Microsoft’s much-talked-about Windows Recall is officially out for testing, and I’ve had it running on my Surface Laptop 7 since its preview launch last week. Honestly, I’m quite impressed, especially given all the initial hiccups around privacy concerns and delays.
I’ve always been intrigued by the Recall idea—a feature embedded within an operating system that smartly organizes everything you do. It’s essentially a digital safety net, capturing your activities so if anything gets lost or deleted, you can easily retrieve it later.
Recall really shows its value when you least expect it. Just the other day, I was working on an article and trashed a few paragraphs, thinking they were redundant. Later, I realized I needed those exact sections for a different piece. Without Recall, they would have been gone for good, requiring me to recreate them from scratch. Luckily, I was able to swiftly backtrack and retrieve the paragraphs straight from my laptop, ready to be reused.
Recall shines when you must dig up something that has slipped your mind, whether it’s the name of an article, a product, or even an image. Recently, I spotted an ad for a smartwatch that caught my eye, but I didn’t click it then. Thanks to Recall, all I had to do was type “watch” into the search, and there it was.
What’s impressive is that Recall handles both text and image-based searches seamlessly and quickly. It’s a game-changer, finding visual results even if the specific word isn’t in the image itself.
The interface is great too. It prominently displays your activity snapshots, with a timeline across the top for easy navigating. You can scroll through your history and zoom in for more detail if needed.
Customization here is a strong point. You can filter out what you don’t want Recall to capture, which is excellent for safeguarding your privacy. Personally, I’ve set it to ignore my online banking and messaging apps like Signal and WhatsApp. It’s a relief knowing those sensitive data points aren’t captured, and Recall manages this filtering effortlessly in the background.
Overall, I’m thoroughly enjoying Recall. It feels like the first genuinely productive, AI-driven feature within a desktop OS that operates so intuitively behind the scenes. As someone usually skeptical of Copilot’s other AI gimmicks, Recall is something I can wholeheartedly endorse.
The only real frustration? You can’t sync your Recall data across multiple devices. Security concerns mean there’s no cloud storage for snapshot data yet. It makes managing Recall on multiple devices a bit of a hassle since the data is device-specific, but it’s a trade-off I can understand.
Of course, this is just a preview build, so bumps in the road like the clunky setup process are expected. Downloading the necessary updates through Windows is time-consuming, and the fact the app doesn’t work out of the box post-download is a bit of a letdown. And it doesn’t help that some users report glitchy rollouts.
Then there’s the frequent Windows Hello authentication prompt each time you start the app. While it’s important for keeping things secure, it gets tedious when you’re in and out of Recall multiple times an hour. A smoother authentication process would go a long way in making the user experience less bothersome.
All told, I am glad to have Recall by my side. It’s liberating to know that I can recover any lost moment, image, or text whenever needed. It provides peace of mind, ensuring that essential data is never out of reach.
Windows Recall is rolling out in a preview phase for Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PCs, with Intel and AMD counterparts to follow soon. The official release will likely happen across the board in early 2025.
