The PowerToys utilities I keep enabled on every Windows 11 PC, and the ones I turned off within a week

PowerToys has lived on every Windows machine I use for years, but I rarely touch most of it. The suite ships with around thirty utilities, and most people enable everything on day one and leave it that way. In the same way I audit the registry tweaks I apply on every new PC, I worked through my PowerToys list and cut the active utilities in half.

A handful of PowerToys utilities have earned permanent residency on my taskbar

My PowerToys Run shortcut, Alt + Space, is one of the most muscle-memory key combos on my machine. It opens any app, folder, or file faster than the Start menu and saves typing in the address bar. Command Palette is the newer launcher Microsoft is positioning as the eventual replacement, and the two can run side by side while you decide which one fits better.

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FancyZones earns its toggle for anyone who's ever tried to make Snap Layouts work on an ultrawide. I have a few zone presets for writing, research, and side-by-side editing, and each takes about a second to drop a window into. Workspaces handle the rest. It remembers which apps I had open and where, then restores the whole set with one click after a restart.

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The smaller utilities do quiet work. Always On Top pins any window above the rest with Win + Ctrl + T, which is faster than reshuffling layouts for a single sticky window. PowerRename runs bulk renames with regex and undo, which File Explorer's built-in rename can't match. Keyboard Manager remaps keys system-wide - still nothing native in Windows that does this.

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Windows finally caught up to one of these, so it came off

Text Extractor is the one PowerToys utility that's been displaced by a Windows update. The trigger I used was Win + Shift + T, which dropped me into an OCR overlay to grab text from anywhere on screen. The Snipping Tool's Scan text button does the same thing now, sitting one shortcut away inside the same overlay I'd open for a screenshot anyway.

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The case for keeping Text Extractor was strong before the Snipping Tool got OCR. Now it's one extra background process for a feature that's already loaded into a tool I use every day.

There are a couple of edge cases where Text Extractor is still sharper, such as pulling text from a video frame mid-playback or grabbing text from a locked window. Neither comes up often enough on my PC to justify the duplicate. I covered the broader trade-off in the Snipping Tool, which quietly became the only screenshot app I keep installed on Windows 11. The short version is that when Windows builds the same feature into a default app, the third-party version rarely survives the next audit.

A few utilities looked useful in the abstract and stayed unused in practice

Mouse Without Borders is the kind of utility I wanted to like more than I actually did. It lets a single keyboard and mouse control multiple PCs on the same network - great if you have two machines sitting on the same desk. However, I use the Logi Options+ app since I have the Logitech MX Keys S combo.

Crosshairs is located within Mouse utilities alongside Find My Mouse, Highlighter, and Jump. It draws a permanent crosshair at your cursor, which makes sense for streamers and certain shooters, but not much else. I left Find My Mouse on because pressing Ctrl twice to spotlight the cursor is genuinely useful, and turned off the rest of the bundle.

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The Hosts File Editor is convenient if you touch your hosts file weekly. I do it maybe twice a year, and opening Notepad as an administrator handles those rare edits without keeping another module running. Power Display sits in the same bucket. DDC/CI support is inconsistent across monitors, and even when it works, the panel's own buttons or the manufacturer's utility were already doing the job.

Grab and Move is the newest utility worth a week's trial

Grab and Move is the one new utility I've kept enabled since the 0.99 release in April 2026. The idea is small, but it pays off. Hold Alt and left-click anywhere inside a window to drag it, or hold Alt and right-click to resize it from wherever your cursor sits. This way, you don't have to hunt for the title bar or aim at a thin window border.

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The use case shows up the moment you have a large display or two. Dragging a window across an ultrawide stops being a precision exercise, and recovering a window that's drifted partially off-screen takes one drag instead of minimizing everything. If you already use Alt as a system modifier with other remapping tools, you can switch the activation key to Win in settings.

The behavior has been standard on Linux desktops like GNOME and KDE for years, and it feels overdue on Windows. A week is plenty to know whether it sticks for your setup.

The PowerToys list is worth running through every few releases

Microsoft keeps adding utilities at a steady pace. Light Switch and Grab and Move all landed in the last few releases, and the cost of leaving everything enabled adds up across system tray slots, background processes, and update prompts. The next audit worth doing is your startup apps, where the same logic applies, and the gains are bigger.