For my first Software of the Day post, I chose to showcase Microsoft PowerToys, which is a convenient suite of tools for Windows that make life much easier. PowerToys just released v0.64.0 recently, which adds new features and a variety of bug fixes. The most notable parts of this update include two new utilities, which are File Locksmith and Hosts File Editor, as well as backing up and restoring settings from a file.

File Locksmith

Many of us have likely encountered the inconvenience caused of a process on the system using a file or folder that we don’t want it to be using, making it lock the file and not allowing us to delete or modify it. This issue can already be resolved by looking for the process via Process Explorer, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a more convenient way to find it? That’s exactly what File Locksmith does – it adds an option to the File Explorer’s context menu called “What’s using this file?” that adds a neat menu of programs using the file/folder.

Hosts File Editor

In case you don’t know what the Windows ‘Hosts’ file is, it’s a file that maps domain names to IP addresses to find hosts on IP networks, with this file being checked before your PC uses the regular DNS to convert the domain name into the IP address. The editor makes it more easy to edit the configuration of this file, and there are some cases where this can come in handy. As the official Microsoft PowerToys source states:

This can be useful for scenarios like migrating a website to a new hosting provider or domain name, which may take a 24-48 hour period of downtime. Creating a custom IP address to associate with your domain using the hosts file can enable you to see how it will look on the new server.

Source: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/hosts-file-editor

If you’d like to look further into this, you can check out the official Microsoft page about it, which does a good job at explaining this.

Settings Backup

PowerToys v0.64.0 brings another new feature to the table, which is the ability to back up settings to a file. This is great if you use more than one machine or if you just want to make sure your settings aren’t lost in the event something goes wrong. The settings for backing up to and restoring from a file is in the General tab of Microsoft PowerToys.

Deprecation of Video Conference Mute

Unfortunately for those who make use out of Video Conference Mute, there’s some bad news for you: the feature is now deprecated and will be unavailable soon. A deprecation notice has been added to the settings for the feature so users know that it will be gone in the future.

Updating

You can update to version 0.64.0 of Microsoft PowerToys through the program itself or by going to its GitHub page. Thanks for reading!