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Windows 10 Technical Preview updated, boasts 7,000 changes and fixes

The latest Build of the Windows 10 Technical Preview is now ready to download.

Nate Ralph Associate Editor
Associate Editor Nate Ralph is an aspiring wordsmith, covering mobile software and hardware for CNET Reviews. His hobbies include dismantling gadgets, waxing poetic about obscure ASCII games, and wandering through airports.
Nate Ralph
2 min read

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Rick Broida/CNET

There's a new build of the Windows 10 Technical Preview available, for you enterprising early adopters who jumped on the first release. Build 9860 (up from Build 9841) adds a host of new features, squashes some bugs and likely brews up a few new ones.

Microsoft says that there are nearly 7,000 new improvements and fixes since the first Windows 10 build we checked out a few weeks ago, many of which were based on the handy Windows Feedback app that's bundled with Windows 10.

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The new Windows 10 Action Center Microsoft

There's a new Action Center (borrowed from Windows Phone 8.1) that'll list things like incoming messages, status updates, emails and calendar events in one spot. The virtual-desktops functionality has also been improved a bit: a new animation shows you when you're bouncing around between desktops, and you can use a new keyboard shortcut (Windows key + Shift + arrow key) to move apps between multiple monitors.

If you're already running the Windows 10 Technical Preview, Windows Update will take care of downloading and installing it automatically, depending on your download settings. Those of us who'd rather not wait should head over to the "Update and recovery" section of Windows Update in PC settings and select Preview builds.

The update also adds a new option to the Preview builds menu that lets you indicate how frequently you'd like to see updates. Select "Fast" (the default is Slow) and you'll receive Preview builds as soon as Microsoft has deemed them ready for public testing. I suspect that'll be incredibly risky, so I'll reiterate: don't install the Windows 10 Technical Preview on your primary machine, unless you're running a dual-boot.

Check out our guide to Windows 10 for more instructions on getting it up and running from a flash drive, in a separate partition on your hard drive, or as a virtual machine. And pop over to the Windows blog for more details on the release.