Windows 10 October 2020 Update is being prepared for release

Windows 10’s next update has been christened the October 2020 Update, and should be out next month – in October, of course – with the final work now beginning on preparing for the release.

In a blog post, Microsoft officially named the 20H2 update and let us know that it has hit Release Preview – in other words, the testing stage where this is now the final version (theoretically there’s only a little bit of tweaking left, unless any major last-minute problems are stumbled upon).

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Brandon LeBlanc, senior program manager of the Windows Insider Program, observed: “We believe that Build 19042.508 is the final build and still plan on continuing to improve the overall experience of the October 2020 Update on customers’ PCs as part of our normal servicing cadence.”

Testers in the release preview channel will initially get the finalized update via Microsoft’s ‘seeker’ scheme, meaning they have to manually check for and choose to download the update at this point (in Settings > Update & Security > Windows Update). Microsoft further clarified that the update is starting to roll out for those in the beta channel.

There is one major known issue highlighted by the blog post, namely that build 19042.508 suffers from a bug which breaks the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). This is the nasty ‘element not found’ error as previously reported to be a problem with cumulative update KB4571756 (which 19042.508 carries).

Microsoft has successfully resolved this issue and is now working on implementing a fix which it promises will be included in the next servicing release for the preview version of the October 2020 Update.

Minor update

As you may recall, the October 2020 Update is one of Microsoft’s more minor updates – rather like the upgrade for the second half of 2019, except it applies a little more work.

Those who have the previous May 2020 Update installed will be able to get the new update as a simple enablement package – basically flicking a switch to turn it on – whereas those who still haven’t moved to the May 2020 Update will get the October 2020 Update as a full download (in other words, a major feature update that will be a hefty download and will take some time to apply).

The October 2020 Update does deliver a bit more in the way of changes than last year’s H2 update, as mentioned, and that includes a new look for the Start menu, and a better way of working for Windows 10 tablet users.

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