Windows 10 Insider Preview Dev Build 21343 (RS_PRERELEASE) - March 24 Insider

Nice build. I have left the builds since the first week of January, but was tempted by this one as good reports and File Explorer icons looked nice Anyway installed in around 45 mins on my old machine, with no issues. restored my Macrium boot menu (as usual). My only moan was the wide spacing on File Explorer, which I fixed through 'File Explorer Options/View/Use Compact Mode'. Now looks great. Now paused for a few months unless any major updates come.

21343.1000 so far...offline disk portion of the install was the usual ~7 minutes, which I really cannot say too many good things about. Compared to the time it took for a Win7 upgrade installation after Win7 debuted, the time it takes to upgrade a previous Windows build today is almost nothing. We are all terribly jaded about that, imo... (I am indulging my jadedness to prove I'm not that jaded, and--er, but wait--I'm proving I am that jaded, eh? Er....we'll come back to this topic at a future date sometime in the 22nd century.)

I often dreamily reminisce about those "wonderful" two-hour plus sessions with Windows 7 (or earlier), in which doing an upgrade Windows install would require 120 minutes and counting, even on the "fastest" 7200 rpm (and faster) platter drives money could buy! Remember the pure joy we all felt when trying to upgrade to a newer build service pack, etc., from an earlier build? (Yea, sure--why not? Joyous ecstasy incarnate it was not.)

(Obviously, upgrade installations require a lot more time than clean installs--at least that is the way it was!)

Now, it's a mere seven minutes in which the drive and system is tied up and dedicated to the upgrade install job and cannot be used for anything else! 7 friggin' minutes! These days, I don't count the download time or the pre-install work that occurs before the actual upgrade install begins, for the simple reason that none of those background activities require the dedicated attention of the system: you can still work with the current build and use it productively--you can play a game, type a dissertation, or gorge yourself on your favorite type of monkey & canine porn, feed a Norwegian foot fetish in Technicolor until you have toes sprouting from your ears, what-ev-ah!... (If that's the sort of thing you like, I mean...*cough*)

Anyway...enough of my not-so-Golden-Days-of-Yore fetish!

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1) Good news...b21343 is the first build in the last 2-3 months that upon upgrade installation has not knocked my RealTek 2.5GbE LAN driver offline! And even though the build install placed the Microsoft 1.0.0.4 driver, supposedly the problem driver, it has stayed up from the get go and showed no penchant for falling offline or losing the gateway, etc.

Quiet Please, a milestone has been passed in Win10 development! Microsoft says, "No applause, please. Just throw money. We have discovered how to install these drivers so that they stay up as expected without being knocked offline by our builds!"

Huzzah!

Nothing facetious here at all--this is indeed good news. I have reported this success to the HUB to give credit where credit is due.

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2)"Where have all my icons gone?", sung to the tune of "Where have all the flowers gone?"-- Beginning with b21337 and now continuing with b21343, my desktop short-cut icons no longer remain in place at cold-boot each morning.

Thanks to our dedicated forum member, Count Mike, for a long while I have used Desktop OK to control various things about my desktop shortcut icons that I wish to see maintained by Win10. Desktop OK is a nifty little program that works very well with all Win10 builds so far released by Microsot--er, Microsoft. So... the job that the iconcache used to do reliably is now being done reliably by Desktop OK.

This no longer works as it should: "ie4uinit.exe -show", nor can I find in these builds a file named iconcache.db, which I'd like to delete so that I can rebuild my iconcache for the desktop in the hopes that it can retain the placement info for my desktop shortcut icons as Win10 has been doing so well up to now.

If memory serves, I've only seen this happen once with Win10, and it wasn't difficult to fix it--once I deleted
iconcache.db, rebooted, and allowed Win10 to rebuild the iconcache.

--Does anyone have a tip he can share from his own experience? Thanks in advance!...

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I like the newer desktop icons Microsoft has presented in this build! Told 'em so at the HUB, too. Really looks like people have taken their time and put a lot of thought into these icon designs. Like 'em fine. The new orange-yellow cast to the folder icons is nice, I think, and the shape is nice. Also, these icons feature a distinct but subtle color gradient that really looks very nice. The folder icons and "This PC" desktop icon and several other new ones look very nice due to the color gradient applied sans gaudiness--eh, I like it so far!

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That's it for now...I guess I'll have to come back if something else erupts that is worth a comment. And now, I s'pose it would pay to go and read the build notes, you think?...

Oh, I really like the AutoHDR feature they are introducing (b21337 and later)--it's optional with an on-off toggle--that allows us to turn AutoHDR off while leaving the system-wide support of HDR ON, for anything that natively supports HDR. If they can get the colors right with saturation and with contrast--the D3d11/12 SDR games affected by AutoHDR (> 1000 games atm they say) will be looking pretty darn good, surprisingly.

Edwin said:

You guys actually like the closed folder look??? I hate it!!!

I never liked MS anything, I use my own, there are literally millions of icons out there to choose from.

Edwin said:

Reverted back to previous Build and Quick Access is still fecked up there!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

This is getting tiresome!!!

冷冷冷冷冷冷冷冷

Someone else advise me to do that to bring back "Quick Access" and I didn't yet because I had no time so, I am glad, at least did not waste the time.

But I am very sorry for you bro.

All upgraades completed = both VM and "real".

All my "Notification Area" suddenly disappeared...