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Hands-On Windows 166: Power Toys 2025 Update
00:13:01
Windows Tweaks You Didn't Know You Needed
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- [00:00]
Leo Laporte
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- [00:27]
Micah Sargent
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- [01:26]
Paul Thurrott
Comfort Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to take another look at PowerToys. It's been a while and a lot of improvements and one major new tool that is immediately useful.
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Podcast Announcer
Podcasts you love from people you trust.
- [01:44]
AT&T Business Announcer
This is Twit.
- [01:50]
Paul Thurrott
Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Thurat and this week we're going to take a look at PowerToys. It's been a while. We have certainly talked about PowerToys several times over the years. This is that set of free utilities that Microsoft makes available. You can get it from the Microsoft Store. It keeps growing. It keeps getting better. A lot of these things feel like features that are going to be added to Windows later because actually that has happened and there's been some big changes since the last time we spoke, including a new UI for the front end for all of the utilities, kind of the main app part of it, and also a major new app addition which I love and I think almost all of you are going to want to use immediately. It's much needed. Before we get to that, though, let's just recap here some of the things that are available. And I'm not going to go through the whole list. There's so many of them. But in Fact, if you look at. This is the new front end. So these are all contracted now. But if you open these things up, you can see there's dozens and dozens of utilities in here. One of the things you can do here is just go through and disable the ones you're not going to use. When I look at these checkboxes here, I already know this actually off the top of my head, but these are the ones I use. Always on top is terrific. This is a way you can just point to any window and say, no matter what is going on in Windows, this thing is always going to be on top of the other windows, which is fantastic. Awake is a utility I use when I have two laptops side by side and playing a video game over here. But I need to keep track of work. I'm writing between things. And this will keep the PC from going to sleep or turning the screen off for whatever amount of time. I usually set it two hours, but you can do whatever you want there. Command palette, right. Which is the. This interface here. So this is like that. I forgot the name of it, but the interface of Mac os, which they don't have a start menus, but they can run apps this way or find things and do. You could run batch files and so forth. There's all kinds of stuff you can do here. It's really powerful. But if you just wanted to run an app, for example, you could run Notepad, kind of a successor of PowerToys Run, which is the older version of that app. Find my mouse. Embarrassed to say I use this so much. This isn't as much of a problem here. I'm in dark mode right now, but when it's in light mode, you can see like this tiny little thing. I lose track of the cursor all the time. So you hit the. I just did it on the wrong screen. That's funny. I have multiple screen. There it goes. You hit the control key, the left control key twice, and it focuses in. Then once you start, you know you can just hit it again. It goes away. So it's. It's this fun little game I play. It's called where's my Mouse? And then I use that thing to find that keyboard Manager lets you remap any key to do anything or to do nothing. Which is perfect if you don't want to use the copilot key because you can map it to do nothing. If the copilot key is next to your left arrow key, for example, you could map it to left arrow. So it's like you mishit it and it just goes left, you know, it doesn't do anything. So you can do that as well. Peek is a really cool tool. So I get this one also inspired by the Mac. If you've ever used a Mac, you know that you can select a file in the finder and then hit the space bar and it will show you a preview of that thing and then hit space again to get rid of it or just escape or whatever. And now we can do that. This is. Well, it's not working for some reason. It's break is added up. Sorry. Let me. Let me see if I can do something to fix that. But it should just be spacebar. Yeah, let me try that one more time. Oh, actually it's enabled. Yeah. So you should be able to hit space. There we go. All right. So you get a preview window. The nice thing about this is that it also works with documents of various times. I write and markdown, but these could be Microsoft Word files, et cetera, et cetera. Let me see if I could find one that actually has text in it. Most of these are things I'm kind of working on, so they're not complete documents, but I guess not. So I will just. Well, here's what I'm kind of in progress. So hit space and the text comes up. Right. Useful. It's nice. It's kind of, you know, it literally is what it sounds like. It's a preview of something. So depending on the app you're that would launch, it could take a little while. You might not. It's like, you might get the into it, be like, oh, it's the wrong one and go try to find it. It's a really neat utility. So that's a good one that I use all the time. And actually I do not use Power Rename and I'm not sure, and I do not use that. So there you go. I guess I got lazy toward the end there. So that's most of what I use in PowerToys. And right after this message, we're going to take a look at a new tool.
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Odoo Announcer
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Micah Sargent
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- [07:56]
AT&T Business Announcer
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- [08:25]
Leo Laporte
Hi, I'm Leo Laporte, host of this Week in Tech and many other shows on the Twit podcast network. Can you believe it? 2026 is around the corner. So this, my friends, is the best time to grow your brand with Twit. Nobody understands the tech audience better than me. Than we do. We love our audience and we know how to effectively message to them. We develop genuine relationships with brands, creating authentic promotions that resonate with our highly engaged community of tech enthusiasts. You know over 90% of Twitch audience is involved in their company's tech and IT decision making. Can you believe that 90%, 88% have actually made a purchase based on a Twit post read ad. No one comes close. We're the best at this. As one Twit fan said. I've bought from Twitt TV sponsors because I trust Leo and his team's knowledge of the latest in tech. If Twit supports it, I know I can trust it. You cannot buy trust like that. Well actually you can. You can buy an ad On Twitter. All our ads are unique. They're read live by our expert host, Micah Sargent.
- [09:35]
Micah Sargent
Me.
- [09:35]
Leo Laporte
We simulcast all during the shows on our social platforms, so everybody can be watching live. You know one of our customers, Harun Meir, the founder of ThinksCanary, he's been with us since 2016. Since 2016. He said we expected Twit to work well for us because we were longtime listeners who over the years bought many of the products and services we learned about on various Twitch shows. And we were not disappointed. The combination of the very personal ad reads and the careful selection of products that Twit largely believes in gives the ads an authentic, trusted voice that works really well for our products. 10 out of 10 we'll use again. Thank you, Haroun. We love you. And it's been nine years. That's kind of. That's the proof, right? Partnerships with Twit offer valuable benefits, including over delivery of impressions. You get presence on show episode pages. So there's a link right there that our audience can click on. We're in the RSS feed descriptions, a link there too. And social media promotion. Our full service team will craft compelling creative to elevate your brand and support you throughout your entire campaign. I work on the copy myself to make it authentic, to make it real. If you want to reach a passionate tech audience through a network that consistently over delivers, please contact us directly. PartnerWIT TV. That's the email address. PartnerWIT TV. Let's talk about how we can help grow your brand. Or just go to Twit TV advertise for more information. I look forward to working with you. Thanks for listening.
- [11:14]
Paul Thurrott
All right, welcome back. So in addition to this new front end, you can see the new here there is a new tool which I have been using as soon as I found out about it. And you can see it's going bright because that's what this thing does. So if you're familiar with how Windows works today, you know that we have. Let me bring up settings here. We have capabilities tied to the display, like night light. Right. And so night light is this thing. It's actually on here, but I can turn it on schedule. And the way that this works is it will. Or it will color the screen a little bit orange, which you can't actually see unfortunately in the recording, but from whatever set hours you want or from sunset to sunrise. Right. And that's how I usually set that up. It's pretty cool. And if you go into personalize, we have this colors interface and you have three choices Here, so you have dark mode, light mode. Right. So we can put it back in dark mode and custom and custom is just a way to have a different setting for both windows and then the apps that are running. So I could have windows and dark or apps and light or whatever. So you can see this taskbar down here, still dark, but the app itself is light. Right. So unfortunately it doesn't have an automatic setting. There's no way to do a sunset, the sunrise or whatever. The best we can get is if you go to the home page here. This is one of the settings that's almost for me at least, is always here. So you can launch settings, you know, Windows key +I, it's scroll down a little bit and we can switch it right here. You could do that if you really know what you're doing. I have a shortcut somewhere in my file system for double clicking and it just goes right to that page. And settings, you could do that kind of thing I guess as well. But light switch is what makes this happen automatically. So it's like night light but for dark and light mode.
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Podcast Announcer
Right.
- [13:04]
Paul Thurrott
So it's not set this way by default. It's actually manual and you can enter the times. But I want it to be sunrise or sunset. To sunrise, it will ask you at the time. I've already done it, but it'll ask you to set your location. So if I click that now, it's going to look at where I am. I'm in Mexico City. So it's going to come up with some sort of a latitude, longitude kind of a deal here. And as I record this, the sun rises here at 6:30am we're pretty close to the equator, so these things, this doesn't change too much. But sunset is at 6:12. Now, of course, if you're, you know where I was in Boston or in Pennsylvania or at some other part of the globe, these things could be quite different. Right. And so we'll keep track of that, which is really good. And you can do an offset, which is actually kind of awesome. Right. So you might not want it to go to dark mode immediately. When the sun sets, there's still ambient light in the sky, etc. You might want it to be 30 minutes later and you can set that here. So that's really neat. They also have this capability to do different settings for system and apps, which is that Windows and app setting that we start in the Settings app. Right. And so I don't do that, but I want everything dark or everything light. But they let you do that here. So this thing, you know, PowerToys, runs when your computer starts up. So this thing will always be running. It's not taking up a lot of space, it's not taking up a lot of resources, et cetera, but this thing runs in the background. And now it works the way Windows should work. And it's hard to imagine this thing not becoming part of Windows in the future. I am going to temporarily turn this off because this thing is blinding me. When I record, I don't like to have the screen on light mode, although I do use it that way normally during the day, but night mode at night. So now it works the way I want it to work. It's cool. The one thing it doesn't fix, by the way, is one of the other weird problems with dark mode in Windows is certain interfaces, classic interfaces, are always going to be in light mode, even if you're in dark mode, right? So the screen's in dark mode. If I open options here, this is white, right? It's not doing the dark mode thing. I have a bunch of big videos here. If I just to get a file copy going. If I were to start these things copying, you'll see this progress dialog. I'll just pause that because we're going to stop it. But as you can see, this thing is in light mode and that's not what you want. Microsoft is in fact updating Windows 11 to make at least some of those interfaces support dark mode accurately. Right? So that I know the file progress is one of those. So when that happens, we'll talk about that as it happens. But that's in the works. It is happening. But if you're running 24 or 25H2, you can look forward to that. And then otherwise you should still get this. Get powertrays, if only full light switch. Because it's. This is so necessary. I can't believe this isn't part of Windows. But, you know, that's what we get. Alrighty. Well, I hope you found this useful. We will have a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. You can find out more at Twitter tv. How. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you especially to our Club Twit members. We love you. If you're not a member of Club Twit, please consider it. Support the channel and all the content creators and you can learn more about that at Twitt tv. Club Twit, thank you so much. See you next week.