Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 28020.1495 arrives in the Canary Channel (KB 5074168)

Microsoft has pushed Build 28020.1495 to the Canary Channel for Windows Insiders — listed under KB 5074168. This update reads like a classic polishing pass: small but targeted fixes across the desktop experience, Start, input handling, power management and Settings, with a handful of lingering issues that are worth watching if you run early preview bits.

What this build aims to fix and why it matters

Rather than introducing headline features, this release focuses on reliability. Reported problems that often crop up in builds at this stage are the sort that annoy daily use: desktop background changes that don’t stick after a reboot, Start menu stalls or slow animations, and input quirks with keyboard or IME handoffs. Addressing those reduces friction for testers and helps Microsoft gather cleaner telemetry from new features down the line.

Experienced Insiders tend to notice the difference in two places first: perceived speed and consistency. If your wallpaper was resetting, or the Start menu took a beat to respond after waking the device, these are the types of fixes included here. Power-related tweaks are also notable — many preview users run into odd battery drain patterns or strange sleep/wake behavior after successive builds; small adjustments in power management code can make an outsized impact there.

There are also miscellaneous Settings and “other” fixes tucked into this build. Those are typically stability and UI polish changes — things users won’t always call out in the feedback hub, but which reduce crashes and odd edge cases when toggling features or changing device configurations.

Known issues — what to expect

As usual with Canary releases, not everything is perfect. Microsoft flags a couple of higher-level problem areas: general system instability in particular configurations, and File Explorer oddities. File Explorer problems can range from search results not appearing as expected, to preview panes behaving inconsistently or context menus failing to render. Those symptoms commonly surface after deep UI changes or when shell components are updated; often a restart of explorer.exe or a system reboot clears transient problems, but persistent cases should be filed through the Insider feedback channels.

One small caveat: functionality will vary by device and market. Features that depend on locale, character sets, or specific hardware may not be available everywhere immediately — that’s intentional for staged testing. If you’re relying on input-method fixes or text actions in non-Latin scripts, expect gradual rollout behavior rather than instantaneous global availability.

Practical notes for Insiders and a touch of context

Insiders who opt into the Canary Channel do so to see very early work; stability trade-offs are part of the deal. That said, this build looks like Microsoft is tightening up groundwork for broader quality updates. Whether this results in a noticeably smoother Beta or Release Preview cycle remains to be seen — Canary tends to be the place where rough edges get buffed, and then sometimes reworked again when the team starts integrating larger feature sets.

Common advice: if you depend on a rock-solid daily driver, avoid Canary. If you’re troubleshooting a problem, check Feedback Hub reports and consider the usual mitigations — sign out/in of affected apps, restart explorer.exe for File Explorer quirks, and perform a full reboot before filing a bug so Microsoft gets a clean repro. Experienced testers often note that many transient issues disappear after those steps, which helps triage what’s an environmental fluke versus a reproducible bug.

Where to read more

For the official details and to check whether a particular tweak or fix affects your setup, follow the release notes and the Insider channels. Functionality will vary by device and market; text actions will be available across markets in select character sets. See aka.ms/copilotpluspcs for related information.

Thanks,
Windows Insider Program Team