing Windows 10 (19H1).

Build 18342 arrived late yesterday afternoon and as expected, it does not have new features but a long list of fixes. In fact, there are more than 50 items listed under the general changes, improvements, and fixes for PC header. 

This is a good thing for the upcoming release of Windows 10 Version 1903 – aka the April 2019 Update.

However, not all Windows Insiders in the Fast Ring will get to upgrade to Build 18342 because of a processor related bug that impacts Connected Standby.

The two processors impacted are the Intel64 Family 6 Model 142 and the Intel64 Family 6 Model 158.

You can check your system to confirm it is one of the impacted processors by following these steps from the Build 18342 Release Notes:

1. Open Device Manager by right-clicking on the Start button on your taskbar.
2. Open up the Processors group and right-click on one of the processors listed (you will see multiple for each core of the processor in your PC).
3. Click properties and go to the Details tab.
4. Choose “Hardware Ids” in the property dropdown. This will give you the model number of your processor.

I currently have three bare metal devices in the Fast Ring and two of them are impacted by this block on Build 18342. 

In the release notes, you will also see that more work has been done on the gaming improvements that were tested as part of Build 18334 and includes a new request to test this technology. 

In addition, two new enhancements, that were announced earlier in the week from other teams at Microsoft are also mentioned. One of them, a new extension for Chrome that adds first party Windows Timeline support, I have already written about earlier this week. 

The other one, adding the ability to view your Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) files using File Explorer, was documented by the Windows Command Line team.

As I have done over the last five Fast Ring builds, (18312; 18317; 18323; 18329; 18334) for Windows 10 (19H1), I also want to continue documenting the Reserved Storage usage between each new Fast Ring build.

Note: I am currently just tracking three bare metal devices and one virtual machine running Windows 10 (19H1) Fast Ring builds. However, due to the blocking bug impacting two of those bare metal devices, my data this cycle is just for one bare metal device and the virtual machine.

Here are the two installs and their latest Reserved Storage usage numbers:

• Surface Book
  • Build 18312 – 7.09GB
  • Build 18317 – 6.75GB
  • Build 18323 – 7.11GB
  • Build 18329 – 6.40GB
  • Build 18334 – 7.26GB
  • Build 18342 – 7.26GB
• Virtual Machine
  • Build 18312 – 7.04GB
  • Build 18317 – 7.13GB
  • Build 18323 – 7.06GB
  • Build 18329 – 7.06GB
  • Build 18334 – 7.20GB
  • Build 18342 – 7.27GB

I will continue to track this on future Fast Ring builds and the new Windows 10 (20H1) Skip Ahead builds which we began receiving last week.

Windows 10 (19H1) Screenshot Gallery