Microsoft's fifth major iteration of Windows 11 is nearing its release to the general public—the Windows Insider team announced today that Windows 11 25H2 was being put into its Release Preview Channel, the final stop for most updates before they become available to everyone. That's around two months after the first Windows builds with the 25H2 label were released to the other preview channels.
Putting a new yearly Windows update in the Release Preview channel is analogous to the "release to manufacturing" (RTM) phase of years past, back when updates shipped on physical media that needed to be manufactured. Build numbers for this version of Windows start with 26200, rather than 24H2's 26100.
The 25H2 update doesn't do a lot in and of itself, other than reset the clock for Microsoft's security updates (each yearly release gets two years of security patches). Microsoft says that last year's 24H2 update and this year's 25H2 update "use a shared servicing branch," which mostly means that there aren't big under-the-hood differences between the two. Installing the 25H2 update on a PC may enable some features on your 24H2 PC that had already been installed but had been disabled by default.
Microsoft says that installing the 25H2 update removes PowerShell 2.0 and the Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line tool (both previously deprecated), and that it allows IT administrators to automatically remove some preinstalled Windows apps from the Microsoft Store via Group Policy. But Microsoft hasn't said much about major, user-facing new features that are unique to the 25H2 update. The 23H2 update from two years ago was a similarly quiet add-on for Windows 11 22H2.
For anyone who wants to be able to start with a fresh install of Windows 11 25H2, Microsoft says ISO files for creating install media will be available starting next week. Even if you're not in the Windows Insider program, this build of Windows ought to get regular updates and will eventually converge with whatever version of the update is released more widely later on.
Microsoft usually starts rolling these updates out to the public in or around October. Typically they go out in phases, being offered to a small number of PCs at first and then expanding as Microsoft monitors for major show-stopping problems. They're usually offered to everyone via Windows Update and installed automatically a few weeks or months later.
Microsoft also released new Insider Preview channels to the less-stable and more experimental Canary, Dev, and Beta channels today. They're all pretty light on marquee features: The "Click to Do" AI screen analyzer thing can now offer to make an Excel spreadsheet out of tables on websites or documents; some features were added for people who use Braille in Windows; and the Windows Share window will now let you look for apps to share a file to. The builds also fix (and add!) a handful of bugs.
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