Windows 11 update preview promises faster launches, puts Task Manager on NPU patrol

Microsoft has released a cumulative update preview for Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2 with some useful quality-of-life improvements for users brave enough to install it. Windows 11 will now support sharing Bluetooth audio (via Bluetooth LE Audio broadcast technology), and the venerable Task Manager has "improved visibility into NPU usage." Task Manager has come a long way from its origins as the stone-cold killer of errant processes. Now, if a PC is equipped with an NPU, there are optional columns for NPU, NPU Engine, Dedicated Memory, and Shared Memory on the Processes, Users, and Details pages. "Neural engines that are part of a GPU now appear on the Performance page, providing a more complete view of AIrelated activity," Microsoft said. Perhaps more usefully, there's also an optional Isolation column on the Processes and Details pages to show which apps are running in an App Container. Task Manager turned 30 last year, although the original lean incarnation is very different from today's version. That said, the author of the original, Dave Plummer, noted that it came from "a very Unixy impulse" to know what was going on inside the system, so adding NPU monitoring makes some sense. Microsoft has also promised improved performance in this release. App launches will be accelerated and "core shell experiences," such as the Start Menu, should be faster. The company did not spell out in the post how it was doing this, but judging by chatter on social media, it appears to involve a temporary CPU boost. Other changes include allowing users to select a custom name for their user folder during Windows setup and support for specifying the size of the Dev Drive in gigabytes rather than megabytes. It's a beefy update, but one item in the list of known issues is a reminder that Microsoft updates are often only for the brave. The May 2026 security update 0x800f0922 error persists. The issue occurs on devices with limited free space on the EFI System Partition, "especially if it has 10 MB or less available," according to Microsoft. The result is failure at around 35-36 percent completion and a rollback, sometimes with the helpful text: "Something didn't go as planned. Undoing changes." "A resolution is in progress and will be included in a future Windows update," Microsoft said. (R)