How to enable pre-release features on Windows 10 Insider Builds
Mach2 is a free open source program for Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system that you may run to find and enable pre-release features on Insider Builds of the operating system.
Windows 10 Insider Builds provide access to development features that may make their way into the next feature release of the operating system. Microsoft "hides" some features that it considers not ready yet from these development builds of the operating system.
The company does so sometimes to avoid functionality breakage but at other times because it does not want testers to use the functionality yet. While a hidden feature may work fine in a certain build, it is usually the case that development continues on that particular feature.
Mach2
Mach2 is developed by Rafeal Rivera. You may download the latest version of Mach2 from the project's GitHub page. All that is left to do is to extract the download to start making use of it.
Rafael describes what the tool does in the following way:
Mach2 manages the Feature Store, a core component of Feature Control, where these switches live. It can display which features are enabled or disabled on a machine. It can also assist with the discovery of interesting features to flip on and off.
The program is a command line tool which you need to run with parameters to use the functionality it provides.
Here are common commands that you may run:
- mach2 --help to display all available options and commands.
- mach2 scan directory to scan a specific directory for *.pdb files and reveal new features found.
- mach2 display to display enabled, disabled, and defaulted feature IDs.
- mach2 enable ID to enable a specific feature
- mach2 disable ID to disable a specific feature
Closing Words
Mach2 is a specialized command line tool that is only interesting to Windows Insider testers, and there only to those who want access to specific features that are not enabled yet.
I ran the program on a Skip Ahead build of Windows 10 and it did not find any new features during scans.
One issue that you will encounter while using the program is that you work with IDs only which means that you don't know anything about these features. While you may notice changes immediately after enabling a feature or on the next restart, you sometimes may not notice any change at all because of that.
Last but not least, it needs to be noted that enabling or disabling features may wreck the operating system installation on the machine. I suggest you run it only in virtual environments to avoid that.
