I’ve been noticing some odd and unusual behaviors from the now widely-available News and Interests taskbar item lately. Other sources have been reporting something similar (Windows Latest, OnMSFT, etc.) as well. For some, it has included “blurry text” for N&I on the taskbar. That is not anything I’ve seen on any of my 10 Windows 10 PCs. But it seems certain that odd Win10 News and interests issues are rampant right now.

What Kinds of Odd Win10 News and Interests Issues?

The weirdest thing I’ve seen appears to indicate synch or dynamic update issues. I’ll often look at N&I on my production desktop and see a different weather icon and  temp than in an RDP window on the other display. Just now, for example, I saw partly sunny and 87F on my left-hand monitor, and sunny and 88F on its right-hand counterpart. I’ve seen the N&I info show up when RDP-ing into other PCs with information that is hours old or from the previous day.

Is this a problem? No, not really. It’s more of a curiosity. It also has me wondering about how MS manages communications between the notification text and the back-end servers that feed it information. Methinks it’s likely there’s some rough spots in the polling or interval handling for refreshes involved.

That said, MS is reported to be aware of these issues and working on fixes. Other sources assert that N&I went out the door lacking polish and may not be completely “cooked” yet. My own experience is not that negative. However, it is easy to observe that some aspects of N&I don’t work as smoothly or seamlessly as they could. I’m sure this will be the focus for ongoing updates, refinements and enhancements in upcoming updates ahead. I look forward to its continuing elaboration and evolution. Stay tuned!