Preview Builds Customization in Windows 10 Build 9860

The very first build update for the Technical Preview of Windows 10 delivered yesterday afternoon. Over 4GB in size, the update provided some new features including an Action Center (notification review), battery saver, preview build cadence customization, and DataSense, among other things. Microsoft boasts that build 9860 comes with around 7,000 changes to the first technical preview.

I'll cover all the new features to look for when testing this new build, but want to highlight the Preview Builds cadence feature in this article.

Windows 10 Build 9860 includes a new feature in the Preview Builds area of PC Settings. You can get to it by navigating: Settings (on the Charms menu) – Change PC Settings – Update and recovery – Preview builds

The Preview Builds screen now has an additional option which allows you to tell Microsoft how quickly you prefer to be presented with new Windows 10 builds. It contains two options:

This feature was added for those daring, brave Technical Preview adventurers that love to cast caution to the wind and who hunger for the latest and greatest bits, no matter what potential problems lie inside. The default, as shown above, is Slow. Keeping it at this pace allows you to wait a bit to hear of any potential problems from early installers before the download is also available to you.

Microsoft explains the different cadences in this way:

To put this into perspective, it’s helpful to understand what we call "ring progression".

Every day our build process compiles the latest changes our engineers have made and produces a build that is automatically sent out to our "Canary ring" – people in OSG who want to be the first to get started using and testing the newest code. Once we have validated with that group that the build is stable enough to use by more people, it is sent out to the next ring – all of OSG – where we validate it with that audience. From there we send it to tens of thousands of people here at Microsoft, and after it proves stable enough there, we make it available to you.

This is a change from the initial Windows 10 Build release in that, prior to build 9860 there was only 1 Windows Insider ring. Now there are two: fast (or ludicrious speed for those Spaceballs fans) and slow.