- Windows 11’s March Update is now rolling out
- Microsoft has made a whole bunch of fixes and reliability improvements
- There are also a number of new features, but they are not too exciting in the main
Windows 11’s latest update is rolling out now, and this is a patch you’ll probably want to grab purely for the tweaks applied to the operating system — though there aren’t any hugely compelling feature additions (for most, anyway).
Windows Central announced a full breakdown of what’s in the March Update, and Microsoft has confirmed and implemented a whole lot of smoothing and fixing here (as previously mentioned with the February optional 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 that process should happen faster due to the fine-tuning of display-related elements. This speed increase should be particularly noticeable when the system is under heavy load, we’re told.
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There are quite a few tweaks to File Explorer, which is the app responsible for displaying your folders and files within it on the desktop. Microsoft notes: “You can now open a new File Explorer window more reliably. If you hold down the Shift key and select the File Explorer icon on the taskbar, or you use the middle mouse button, a new instance of File Explorer will now open instead of the current one.”
Reliability improvements to File Explorer have been applied 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 the drives in your system).
Microsoft has also added an ‘Extract All’ command for archived (compressed) folders that are not ZIP files (which already had this).
When moving to the taskbar, the behavior when apps are ‘undocked’ – meaning each instance of an app window appears separately instead of being stacked under one entry in the bar – has been improved. Specifically, when the taskbar uses its overflow area because there are too many app entries on the bar, it doesn’t move the entire lot of a given app over to this separate spillover panel; only some of the instances (the ones that don’t match) are moved. It makes a lot more sense.
The taskbar search functionality has also been tinkered with so you can preview any search result by hovering over it and selecting ‘Preview’ (so you don’t have to open it). Group headers now also show the number of results, and on top of this, Microsoft has changed the icon for when searching in Task Manager to show the traditional magnifying glass.
The March update has also introduced improved levels of ‘visual consistency’ across Windows 11. This includes a better experience of 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 become more reliable, as has the projection menu in Windows 11, plus Nearby Sharing now has better reliability when sending large files.
Finally, the Windows Printing Service has gotten some attention to “help printing run more smoothly and reduce slower printing during high-volume printing,” which sounds very useful. And the Windows Update panel settings should behave more responsively now.
Analysis: a commendable fixer update, but let’s stay away from bloat, Microsoft
It’s a long list of tweaking, and it’s good to see all of this rolling out to the Windows 11 desktop audience. Overall, it represents some useful work on tweaking existing features, which is something Microsoft has promised will be a big campaign this year – and we’re already seeing the evidence of this. This time in the wake of hibernation and printing improvements look particularly handy, as does all the work with 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 of an impact, if any.
Quite a few of the changes are just for business, and others are pretty uniform, although there are some interesting additions here if you use emoji, as there are new offerings in the emoji selector or widget panel – a revamped interface is rolling out with some great customization options, so that’s a big bonus for widget fans.
While a new internet speed test on the taskbar sounds good, I wrote yesterday that this is a disappointment and very much a missed opportunity for Microsoft. On top of that, a new option present in the account menu section of the Start menu that takes you to a ‘benefits’ page is essentially just a free promotion for the Microsoft account, in the same way that the speed test promotes Bing. We could certainly do with less of this kind of bloat and more of the tweaking and tweaking seen above in the March update, Microsoft.
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