Hot on the heels of the Windows 11 2022 Update releasing yesterday to the general public, Windows Insiders in the Dev channel are getting their weekly build of Windows 11 today. Microsoft is rolling out Windows 11 build 25206 in the Dev channel, and it comes with some notable improvements, including a the ability to use dynamic refresh rate (DDR) on external monitors.
Indeed you may remember that Microsoft first announced support for dynamic refresh rate in Windows alongside the Surface Pro 8 and Surface Laptop Studio, which were some of the first devices to support it. However, it was only available for the built-in monitor on the laptop, and other laptops that support had the same limitation. With this build, however, as long as you have a driver supporting WDDM 3.1 and a monitor with a 120Hz refresh rate or higher, you can take advantage of the dynamic refresh rate to save power.
This build also comes with a change to the SMB authentication rate limiter, which is a feature that limits the number of incorrect authentication attempts for an SMB server. For example, if a brute force attack were to attempt to submit 300 authentication attempts per second for five minutes, it would submit 90,000 passwords in that time, but with this limiter, that same process takes over 50 hours. This feature was already available, but now it's enabled by default and set to a 2-second delay for every failed authentication attempt, which makes WIndows machines less appealing targets for brute force attacks like this.
Other changes in this build include the full availability of the "Open with" dialog with a modernized design. Additionally, when performing a search in the File Explorer Home page, you'll now see recent file activity for files in the cloud. Finally, Microsoft is starting to roll out a change that lets you use the clipboard history in password fields.
Aside from these additions, there's also the typical list of bug fixes, though it's a relatively short one this time around. You can check it out below:
Also typical is the list of known issues, which are to be expected with any pre-release software. This includes a few issues with the recently-added tablet-optimized taskbar, which still has some problems to iron out. Here's the full list:
It's hard to say when these changes will be available to the general public, especially now that Microsoft has said it plans to release smaller feature updates throughout the year instead of concentrating new features in annual updates like the one released earlier this week. They might show up at any point in the next year or so.
Source: Microsoft