Windows 11 has got a new cumulative update which applies some important fixes to the taskbar, and also resolves an issue that has been bothering some PC gamers for a long, long time (we’ll come back to that).
Patch KB5022845 (opens in new tab) has now been deployed, containing all the tweaks and changes that were made in the preview of this update (which was released late in January).
As made clear in Microsoft’s patch notes (opens in new tab), it includes a long-awaited fix for gamers. Windows 11 has been behaving rather oddly for those with a game controller hooked up to their PC, in that the system may not enter sleep mode due to that peripheral being connected. Well, all that’s a distant memory now as the cure has finally been implemented here.
On top of this, there are also solutions to several niggling problems in search functionality with Windows 11.
The main one is that when hunting for image files using the taskbar search, there’s a bug that prevents opening the pic in the photo editing app of your choice; and that glitch has now been fixed.
A further issue that stopped users from searching for a file via its contents has also been resolved.
There are a bunch of other fixes for minor issues here, outlined in full in the release notes, and some security measures applied as expected with these monthly patches.
Analysis: A tricky fix, it seems
The game controller-related flaw – which also stops the screensaver from kicking in, as well as preventing sleep mode – is a strange bug indeed, affecting not just gamepads but the likes of flight controllers. It’s an issue that has dogged Windows 10 users persistently in the past too, and indeed, there have been quite a number of reports (opens in new tab) online about this problem over the past couple of years (with bug reports that can be traced back to the very launch of Windows 10 (opens in new tab), in fact).
Why has it taken Microsoft so very long to solve this, then? Well, that’s a question we can’t answer, but we guess it must have been a deeply embedded issue that took some work to unpick. (Either that, or it fell off priority lists and disappeared into a chasm of inaction for some years).
Better late than never with the fix, of course, although in this case, Microsoft has pushed the acceptable bounds of the definition of ‘late’ to extremes. Hopefully this fix will come to Windows 10 soon enough, and indeed it’s also notable that we’ve seen comments online from some affected PC owners that this fix alone has prompted them to upgrade to Windows 11 (or nudged them off the fence, likely).
In these days of spiralling energy prices and the cost-of-living crisis, gamers can doubtless ill afford for their system not to be sleeping when it should be.
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Margarete Kucera