Microsoft shipped an unexpected feature-laden preview update on June 23, 2026, as KB5095093 began rolling out to Windows 11 versions 24H2 and 25H2. The optional cumulative update lifts systems to build 26100.8737 for 24H2 and 26200.8737 for 25H2, and it introduces a pair of tools that could meaningfully change how enthusiasts recover from foul updates and schedule maintenance windows. Point-in-Time Restore brings a modern, snapshot-based recovery mechanism that surpasses legacy System Restore, while the new Pause Calendar gives users a visual, date-picker interface for deferring quality and feature updates. Alongside those headliners, the preview ships the usual assortment of squashed bugs, performance tweaks, and security hardening that IT admins typically expect from a late-cycle monthly optional.

Microsoft is pushing this out as an optional “C” or “D” week release, meaning it is not installed automatically unless a user manually triggers the download in Windows Update or grabs the standalone MSU from the Microsoft Update Catalog. The build strings—26100.8737 for the annual feature update branch 24H2 and 26200.8737 for the 25H2 mainline—confirm that the same servicing stack is being leveraged across both releases. Redmond activated a staged rollout, so even among seekers it might take up to 48 hours for the bits to appear on all eligible endpoints. The quickest way to pull the package is through Settings > Windows Update, flipping the “Get the latest updates as soon as they’re available” toggle, and then clicking the “Check for updates” button.

What’s New in KB5095093

The headliner that Windows enthusiasts have been waiting for is Point-in-Time Restore. While Windows has had System Restore for decades, it has often been derided as unreliable, excruciatingly slow, and prone to breaking after driver updates. The new tool, accessible through Settings > System > Recovery, sidesteps the old shadow-copy infrastructure and instead relies on a lightweight differencing scheme that captures a known-good system state without duplicating gigabytes of personal files. During testing, Microsoft benchmarked a 40-second restore cycle on NVMe-equipped laptops, down from the multi-minute wait that plagued System Restore on the same hardware. Users can create manual touchpoints with a single click, and the OS automatically generates a checkpoint before any quality update, driver install, or application setup that integrates with the Windows Installer. A timeline slider lets you scrub through available points, preview which system files, registry hives, and even certain app configurations would be reverted, and then restore the PC with a single reboot.

Perhaps more tantalizing is the Pause Calendar. Instead of the current binary “Pause for 1 week” or “Pause for 5 weeks” toggles buried in Settings > Windows Update, users now see an interactive monthly calendar. On the calendar, every eligible date that falls inside the supported pause window (up to 35 days) is clickable. Selecting a specific date sets the resume point with a clear on-screen countdown. If you pause updates on June 24, 2026, and tap July 10, the system will display “Updates will resume in 16 days” and will not bother you until midnight on July 10. The feature also introduces an exclusion zone: weekends and national holidays (based on the region format) are automatically greyed out to prevent a surprise Monday-morning reboot. Power users can override the zone by toggling “Allow weekend resumes” in Advanced options. Early testing suggests the calendar respects active hours and will only attempt the resume action during the user’s designated maintenance window.

Beyond the two star features, KB5095093 includes the prerequisite security patches for the June 2026 Patch Tuesday (even though this preview itself is not classified as a security update). It also delivers a stability fix for DirectStorage slowdowns that occasionally plagued PCIe 5.0 SSDs during wake-from-modern-standby, a mitigation for a memory leak that the Windows Subsystem for Android could trigger after six or more concurrent app instances, and a correction to the taskbar overflow menu that sometimes painted invisible icons after a multi-monitor topology change. Microsoft’s support document highlights a modest but welcome latency reduction in the WSL2 networking stack—TCP round-trip times to a virtual machine are down by 2–3 milliseconds in lab tests—as well as improved compression for printer data streams over Wi-Fi Direct that can shave a few seconds off large print jobs.

Point-in-Time Restore: A Lifeline for Windows Recovery

For anyone who has ever watched a machine fail to boot after a driver update, Point-in-Time Restore is a overdue modernization of a core integrity safeguard. The tool operates at the component-layer, snapshotting the WinSxS manifest, driver store, boot configuration database, registry, and select application binaries tracked by the Windows Resiliency Platform. It intentionally leaves user data (documents, pictures, videos) untouched, so a restore never risks wiping out a recently edited spreadsheet. The differencing engine uses a B-tree index stored in the existing System Volume Information folder, but unlike the old VSS writer it does not rely on strict block-level volume shadow copies. Instead, it chains incremental deltas, which means creating a new touchpoint on a 256 GB drive typically consumes less than 300 MB of space and finishes in under three seconds.

Administrators will appreciate that Point-in-Time Restore hooks into the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE). If a machine fails to start three times, WinRE’s “Troubleshoot” menu now offers a direct entry into the restore timeline, bypassing the need to have a bootable USB. For enterprises, Group Policy templates (available in the 24H2 Administrative Templates pack updated June 2026) permit IT to disable manual point creation, enforce a maximum storage quota, or auto-create a point every 24 hours in a protected schedule. The feature also introduces a PowerShell module, Start-PITRestoreSession, that can be scripted for remote remediation. In early deployment rings, the module successfully rolled back a faulty CrowdStrike sensor update on five thousand corporate laptops in under eight minutes, according to internal Microsoft telemetry shared at Build 2026.

Pause Calendar: Scheduling Update Resumes Becomes Visual

The Pause Calendar answers a long-standing pain point for power users who juggle multiple devices. Previously, to pause updates until a specific date you had to do mental arithmetic—tap “Pause for 1 week” four times then count forward, hoping you landed on the right Thursday. The new interface eliminates the guesswork. A month-grid view, laid out identically to the legacy date-and-time picker in the Control Panel, defaults to the current month and dynamically shades non-pausable dates in light grey. A click on any available date instantly commits the resume target, and a subtle animation confirms the timer reset. If you later need to extend or shorten the pause, simply click a new date; the countdown re-anchors accordingly.

Early builds of the feature also integrate with Focus Assist. When the resume date arrives, Windows Update checks whether the user is in a full-screen application (detected through the Game Bar infrastructure). If so, it postpones the notification and the pending reboot until the application exits, provided the adjournment does not exceed a hard deadline of 24 hours beyond the scheduled resume date. Microsoft is positioning this as a quality-of-life upgrade for gamers and content creators who cannot afford a mid-session restart. User telemetry from the Dev Channel, where the calendar first surfaced in April 2026, showed a 38% drop in involuntary reboots during evening gaming sessions.

Under-the-Hood Improvements

Service stack reliability continues to receive attention. KB5095093 revised the component-detection logic that Device Manager uses when scanning for hardware changes; a prior edge case could introduce a COM surrogate crash on systems with Thunderbolt 4 docks carrying multiple USB class devices. The servicing stack itself was hardened against a race condition that occasionally corrupted the pending.xml file when a cumulative update was applied simultaneously with an out-of-band servicing stack update—a scenario that enterprise patch management tools sometimes orchestrate. Additionally, the update brings the Windows Imaging Component (WIC) to version 10.0.26100.8730, unlocking native decode support for JPEG XL images in File Explorer, Photos, and the lock-screen slideshow. Creatives who have been clamoring for JPEG XL since the format’s standardization in 2022 can now set a .jxl picture as their desktop background directly from the context menu.

Networking receives two refinements. The Wi-Fi 7 hotspot feature, exclusive to 24H2 and 25H2 Pro for Workstations SKUs, gained Multi-Link Operation (MLO) channel steering for 6 GHz bands, which can boost throughput by roughly 12% in dense office environments. And the SMB over QUIC client now respects RFC 9369 acknowledgements more precisely, reducing transfer pauses when writing large files to Azure Files shares across high-latency WAN links.

How to Get the Update

KB5095093 appears in Windows Update as “2026-06 Cumulative Update Preview for Windows 11 Version 24H2 for x64-based Systems (KB5095093)” (or the ARM64 / 25H2 equivalent). Anyone running build 26100.1 or higher on 24H2, or 26200.1 or higher on 25H2, can install it. Because it is optional, it will not download unless you explicitly click “Download and install.” Enterprise IT administrators can import the MSU into Microsoft Endpoint Manager or WSUS; the package’s SHA-256 hash is published on the Microsoft Security Update Guide. After installation, a reboot is mandatory, so plan accordingly.

Those who test the preview are encouraged to listen for the telltale audio cue that Windows plays when the Pause Calendar reminder fires—a soft chime that Microsoft’s human-factors team believes reduces the anxiety of an impending forced reboot. Early adopters in the Windows Insider Program have already stress-tested Point-in-Time Restore across a range of hardware, from Surface Pro 10 to custom-built Zen 6 desktops, and bug reports have been consistently flat for the past two weeks.

Looking Ahead

Microsoft has not publicly committed a date for baking the new features into the mandatory July 2026 Patch Tuesday update, but the general pattern is that features premiered in a “C” week optional usually graduate to the “B” week security update the following month, barring unforeseen regressions. Both Point-in-Time Restore and the Pause Calendar are considered stable and are expected to ship to all 24H2 and 25H2 users with the July security rollup. For now, the optional preview offers a risk-free way to rebuild confidence in Windows recovery tooling and to finally put updates on a human-friendly schedule.