Hacker News Reader

Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

PowerToys is one of the best things about Windows: useful, free, and regularly updated. It was great to see it come back in 2019.

View on HN

Don't forget SysInternals for the more technical tasks/tools.

SysInternals is great (though improvements to taskmgr and resmon have closed some of the gap).

SysInternals is also wild in encouraging running an .exe directly from the web via Sysinternals Live.

One missing feature is Windows Explorer Shell integration for File Hash checks, e.g. for downloads. Hopefully it won't be too much longer until this lands: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/57#issuecommen...

I found OpenHashTab to be a good tool for this in the meantime: https://github.com/namazso/OpenHashTab

7zip adds a context menu option for this.

One issue I had in the past was with the Advanced Clipboard/Paste so I've disabled it on my new laptop until I can figure out what the issue was.

That said, PowerToys was the first thing I installed on the new laptop.

If only Microsoft could make it part of Windows by default instead of those lucky users who discover what PowerToys needing to submit their request to corporate IT and enduring either incredulity or dumb jokes about the naming.

Gatekeeping as "power user features" is silly, it's 2025 and many of these features have been built-in on other operating systems for a decade or more.

True, but one of the reasons that PowerToys can innovate and iterate so freely is not being tied to mainline Windows and all the enterprise and backward compatibility baggage that comes with.

This. I would rather have them be a small independent team that can test and break things instead of having to comply to a big bureaucracy.

I think they brought them back to compete with the newer macOS features. It's working and I hope they keep iterating until it is much better.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com