Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 25126 allows users to access perpetual Microsoft Office products from the Settings app

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 25126 has been released to the Dev Channel. It brings a revamped Accounts page to allow users to access all supported Microsoft Office products from one place.

What's new in Build 25126

Build 22567 that was rolled out a couple of months ago, brought an important change to the Accounts page in the Settings app. It included options to view your active subscriptions, manage your payment methods and billing information. This was limited to displaying your Microsoft 365 subscription. Now, Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 25126 has added shortcuts to all Office products that are tied to your account. This includes shortcuts for perpetual products such as Office 2021 and Office 2019. The data displayed in the Settings app, is quite similar to that you can find on your account management page at Microsoft.com.

Microsoft is A/B testing the feature, so the Accounts page may not reflect the products licensed to your account just yet. That is the only new feature in Build 25126, as this is mostly a bug fix release.

Fixes in Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 25126

The latest build fixes a bugcheck with the error code DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL in pci.sys, that was causing the installation of Dev Channel builds to fail, and rollback to the previous release. Users had reported that the Program Compatibility Assistant Service was consuming a lot of CPU resources in the previous builds, this issue has been mitigated.

You can now edit the names of folders in the Start Menu even when a touch keyboard is docked. Another crash issue that was related to Explorer.exe has been fixed. The change log also mentions that the Task Manager will no longer stop responding, if Explorer.exe has hung. The Processes page in the Task Manager will indicate the status of apps when they are not responding. The color of the circles used in the Performance page will reflect the graph in the summary view, if you've hidden the graphical indicators on the sidebar.

The Lock option in the Start Menu has been removed from the Windows Sandbox, because it wasn't working. Windows 11 will display the preview image under Personalization > Lock Screen correctly for Arabic and Hebrew language users. Previously, it was displaying the image backwards for these users. Using the “Open All Active Printers” option from the system tray shortcut will not open File Explorer, when there are no active queues.

Known issues

The Known issues in Build 25126 are identical to those in the previous release. Live Captions are still buggy, and games with Easy Anti-Cheat may result in crashes.

Microsoft has confirmed that many users had reported that they were unable to install the previous builds on their computer. I too, had trouble with these in Build 25120, and had to clean install the Preview Build last week. But, I had no issues updating to Build 25126.

Microsoft has announced that it will bring the Amazon Appstore preview to five additional countries by the end of this year: France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom. The Store now supports Win32 apps, so developers who code their programs in .NET, C++, Electron, Flutter, Qt, Rust, etc, can host their apps at the Store. The Redmond Company has also opened up ad campaigns on the Store, to allow developers to promote their apps using contextual ads.

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