At the end of last week, Microsoft announced a new Windows 10 Insider Preview version that was being released to the Windows Insiders of the “Fast” ring. Build 14942 include a new setting under Personalization to allow hiding the App List from the Start Menu, an update to the Photos app, improved touchpad usage, improved PC upgrade process, a new Windows Update icon, expanded ‘Active Hours’ default range, adding form field navigation to the Accessibility Narrator, and more. You can see the details on all of these new features at Friday’s Windows Experience announcement post.
The other improvement that I thought was significant was separating processes from consolidated Service Hosts process if a computer has more than 3.5GB of RAM. Those familiar with troubleshooting Windows should be familiar with the svchost.exe process listed in Task Manager. With the grouping of service hosts, it could make it hard to track why a process was using so many resources. The other downside was that if the service host failed, all other service hosts would crash as well.
With Windows 10 Insider build 14942, Microsoft is moving away from this memory-saving method and will use separate service host processes to increase reliability and transparency. This should improve troubleshooting for end-users, IT Pros, and Microsoft engineers. The isolation of processes and permissions should also increase security.
Microsoft adds one disclaimer to the change: “Note that critical system services (services whose recovery require system restarts), as well as a couple of select service hosts, will remain grouped.”