Activate the New Features of October 2020 Update in Windows 10 v.2004

Last Friday, Microsoft surprised users with the official announcement of what will be its second 2020 update for Windows 10 : October 2020 Update. This new version of Windows is already available to Insider users, within the beta channel, but it will still take a few weeks to reach all users. And, although it will not be an update full of changes, it will bring some interesting news, especially in the aesthetic field. And, if you don’t want to wait to update your PC, you can activate these improvements right now without being an Insider or updating your computer.

October 2020 Update, or 20H2, is going to be a very small and quick update. As we have seen, if we have our PC updated to the latest version, this new October 2020 will only take up 100 megabytes, and it will be downloaded and installed in a few seconds. No long waiting times or a multi-gigabyte download. In this sense, Microsoft has done the job well. However, although there are apparently no serious problems related to this update, some users claim that the same bugs of the current 2004 version are still present.

Activate New Features of October 2020 Update Windows 10

Some cosmetic changes of 20H2

In this new update, the Windows 10 start menu now includes a new set of Fluent Design icons, as well as a much more unified look with the same tile, or background, for all pinned icons. As for the taskbar, it has also received an important change, and that is that from now on it will be optimized for an individual user when they first configure their new PC.

Nuevo inicio Windows 10 21H1 Insider

Windows multitasking also receives some minor changes in this update. Microsoft will allow that by pressing Alt-Tab on our keyboard we can see each of the pages open in Edge as independent programs to be able to go directly to any of them.

Of course, and more importantly, the October 2020 Update brings a large number of changes, fixes and optimizations internal to the operating system. These changes will attempt to fix the many issues and bugs in the May 2020 Update, although it remains to be seen if they really do any good.

Turn on what’s new in October 2020 Update in Windows 2004 version

To activate these new features in the current version of Windows 10, all we need is to have all the Windows updates published to date installed. If we already have the PC up to date, then we will only have to make a couple of changes in the registry. The first one is used to enable changes in the start menu and the taskbar.

After opening regedit, we move to the following directory:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE / SYSTEM / CurrentControlSet / Control / FeatureManagement / Overrides / 0 / 2093230218

And there we will create two 32-bit DWORD values. The first one will be called “EnabledState” and will have a value of “2”, while the second one will have the name “EnabledStateOptions”, and will have a value of “0”.

We restart the computer and voila, we will have this novelty available on our PC. Now we only have to enable the new Alt + Tab experience. This will be found within the Configuration menu, in the System> Multitasking section .

Disable news

In case you don’t like these changes, you can easily deactivate them and wait for the October 2020 Update to reach everyone in order to have them available. To do this, all you have to do is delete the previous entries that we have created in the registry and restart the computer.

Now Windows 10 version 2004 will have its own characteristics again, and will not activate anything from the next version until we update.