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Power Toys: tools to tweak the behaviour of Windows Part one of a five-part series of blogs
You can use these hidden gems to reassign or disable keys on your keyboard, detect pixel colours in a website, display a Windows short-cut key guide … and much more! Power Toys: tools to tweak the behaviour of Windows (this blog) Using the colour picker The keyboard manager Using the mouse utilties to find your mouse The Windows key shortcut guide

Power Toys: tools to tweak the behaviour of Windows

Part one of a five-part series of blogs

You can use these hidden gems to reassign or disable keys on your keyboard, detect pixel colours in a website, display a Windows short-cut key guide … and much more!

Power Toys: tools to tweak the behaviour of Windows (this blog)
Using the colour picker
The keyboard manager
Using the mouse utilties to find your mouse
The Windows key shortcut guide

Posted by Andy Brown on 20 January 2022

Power Toys: tools to tweak the behaviour of Windows

Power Toys is the collective name for a suite of software utilities which I would be wary of installing on any laptop, were it not for the fact that they're written and promoted by Microsoft! How had we never heard of them until now?

You can install Power Toys from the website linked to above (the icon is a bit old-fashioned though).

Here's a list of the utilities included:

Out of these it's the Color Picker, Keyboard Manager, Mouse utilities and Shortcut Guide which seem most useful (these are the ones I've covered in the rest of this blog).

Here's what all the utilities do:

Utility	What it does
Always On Top	Allows you to designate for any window that it should always remain visible (preventing it from being hidden by any other).
Awake	Lets you suspend any auto-sleep function on your computer while running a critical task.
Color Picker	Lets you see the colour of any selected pixel.
FancyZones	Creates rectangular areas of your screen into which you can dock windows (you'd have to have a very large screen surely to make this worthwhile?).
File Explorer add-ons	Lets you preview PDF and certain images files in File Explorer.
Image Resizer	Lets you change the size of selected images by right-clicking on them (you can create custom sizes to snap to - useful when you want to force a set of images to all be the same size).
Keyboard Manager	Lets you reassign or cancel particular keys on your keyboard.
Mouse utilities	Allows you to show a searchlight beam where you mouse is, with variable beam size and colour.
PowerRename	Lets you rename multiple selected files simultaneously in File Explorer.
PowerToys Run	Makes it easier to run applications by typing in their name at a prompt in the middle of your screen.
Shortcut Guide	Shows what all the Windows short-cut keys do.
Video Conference Mute	Lets you assign keys to turn on or off your camera and microphone during online meetings.

Parts of this blog
Power Toys: tools to tweak the behaviour of Windows (this blog) Using the colour picker The keyboard manager Using the mouse utilties to find your mouse The Windows key shortcut guide