Windows 10’s next update is the April 2019 Update, which is version 1903 and was codenamed 19H1 during development. It features a light theme, speed improvements, and lots of polish. There are no crazy new features like My People or Timeline.
This article includes everything new as of Insider Preview build 18323, released on January 24, 2019.
Speed Improvements (Thanks to Better Spectre Fixes)
The news of Spectre shook the industry at the start of 2018. Spectre is a design flaw in CPUs, and it allows programs to escape their restrictions and read other programs’ memory spaces. Microsoft patched Windows to help block Spectre attacks, but the resulting patches reduced your PC’s performance in some scenarios—especially on PCs from 2015 and earlier, which don’t have the CPU features needed to speed up the fix.
Now, a change in the April 2019 Update looks set to practically eliminate those performance penalties and speed your PC back up. Specifically, Microsoft is enabling “retpoline” and “import optimization.” All you need to know is your PC should get faster, and you won’t even need to think about it. But here’s a detailed document from Microsoft explaining how these optimizations work if you’re interested in the details.
RELATED: Windows 10’s Next Update Will Make Your PC Faster, Thanks to Better Spectre Fixes
7 GB of Your PC’s Storage Reserved for Updates
Windows Updates can fail to install properly if your PC doesn’t have enough free disk space. This can be a problem on inexpensive devices with only a small amount of built-in storage.
Microsoft is solving the problem by commandeering about 7 GB of your PC’s storage and making it into “reserved storage.” This space is used for Windows Updates, but programs can also store temporary files here. When Windows needs the space for updates, it deletes the temporary files and performs the update. So space isn’t completely wasted, as files that would have normally used space on your computer will just sit in the reserved storage space.
The exact amount of storage space used depends on the optional features and languages you have installed, but it starts at about 7 GB.
