Microsoft continues to screw up Windows 11 Recall, offering no fix for a weird bug that breaks the feature
- Some Windows 11 testers found that Recall didn’t work at all
- Microsoft has explained that this is due to a bug caused by an optional update
- That optional update causes issues with the Dev build recall, but there is no fix for those affected
Some Windows 11 testers trying the Recall feature (which recently went live for Windows Insiders) encountered a baffling issue where it didn’t work at all, and Microsoft just explained the problem but failed to provide a fix for it affected.
As we saw last week, after Recall was finally deployed to the developer channel for Windows 11, it was immediately hit with a number of bugs. Some testers even complained that it refused to save snapshots at all (these are the regular screenshots that Recall takes to facilitate its AI-supercharged search functionality).
According to an update from Microsoft blog post For the affected preview build, the outage affects Windows 11 users who first install patch KB5046740 (the November preview update) and then install build 26120.2415.
Essentially, something in the optional KB5046740 update for Windows 11 is clashing with the Dev Channel build, throwing a serious spanner in the works for Recall.
Microsoft’s advice is: “We recommend that you do not install this preview update before joining the Developer Channel until we resolve the issue in a future update.”
Analysis: Already in this pickle? You’re out of luck, it seems
Of course, Microsoft doesn’t tell us what to do if you’re already in trouble and you installed the preview update before you decided to join the Developer Channel to test Recall. So we can only assume you’ll need to reinstall Windows 11 to fix this (or just accept that Recall doesn’t work – and may never work, in the future with Dev test builds).
Of course, recall is only a feature for Copilot+ PCs – and only for Arm-based Snapdragon devices to begin with – so there will be a limited group of testers anyway. And an even smaller subset that went this route before the Dev build was installed.
Still, that’s still some users being let down, but those are the dangers of being a Windows 11 tester. Especially in the earlier testing channels, Canary and Dev, where the changes made are fresher and more likely to suffer from bugs.
Via The Register
