It will have happened to everyone that an application crashed and, to unlock it, the whole Windows desktop was restarted . A nice nuisance, to which Microsoft remedies with the build 1903 of Windows 10 coming in April, and also known by the code name 19H1. Among the many new features it presents , one has attracted attention: it can manage folders as individual independent processes . The result is that if a lock occurs during an activity, it will not be reflected on the whole system.

It seems a small detail, in reality it solves with a trivial command one of the most annoying problems of the most common operating system on PCs. For the record, the setting already exists , it is found in the "File explorer options", in the "display" tab: it is the " Run folder windows in a separate process " entry . At the moment this item is not checked, so it is deactivated. With Windows 19 Build 1903 it will be enabled by default.

In doing so, each folder opened in File Explorer will use an independent process and, in the event of a crash, will not affect the rest of the open folders or the desktop. The new setting could have a side effect: as the technicians point out, the multiplication of the active processes risks increasing memory occupancy and CPU usage. However, the system requirements of Windows 10 PCs have increased compared to the past, and Microsoft may have calculated that computers are powerful enough to handle the news without problems. To have a definitive answer, all that remains is to wait for the installation.