Microsoft Releases December 2024 Patch Tuesday Updates

Microsoft has just released the December 2024 Patch Tuesday updates for all supported versions of Windows 11 and Windows 10. This month, various changes will roll out to Windows 11 users including a simplified system tray, the ability to share content with an Android device from File Explorer and the desktop, and more.

The KB5048667 and KB5048685 patches are now available for Windows 11 versions 24H2 and 23H2, respectively. You can find a list of the main changes below:

Start menu: When right-clicking apps that are pinned to the Start menu, jump lists will appear for apps that support them.

System tray: The system tray area of the taskbar now shows a shortened date and time, and the notification bell icon might not show if you have set the toggle for “Do not disturb” to on. This can be disabled in Settings.

Sharing to Android: After installing and configuring Phone Link, users will be able to share content to an Android device from the context menu in File Explorer and on the desktop.

Task Manager: The Disconnect and Logoff dialogs now support dark mode and text scaling. The Performance section will also now show the type for each disk.

Windows Speech Recognition: This update improves the speech-to-text and text-to-speech features in Windows.

Mouse settings (only for Windows 11 version 23H2/22H2): New options to turn off enhanced mouse pointer precision and change the direction in which the mouse scrolls are available in Settings > Bluetooth & Devices > Mouse.

For Windows 10 users, today’s KB5048652 patch only includes a couple of bug fixes. Microsoft addressed an issue causing files that have been dragged and dropped from a cloud files provider folder to be moved instead of copied. Another bug causing Windows 10 to not activate after motherboard replacement has also been addressed.

These December 2024 security patches will be the last Windows updates of the year as the Windows team won’t be releasing optional preview updates during the holidays. However, we may still see another Windows Insider flight after Microsoft made Recall and Click to Do available for Dev Channel testers with AMD and Intel Copilot+ PCs last week.