Windows 11 gets a fix for a nasty CPU bug.

Windows 11 insiders have witnessed the release of a new test build which fixes some nasty bugs, including a couple pertaining to File Explorer, and it adds some minor new features to boot.

Windows 11 (22H2) build 22621.898 has hit the release preview channel, and there’s an important bug fix for a problem with File Explorer that triggered high CPU usage, slowing your PC down, which sometimes occurred when opening a file.

Another issue, where File Explorer seized up completely when closing context menus and menu items, has also been cured.

There are a bunch of other bug fixes besides these, as you might imagine, with the full list provided in Microsoft’s blog post.

As for new features for build 22621.898, there are some small but useful additions here, including combining Windows Spotlight with Themes under Personalization settings (making Spotlight easier to find and enable, Microsoft explains).

Furthermore, OneDrive users will now get storage alerts telling them when they’re running out of online storage space on the Systems page (in Settings). There’s also the ability to buy more storage from within the Settings menu, too.

Microsoft also made a small extra change, now telling users the total amount of storage available from all their OneDrive subscriptions combined.

Note that all these elements are still in testing, but will be coming to the release version of Windows 11 before too long, with any luck.

Those are some useful extra additions, but nothing major – the main focus here is a lot of bug squashing, and some vital work on that front, too. File Explorer is the central piece of the Windows UI, so it’s good to see that CPU slowdown issue is now fixed – and indeed the problem which was causing File Explorer to fall over completely (never a good thing, of course).

We’re looking forward to some bigger changes coming to Windows 11, aside from smoothing over bugs, and indeed we just heard about one that we’ve been keenly awaiting for some time – the ability to ungroup apps on the taskbar.

In other words, a ‘never combine’ option that’s always been present on Windows 10, but was dropped for Windows 11 for some unfathomable reason. That’s a big step forward, at least in our book, though that said, it should’ve been a choice from the get-go (fewer options never being a good thing, generally speaking).