Windows 10 Registry Hack Reveals Next Preview Builds

Microsoft presented Windows 10 Preview earlier this week and everyone rushed to download it, despite Redmond's warnings that this particular build is only aimed at IT admins and experienced users.

The company said that the very first preview build only ships with limited features, but more would be added at a later time through a new built-in update mechanism. While no other details have been provided, Neowin has come across a small registry tweak that enables all users to see the upcoming testing builds of Windows 10 Preview. At this point, however, none of the options that would show up in the “Update and recovery” screen of your Windows 10 Preview PC settings menu actually work, so Microsoft saw this coming and decided to lock them until the company is ready to ship more features.

How to enable it

First and foremost, you need to keep in mind the fact that messing with the registry editor isn't quite the best thing you should do if you care about system stability, as deleting the wrong items could actually crash your PC. If you do not care about such a thing (and you shouldn't since this is just a testing version of Windows 10), write regedit.exe in the Start menu search box and hit enter. In the registry editor, navigate to the following path:

code:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/WindowsSelfHost/

Once you're there, create two new DWORD keys named ThresholdInternal and ThresholdOptedIn and change their value to “1.” Simply launch PC settings, go to “Update and recovery” and the new option called “Preview builds” should already be there, with no reboot required.

Locked options for now

At this point, the new options that you get access to with this registry hack are locked, but they are supposed to provide you faster access to new preview builds as soon as they're available. For example, you can choose “how fast you'd like to get new preview builds,” but Microsoft warns that “choosing to get them faster might mean there are more bugs.” At the same time, you can choose where to get the preview builds from, as the company provides multiple branches for user downloads, but also change the time when your PC should automatically install new preview builds. It's not yet clear if Microsoft plans to unlock these features in the coming months, but we expect a similar trick to be found in order to get faster access to new builds despite the locked status of these options.

The new options show up in the PC settings screen
Image credits to NeoWin

Posted in: News, Preview, Software