- Windows 11 March Update is now available
- Microsoft has implemented a large number of fixes and reliability improvements.
- There are also a number of new features, but they aren’t too exciting overall.
The latest Windows 11 update is already rolling out, and this is a patch you’ll probably want to get solely to perfect the operating system, even if there aren’t any very attractive additional features (for most people, anyway).
Windows Central marked a full breakdown of what the March update contains, and Microsoft has confirmed and done a lot of smoothing and fixing work here (as previously noted with the optional February update, which was a preview of this full version).
For starters, Microsoft is now promising “improved reliability” for when your Windows 11 PC wakes up from sleep mode, and that process should happen faster due to the adjustment of display-related elements. We’re told that this speedup should be particularly noticeable when the system is under heavy load.
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There are many settings for File Explorer, which is the application responsible for displaying the folders and files it contains on the desktop. Microsoft notes: “You can now open a new File Explorer window more reliably. Holding down the Shift key and selecting the File Explorer icon on the taskbar, or using the middle mouse button, now opens a new instance of File Explorer instead of the current one.”
Reliability improvements have been applied to File Explorer in terms of showing devices across 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 has also added an ‘Extract All’ command for non-ZIP archived (compressed) folders (which already had it).
Moving on to the taskbar, the behavior when apps are “unbundled” has been improved, meaning that each instance of an app window appears separately, rather than stacked beneath an entry in the bar. Specifically, when the taskbar uses its overflow area because there are too many app entries in the bar, it doesn’t transfer the entire batch of a given app to this separate overflow panel; only some of the instances (the ones that don’t fit) are moved. That makes a lot more sense.
The taskbar search functionality has also been modified so that you can preview any search result by hovering your mouse over it and selecting “Preview” (so you don’t have to open it). Group headers now also show the number of results, and Microsoft has also changed the search icon 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 the projection menu in Windows 11, plus Nearby Sharing now has greater reliability when sending large files.
Finally, the Windows Print Service has received some attention to “help printing run more smoothly and reduce slowdowns during high-volume printing,” which seems very useful. And the Windows Update panel settings should behave more responsively now.
Analysis: A commendable update, but let’s stay away from the bloat, Microsoft
That’s a long list of tweaks, and it’s good to see all of this rolling out to the Windows 11 computing audience. Taken together, it represents useful work to refine existing features, something Microsoft has promised will be a major push this year, and we’re already seeing evidence of that. This time around, the improvements to waking from sleep and printing seem particularly useful, as does all the work in File Explorer and the taskbar.
There are also quite 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 impact, if any.
Many of the changes are just for business, and others are quite monotonous, although there are some interesting additions here if you use emoji, as there are new offerings in the emoji picker or widget dashboard – a revamped interface is being implemented with great customization options, so it’s a big plus for widget fans.
While a new Internet speed test in the taskbar sounds nice, yesterday I wrote about how this is a disappointment and largely a missed opportunity for Microsoft. On top of that, a new option that is present in the account menu section of the Start menu, which takes you to a “benefits” page, is essentially a free promotion for the Microsoft account, in the same way that the speed test promotes Bing. We could certainly use less of this kind of bloat and more of the fixes and refinements previously seen in Microsoft’s March update.
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