If you’re part of the Windows Insider program, and you certainly should be if you’re an early adopter and enjoy playing with new concepts, then you’ll be able to run two anti-virus programs at one time on your PC now. Not terribly exciting on its own, nor smart, but second opinions when traversing the dark web is sometimes much appreciated when bad things are encountered. But there’s far more to this preview build too.
Windows 10 build 14352 also hooks Cortana to music controls and allows better game recording
Cortona can now be used to help play music with your favorite service, be it Groove Music or even Google Music. You can ask for specific songs within the vast library available to you and can even navigate through those tracks. Your digital assistant is even more useful that just that and is now able to actually transcribe messages into the Stick Note app as well. That’s a surprisingly useful feature, especially given the growing accuracy of her voice recognition capabilities. You’re also able to set timers with her now too. The new commands available are:
- “Hey Cortana, play <song name>”
- “Hey Cortana, play <artist>”
- “Hey Cortana, play my <Groove playlist name>”
- “Hey Cortana, pause”
- “Hey Cortana, set a timer for <time limit>”
Beyond that you’ll find that even more games are supported by Microsoft’s Game Center in this build. that means that you’ll be able to use the built-in Game Bar record gameplay in League of Legends, World of Warcraft, DOTA 2, Battlefield 4, Counterstrike: Global Offensive, and Diablo III. The game has to be recognized by the system in order to be recorded, something that’s added in the back-end, unfortunately. Thankfully they’re hard at work adding in as many as possible, and as quickly as possible.
Running two full and active anti-virus programs at once is not recommend, and is actually the anti-thesis of what’s productive. But a new Limited Periodic Scanning has arrived in build 14352 that will have Windows Defender scan on a, well, periodic basis. Running in the background when the other fully-active system isn’t shouldn’t be an issue, and shouldn’t interfere with anything. When a problem is identified but can’t quite be detected by one system, second opinions from software such as Hitman Pro are good, so this could very well help to keep things free from issues while not causing performance issues. It seems that Microsoft is steadily improving their built-in protection to help combat new and emerging threats. They have a long way to go, though it’s certainly still better than having nothing at all.
The build is adding quite a bit of interesting new features, though not all are groundbreaking, however. The Insider Preview program is still a showcase that, at the very least, Microsoft is very committed to progress and to accepting and acting on feedback from consumers as well. Check it out if you are a member and want beta builds. The underlying OS of the build is stable, the new features just may not necessarily work as expected.