Windows 11's New Preview Build Drops AI Focus For Practical Improvements
The most immediately useful change in this build is to the Taskbar and System Tray area. Microsoft has added a built-in network speed test directly accessible from Quick Settings, which means you can check your connection performance without firing up a browser or third-party app. It's a simple addition, but it's the kind of troubleshooting tool Windows should have had a long time ago. For users fighting Wi-Fi hiccups or trying to confirm whether it's their ISP or just Teams having a bad day, having a native speed test one click away is genuinely practical. The update also refines taskbar behavior when buttons are uncombined, tightening up how multiple app instances display and behave. These aren't headline features, but they're meaningful quality-of-life changes in a UI element that millions of people interact with constantly.
Another major addition is built-in Sysmon. Sysmon, short for System Monitor, is part of Microsoft's Sysinternals toolkit and has long been a favorite among IT pros and security researchers. It produces detailed logs of system activity, including process creation, network connections, file changes, and more. This data goes directly into the Windows Event Log, making it invaluable for forensic analysis and threat detection. Previously, deploying Sysmon required separate installation and configuration; baking it into Windows 11 is a real sign that Microsoft is taking endpoint visibility more seriously at the OS level.
The network icon in the system tray's context menu and the Wi-Fi quick settings page in Windows 11 are getting buttons to let you quickly run a network speed test. (Takes you to Bing to do the speed test.) pic.twitter.com/ZXcQvs5BP8
— phantomofearth ☃️ (@phantomofearth) September 13, 2025
Elsewhere, the new build adds Emoji 16.0 support, bringing the sleepy face, fingerprint, leafless tree, root vegetable, harp, shovel, and splatter emojis to Windows. There are improvements to Windows Backup for organizational sign-ins, better Microsoft Entra ID SID resolution for enterprise identity management, new camera pan and tilt controls in Settings, support for .webp desktop backgrounds, a refreshed full-page settings experience in Widgets, and a new Microsoft account entry point in Start. Search, Storage, Explorer, Windows Update, and Display all receive tweaks and fixes, and Microsoft's Quick Machine Recovery (QMR) is coming to Pro systems that are not joined to a domain. It's still not clear why QMR needs to be a cloud-based service, but it's a legitimately useful feature for fixing boot failures.
Microsoft's blog post is a long, dense changelog, and much of it is about tightening bolts rather than adding new wings to the aircraft mid-flight. Indeed, what's striking is what's not here. There's no new Copilot agent integration, no "Ask Copilot" taskbar experiment, no expanded on-device AI accessibility features, no new AI Actions in File Explorer. Compare this to last month's Dev/Beta build 26220.7535, which leaned heavily into Copilot enhancements, including AI-powered accessibility features in Narrator and deeper integration across the shell. That was an Insider Preview and this one is a Release Preview, but the point stands.
While it's too early to say how decisively Microsoft has committed to de-emphasizing AI features in Windows—nor how long it will be able to stick to such a path—the move is likely intentional. Microsoft's Windows honcho Pavan Davuluri gave a statement to The Verge where he tacitly admitted that Microsoft has not been "addressing pain points" in Windows and that feedback from Windows users has been intense. He promised to commit to redirecting engineers to "urgently fix" the performance and reliability issues that have become an unfortunate hallmark of Windows 11. If this update is the first of many such steps, we couldn't be happier.
