Microsoft is following its standard staggered rollout, & the new ISOs are available. You can read plenty of info at most any Windows-centric site, e.g. Neowin[.]net, petri[.]com, Windowscentral[.]com etc., but the gist of it is there's not a whole lot in store, though we'll get some added features next month. There are some features for enhanced security, mostly for the enterprise, but if you install fresh [not upgrade] there's new app whitelisting aided by AI, and drivers can now use similar virtualization to what you get with Windows Core Isolation [assuming you elect to take the performance hit]. If you have higher end hardware & games, there's added support for direct storage, HDR, & DX 12 enhanced. For everyone else there's the new Live Captioning, which captions any audio passing through the system -- Windows + Control + L keys.
With the note that Your Mileage May Vary [& probably will], I fired up my copy of Win11, opened the Windows Update window in Settings, and there was the update to 20H2 waiting for me to click Install. While this update does require a reinstallation, it proceeded just like any other update. When it was finished & I clicked Restart, I found the progress indicator was broken -- it showed 0% long enough for me to think maybe it stalled, then jumped to 100% & restarted. Things went as usual for a reinstall/upgrade from there, though it again had me wondering if it stalled when the login screen appeared -- it took a really long time for the rotating dots to go away. Then I ran into a problem checking Windows Update -- it showed it wanted to install kb5017859 for .NET, but as soon as I clicked install it would flash once then fail. So I downloaded the kb & ran it manually, finding it did not apply to this version of Windows. After that I tried Windows Update again, & now it showed kb5017026, which worked. There's a new Do Not Disturb switch that's turned on by default in Notifications, but I didn't see anything else to note until i fixed the boot menu with EasyBCD... I reordered the menu & renamed the Win11 entry, and on restart the menu was stuffed with 2 or 3 garbage entries, so back in Win10 I restored a BCD backup and booted into Win11 to make sure it held. I don't know if that's just Win11 22H2, or if EasyBCD is no longer 100% compatible or whatever -- just a note that if you have multiple boot entries you may want to create a backup beforehand.
With that done I tackled my Win11 VM. The update wasn't offered in Windows Update -- I'm not sure if that's because VirtualBox can't yet emulate or pass-through secure boot & TPM, or if the VM just hadn't hit the lottery for Microsoft's staggered rollout. So I attached the new Win11 ISO & ran setup, finding it blocked because no TPM etc. So I tried the "Skip_TPM_Check_on_Dynamic_Update.cmd" that makes the necessary registry changes etc. for us lazier people, & that didn't work either. I wound up creating a new .vhd file in Windows, copying the files from the mounted Win11 ISO, then replacing the appraiserres.dll file in sources with the version from Win10 1809. Attached that .vhd file to the VM, ran setup & this time it went fine, just like any other Windows reinstall. I chose not to check for updates during the upgrade, and I again had problems checking Windows Update afterward. Windows Update showed kb5017026 & kb5017321, but only the 1st would install. Downloaded the 2nd kb & ran it, installing kb5017321 just fine. After a restart Windows Update still showed kb5017321, but this time it was downloading (?), and after a short time it marked it as installed.
