Microsoft’s year of fixing Windows 11 is off to a promising start, as latest update improves stability — but it still has a lot more work to do
- Windows 11 March Update is rolling out
- Microsoft has implemented numerous fixes and reliability improvements
- There are also a number of new features, but they’re not particularly exciting overall.
The latest Windows 11 update is rolling out, and it’s a patch you’ll probably want to pick up just for the polish applied to the operating system – even if there aren’t any hugely compelling feature additions (for most people, anyway).
Windows Central reported a full breakdown of what’s in the March update, and Microsoft has confirmed and done a lot of smoothing and fixing work here (as previously reported with the optional February update, which was a preview of this full release).
For starters, Microsoft is now promising “improved reliability” when your Windows 11 PC wakes from sleep, and this process should be faster thanks to fine-tuning display-related items. This acceleration should be particularly visible when the system is subjected to heavy load, we are told.
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There are a lot of changes for File Explorer, which is the application responsible for displaying your folders and files on the desktop. Microsoft notes: “You can now open a new File Explorer window more reliably. By holding down the Shift key and selecting the File Explorer icon in the taskbar, or using the middle mouse button, a new instance of File Explorer now opens instead of the current one.
Reliability improvements for File Explorer have been applied in terms of displaying devices on a network in folders, and the search functionality is more reliable when searching across multiple drives (or via “This PC” which shows all drives on your system).
Microsoft also added an “Extract All” command for archived (compressed) folders that are not ZIP (which already had that).
Moving to the taskbar, the behavior when apps are “uncombined”, meaning each instance of an application window appears separately, rather than being stacked under a single entry in the bar, has been improved. Specifically, when the taskbar uses its overflow area because there are too many application entries in the bar, it does not move the entirety of a given application to this separate overflow panel; only certain instances (those that don’t match) are moved. This makes a lot more sense.
The search functionality in the taskbar has also been changed so that you can preview any search result by hovering over it and selecting “Preview” (so you don’t need to open it). The group headers now also show the number of results and, on top of that, Microsoft has changed the icon when searching in Task Manager to show the traditional magnifying glass.
The March Update also introduced improved levels of “visual consistency” in Windows 11. This includes a better experience for the taskbar when the auto-hide feature is enabled, as well as fine-tuning the print dialog and credentials fields in the Windows Security panel.
Speaking of security, the login and lock screens have been made more reliable, as has Windows 11’s Projection menu, and Nearby Share now offers better reliability when sending large files.
Finally, the Windows Print Service has received some attention to “help printing go more smoothly and reduce slowdowns during high-volume printing,” which seems very useful. And the Windows Update panel settings should now behave more responsively.
Analysis: A laudable patch update, but let’s avoid the bloat, Microsoft
It’s a long list of tweaks, and it’s good to see all of this rolling out to the Windows 11 computing public. Collectively, it represents valuable work to perfect existing features, something Microsoft has promised will be a major campaign this year – and we’re already seeing evidence of it. This time around, the improvements to Wake and Print seem particularly useful, as does all the work on File Explorer and the taskbar.
There are also a few feature introductions with the March update, but I’m not particularly excited about them, as for many users they won’t have much, if any, impact.
Quite a few of the changes are business-only, and others are rather mundane, although there are some nice additions here if you use emoji, as there are some new offerings in the emoji picker or widget table – a revamped interface is rolling out with great customization options, so that’s a major bonus for widget fans.
While a new Internet speed test in the taskbar looks good, I wrote yesterday about how it was a disappointment and a missed opportunity for Microsoft. On top of that, a new option present in the Account menu section of the Start menu, which takes you to a “benefits” page, is essentially just a free promotion for the Microsoft account, the same way the speed test promotes Bing. We could definitely do with less of this kind of bloat, and more of the fixes and refinements seen above in Microsoft’s March update.
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