SINCE ITS ANNOUNCEMENT at Microsoft’s Build conference in May 2024, Recall has had a torrid time. Not only has it been criticized as being a privacy-busting nightmare, but at the time of writing, it’s restricted to the Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PCs, of which there aren’t many. It was removed from Windows 11’s preview versions while Microsoft worked on it a bit more.

At the beginning of December, a Dev Channel version of Windows 11 24H2 appeared with Recall returned to its place in the System Tray. If you’ve managed to avoid all the Recall-based discourse, it’s a system that takes constant snapshots of your PC’s active app. These are literal, image-based snapshots; not the sort of snapshots associated with backup software. These are then stored, and AI is used to parse the text and images in them, which is catalogued, and you can then search within this catalog with natural-language text queries or by sliding back along a timeline to find something you were working on or searching for.

Problems with this are instantly visible. What about banking apps or other confidential information? Is the snapshot library encrypted? Can I turn this off? Does it have an effect on battery life? All good questions, and ones we’ll do our best to address here.

–IAN EVENDEN

A

1 T O THE DEV CHANNEL

If you’ve got a compatible Copilot+ PC, you’ll probably have been waiting for Recall to partially justify your purchase. It’s one of the features we were promised that a Copilot+ PC could do that older, less AI-filled machines could not, and its absence has been felt. Microsoft has stated that it will become available for x86 processors, too, though presumably only those with an NPU or enough of a GPU to run a machine learning model on. At the time of writing, you can install a Dev Channel build on your Copilot+ PC via Windows Update, as long as you’re enrolled in the Windows Insider Program, with the build number 26120.2415 [Image A] or later. It’s worth noting that Dev Channel builds can come with some rough edges and low stability. They’re not as bad as those in the Canary Channel, but also not as polished as the Release Preview Channel. We’ve had no problems with this particular Dev build running on a Lenovo Yoga PC with a Snapdragon X Elite processor and 16GB of RAM, but all combinations of hardware and software are different, and you may encounter problems. If your PC is essential to your work, it’s probably not worth the risk, and you should wait for a more stable build, or even the final release.