Microsoft highlights Windows 10’s speed, reliability and battery life boosts

Microsoft has fired off a blog post talking up the success of Windows 10, and how the operating system is improving substantially across many fronts – including reliability, performance and battery life – ahead of the release of the big Fall Creators Update.

The post by John Cable (Director of Program Management, Windows Servicing and Delivery at Microsoft) discusses the previous Creators Update which emerged in April, and noted its relative success compared to last year’s Anniversary Update.

The Creators Update has been rolled out more slowly and carefully than the latter – it’s now on around two-thirds of Windows 10 PCs compared to 85% for the Anniversary Update after five months – and as a result has hit less reliability issues.

Microsoft’s own figures indicate that there has been an impressive 39% reduction in OS and driver stability issues with the Creators Update compared to its predecessor, and we’ve certainly seen less complaints online.

Although that said, the Anniversary Update was particularly nightmarish when it came to the amount of gremlins popping up during the rollout, so you would certainly hope for an improvement.

Performance boosts delivered with the Creators Update include 13% faster boot times, and unlocking your machine with facial recognition (via Windows Hello) is up to 30% faster. The Edge browser has also seen various performance enhancements to make scrolling pages and rendering websites more responsive, with up to 53% speed increases in some cases.

Battery bolstered

And when it comes to Windows 10 on laptops or tablets, you’ll get more battery life thanks to various tweaked apps. Microsoft notes that users watching streaming movies or offline videos will get a boost of 2.5% or 5% extra battery life respectively in the Movies & TV app with the newest version of Windows 10 compared to the Anniversary Update.

And the latest version of Edge delivers a 17% boost in battery life. Yes, Microsoft is still keen to push Edge as the browser of choice for Windows 10 users.

Microsoft is equally keen to bang the drum regarding its policy of listening to user feedback and changing Windows 10 to meet popular demands, a company line which has been repeated multiple times since the OS was launched.

Cable stated: “By listening to user and partner feedback, we evolve Windows to make each quality update and each feature update better than the last. It also assures we continue to keep Windows 10 the most reliable, performant and secure version of Windows ever.”

And the underlying message is that, naturally, we can expect more of the same from the Fall Creators Update next month (which will, among other things, deliver a welcome boost on the privacy front).

In other Windows 10 news this week, we also glimpsed the future of the OS as a fully modular system.

Via: Ars Technica

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).