MISSING FEATURES AFTER INSTALLING THE WINDOWS 10 MAY 2019 UPDATE

HAVE YOU NOTICED THAT SOME FEATURES YOU USED TO RELY ON HAVE DISAPPEARED AFTER INSTALLING THE WINDOWS 10 MAY 2019 UPDATE?

Unfortunately, this isn’t a bug, but rather a deliberate move by Microsoft to clean up Windows 10 and remove old and rarely used features.

So, the list of features being ditched with the freshly launched May 2019 Update has just been published by Microsoft, and the good news is that in terms of what’s being removed, it’s nothing that you will likely shed any tears over.

Firstly, support for XDDM-based remote display drivers is set to be removed in a future release, Microsoft notes, adding: “Independent Software Vendors that use XDDM-based remote display driver should plan a migration to the WDDM driver model.”

And secondly, the desktop messaging app is losing the sync feature which allowed it to sync text messages received from Windows Mobile devices, keeping a copy of them on the PC desktop. Of course, Microsoft’s mobile OS is dead in the water and reaches end-of-life in December 2019, so it’s not surprising that this particular piece of functionality isn’t important to the company any more.

As for the features which are no longer under active development, these include the roaming of Taskbar settings (where it’s positioned, whether it auto-hides, and so forth), and Microsoft advises that this capability will be disabled in a future release.

Windows To Go – which allows you to boot up a workspace from a USB drive – will also no longer be developed, and the Print 3D app is being replaced by 3D Builder (which you can snag from the Microsoft Store).

Finally, when it comes to Wi-Fi networks using outdated WEP security, or TKIP encryption (used in WPA – as opposed to WPA2 or WPA3), Windows 10 will now issue a warning when you connect, and in the future, connecting to these networks will be blocked completely. Microsoft rightly doesn’t consider them secure enough anymore.