Whenever Microsoft releases new test copies of Windows, a number of features are typically announced but only made available to a select group of testers. Sometimes it’s because the business is A/B testing many iterations of the same thing, or because Microsoft wants to roll out significant changes to a select group of customers before implementing them broadly.
Users often have little control over whether new features actually appear in their Windows beta installations, but Microsoft’s proprietary StagingTool software allows the company’s developers to independently turn features on and off. Due to a “bug bash” the business is conducting this week to detect and repair issues before the following significant batch of new Windows features ships this fall, StagingTool has now been made publicly available.
According to The Verge, some bug bash participants were assigned “quests” that specifically instructed them to use the StagingTool to enable particular features. StagingTool is already being freely distributed among Windows enthusiasts who want more control over the features they see (Microsoft’s official link is broken, and you should be cautious when using third-party download links for any kind of executable file). Those quests and the tool itself have since been taken down from Microsoft’s servers.
StagingTool is quite similar to a third-party tool named ViVeTool that testers have used to activate unannounced and announced-but-unavailable features in fresh Windows releases. Due to Microsoft’s recent “whenever they’re done” policy regarding testing and rolling out new Windows features, there are now more of these features available than in the past.
Similar to ViVeTool, StagingTool is a command-line tool that uses featureID strings to enable and disable specific features. If you can’t locate the precise string for the feature you want elsewhere, you can utilize the search feature included in ViveTool to find new feature strings to toggle on and off.
The most recent of several Microsoft products to receive new generative AI features driven by ChatGPT will be Windows Copilot, which will make up the bulk of the batch of Windows upgrades coming out this fall. The Outlook app replaces the built-in Mail and Calendar apps from Windows 10, improved support for passkeys, additional fixes for the Windows 11 taskbar, and expanded support for various compressed file formats, among other things, are likely to appeal to users who aren’t interested in AI features.
