Notes From the Field: The Week That 23H2 Happened (Updated) (Premium)

UPDATE: Someone from Microsoft—but not Microsoft officially—was kind enough to confirm my findings that the Media Creation Tool described below has not been updated for Windows 11 version 23H2. Please read Microsoft Quietly Delayed 23H2 on MCT Until Mid-November and Didn’t Tell Customers for more information. –Paul

The past month has been a whirlwind of Windows 11 version 23H2 activity for me, for both the site and my book. And while I certainly have my opinions about the ridiculous way in which Microsoft communicated and then deployed this new version of Windows, here I’m taking a more pragmatic stance. I’ve installed this version of Windows literally hundreds of times now across both physical and virtual machines, have gone down some one-way, dead-end streets, and have made my share of mistakes. So let’s discuss that.

First, and perhaps more importantly, Windows 11 is—for perhaps just this brief slice of time—finally in a good place. I feel cheap just writing this, but it’s true: The Windows 11 we have today delivers the functional completeness and (with one glorious exception, noted below) reliability and consistency we all a right to expect. It’s not perfect. But it is, if not very good, at least acceptable.

It’s so easy to forget how bad it was. The first version of Windows 11 (21H2) arrived in incomplete form and with multiple functional regressions when compared to Windows 10, making it a non-starter for businesses and many users. Not helping matters, it also arrived with some egregious and arbitrary hardware requirements, further limiting its appeal.

And then there’s the year I’d like to forget, the hectic 12-month slog during which Microsoft piled new features on top of Windows 11 version 22H2 at a frantic rate almost every single month, culminating in the silly and unnecessary confusion of releasing most of its successor’s new features a month or two early, albeit only in preview form. Then only to dump the Windows 11 2023 Update—which updates Windows 11 version 22H2 PCs to Windows 11 version 23H2—on us earlier than expected. On Halloween, so perfect.

That the Windows 11 2023 Update has brought its own confusions was perhaps predictable. But I think it’s fair to say that most Windows 11 users will be up in running with all the new features soon if they aren’t already. And while we may never understand the way they got there—the magical combination of things that had to happen first—this weird time will be in the rearview mirror soon. We’ll mostly be aligned from a new features perspective, at least for a while.

But I do have my questions about this thing. I came to Mexico City with two PCs running 23H2 in pre-release form and quickly updated the two PCs that I leave here to 23H2 as well (more on this below). I did this because I’m updating my Windows 11 Field Guide to support this release, and I had a goal of releasing a big 23H2 update for the book before we came home (and I was happy to accomplish that despite the earlier-than-expected release of 23H2). Since then, of course, 23H2 actually arrived. And so I started testing a variety of things (again, more on this below) over just a few days, culminating in a clean install of the OS using an ISO that I downloaded from Microsoft’s public website.

And I am confused by the fact that a clean install of Windows 11 version 23H2 is offering me KB5031455, the Cumulative Update Preview that Microsoft delivered to those on 22H2 on October 26, a date that has nothing to do with the normal update delivery schedule. For those unfamiliar, KB5031455 was the second release—the second preview release—of the so-called Fall Update that Microsoft announced at its September Special Event. Like the first preview release of the Fall Update, KB5030310, it contained almost all of the new features originally expected in 23H2. But where KB5030310 used a literally random Controlled Feature Release (CFR) scheme to roll out new features, confusing everyone, KB5031455 enabled all those new features by default (supposedly). So as long as you were explicitly seeking it, enabled that option in Windows Update to “get the latest updates as soon as they’re available,” and downloaded and installed manually, you pretty much got 23H2 early. Minus a few features like the updated Teams (free).

Well, I’ve now clean-installed Windows 11 23H2 on two physical PCs (one I’ll keep here and one that’s coming home with me next week). And now that each is fully up-to-date with Windows Updates, Microsoft Store app updates, and my PC maker’s latest drivers, I’m curious. Why are these PCs both being offered KB5030310, a preview update for 22H2 whose only purpose is helping people get 23H2 features early? After all, these PCs already have these features. All of them.

I haven’t installed the update yet. I am purposefully leaving these PCs on the most stable train there is so I can use them for the book, meaning no Insider anything and no preview updates. But I did go and check out the Microsoft Support website, where, among other things, you can examine the update history for each version of Windows 11. And go figure, it tells me that Windows 11 version 23H2, which first shipped on October 31, 2023, already has one documented update: KB5031455, which also shipped on October 31, 2023.

Curious.

Going forward, this is going to be much easier. Not just for me, for purposes of having an up-to-date OS in which I can test features and take screenshots, but for all of you as well. This weird schism between 22H2 and 23H2 won’t matter as each month goes by and more and more people who were on 22H2 are simply switched over. We’re just in the thick of it now. (And we’ll see how future cycles of preview and stable updates go. Will there be a stable version of KB5031455 that arrives on November 14—this month’s Patch Tuesday—that once again delivers all the 23H2 features that those on 23H2 already have? I wait with bated breath.)

But it wasn’t easy at first. It wasn’t that long ago that it seemed that the Windows Insider Program’s Dev channel was the place to be, and then sometime that switched over to the Release Preview channel in late September. And that was when I started putting PCs on the Release Preview channel so that I could test—and then write about—23H2 features.

My advice remained the same as in the past: Anyone interested in doing as I was should also configure their PCs to automatically unenroll from the Insider Program using the “Stop getting preview builds” option that appears on enrolled PCs in Settings > Windows Update > Windows Insider Program. But this option is predicated on something that may never actually happen because of how much the Insider Program has changed. That is, it is set to fire when “the next version of Windows releases.”

And the next version of Windows has been released: It arrived October 31, 2023 with the Windows 11 2023 Update. So anyone who followed my advice, which used to work, should already be back on stable. But to my knowledge, that has not happened. It certainly didn’t happen to my four PCs here in Mexico. Which is why I ended up clean-installing two of them (so far).

This kind of thing isn’t why I’m so compulsive—who travels to another company with two laptops when they have two laptops waiting for them there?—but it’s harder to account for every eventuality when I’m not at home, where I have far more PCs for testing purposes like this. What to do?

Then it occurred to me: My wife’s here too, of course, and she has her laptop with her, and like any normal person, she only has the one. And it’s running Windows 11, and while I never look at it, I figured she must be on 22H2 and up to date. Maybe she had been offered 23H2 and I could see what that looked like.

She did and I did. And as I’m sure so many of you saw as well, her Windows Update notes that  “Windows 11, version 23H2 is available.” There’s no KB number associated with it, which is kind of crappy on Microsoft’s part. But it’s called out much like a preview update is: It’s in a box below the normal update(s), with a “Download & install” button. I bet that if I clicked that, it would tell me to first enable “Get the latest updates as soon as they’re available.” And that means that the Windows 11 23H2 Update is actually a preview update. And go figure, Windows 11 version 22H2 did get a preview update on October 31, 2023. It’s KB5031455. Of course it is.

Wait for it.

That all means that Windows 11 version 23H2 isn’t really out yet. It’s available now in preview.

But not exactly, right?

You can download the ISO. You can use the Media Creation Tool (MCT). You can run the Windows 11 Installation Assistant. All of these tools are available now on the Download Windows 11 website, which clearly states that the current release is “Windows 11 2023 Update l Version 23H2.” And I have literally tested all three of these, though the MCT actually created 22H2 installation media on Tuesday and Thursday; I haven’t tested it yet today. And the ISO and Installation Assistant do get you to 23H2. They are 23H2. So it’s also out and fully supported. In other words, not a preview.

(UPDATE: As noted above, the MCT release of 23H2 is delayed, until mid-November. Please read Microsoft Quietly Delayed 23H2 on MCT Until Mid-November and Didn’t Tell Customers for more information. –Paul)

Confusing? You bet. But like I said, this is all about being pragmatic and moving forward so I will leave this confusion behind: I’m just happy to have the “final” version of 23H2. I need the screenshots I take and the text I write to be accurate. So that’s good.

I mentioned that I brought two laptops here. I’ll discuss this more in a coming “What I Use: Mexico City (October 2023)” post, but those two laptops are the HP Dragonfly Pro that I reviewed back in May and the HP Spectre Foldable PC that I am currently reviewing. The Dragonfly Pro remains one of my favorite laptops of all time, so it’s good to write on, but its display is also the exact right combination of a 16:10 aspect ratio and a relatively low (Full HD+) resolution, making it ideal for screenshots. So I have a clean user account on there for the book as well.

When we flew here, the Dragonfly Pro was on whatever Release Preview 23H2 build and I’ve done a lot of work on it. And then just today I did a clean install using a USB-based installer that I created using the downloaded 23H2 and Rufus. I used (most of) the methods I documented in Roll Your Own Windows Time Machine (Premium) to get up and running as quickly as possible: The 23H2 installer, Winget for most app installs, and cloud-based backup/sync, albeit in Google Drive this time. As I said I’d do in that last link, I also used this clean install as the excuse to switch my “Book” folder—with the live files for the Windows 11 Field Guide, Windows 10 Field Guide, and Windows Everywhere—from OneDrive to Google Drive as well. It’s working great, but the point here is that I’m now working on the book out of Google Drive too. Progress.

But before I did that, I also beat up on an older 14-inch HP ZBook Firefly that I leave here in Mexico by trying an insane variety of upgrades and clean installs on it. I can’t recall everything I did anymore, it was such a busy time, but I used this PC to try different upgrade scenarios, which required many reinstalls and upgrades, and I tested and re-tested the Windows Setup workarounds I documented in the book. I created and downloaded different versions of the Windows 11 installation media, using different tools, and when 23H2 was released officially I did it all again, and repeatedly. This is why I know where those downloads were/are: While I’m not sure about the Media Creation Tool—I’ll get to that again later–the ISO and Installation Assistant are up-to-date as noted.

Once I was sure the ZBook was clean using the “final” 23H2 bits, I started looking at the Dragonfly Pro. That one was tough because I actually do work on it. But as noted above, that went well. I think the other HP I leave here in Mexico City will be the next to get the clean install treatment.

Before moving on, I need to address the “glorious reliability exception” I mentioned up top. I wrote about this a lot in the recent articles in my Digital Decluttering 2023 series, but the version of File Explorer that comes with Windows 11 version 23H2 is a trainwreck, plain and simple. Microsoft is curiously proud that it switched part of the File Explorer user interface—it’s just the address bar/command bar area, really—over to WinUI, but most users won’t even notice any visual differences. And it introduces a new functional regression: You can no longer drag and drop files on the address bar to move/copy them to the currently displayed folder, something that worked for decades before.

But it’s worse than that. The “new” File Explorer is a performance disaster, and I had to turn to third-party tools to overcome this issue while digital decluttering. And the reliability is a nightmare: File Explorer hangs on me routinely and even with third-party tools I’ve found myself manually killing and then re-running explorer.exe so that I could keep working. Despite multiple last-minute builds with File Explorer reliability fixes, the problems persist in the shipping version of 23H2 as expected. It may be a while before they’re fixed. But that’s why we have monthly preview and stable updates, I guess.

The next few months should be interesting, but I hope they’re calmer than this past month. They almost have to be.