Microsoft releases PowerToys Preview v0.101.2601.0
Microsoft has released a new Preview build of PowerToys today. The release is fix-focused, resting on six merged pull requests that touch Grab And Move, PowerRename, and ZoomIt. It succeeds Preview v0.101.2572.0 and carries the usual caveats: this is a pre-release for early adopters, not the stable build you should install on your work machine tomorrow.
The one change worth your attention is the Grab And Move overhaul. Microsoft took a real swing at the performance regressions that had accumulated in the feature, and the numbers are genuinely impressive.
Grab And Move lets you reposition and resize windows by holding a modifier key and dragging anywhere inside a window. It's one of the utility's more useful tools, which is partly why Microsoft bothered to refactor it so thoroughly. The older code had a nasty habit of stacking up unbounded SetWindowPos calls on slower applications. The new version keeps just the latest requested rectangle and flushes it when the interaction ends.
The resize overlay got the same treatment. Previously it redrew the entire target window on every pixel. Now it uses three lightweight surfaces: a constant-alpha fill, a rounded border ring, and a small width-and-height readout.
Then come the performance numbers, and this is where it gets interesting. In Microsoft's large-window testing, the average mouse-hook occupancy fell from 15.03ms to between 0.42 and 0.61ms during resize. During move, it dropped from 6.85ms to 0.20ms. That's roughly a 30-to-75x improvement in the latency footprint. Head here to read the full PR #50082, which had its own dramatic arc: an automated policy service briefly closed it after seven days of silence, then it was reopened and merged on September 15.
There's also a per-application modifier-key exclusion in here, letting you whitelist specific foreground apps so they keep their own shortcuts. Keep in mind that this ships as part of the same PR, so it's ready to use right out of the box.
The rest of the build: bugs, tests, and a quirky Notepad fix
PowerRename landed a shutdown-hang fix. The bulk-rename tool decodes image metadata, and a genuine CI hang exposed the culprit: a Windows Imaging Component factory was being released during DLL teardown. The static destructor ran under the DLL loader lock, driving exactly the call chain that Microsoft's own documentation warns against. The fix scopes WIC creation to individual decoder operations instead of holding a persistent global owner. All 249 PowerRename tests and 69 Workspaces tests passed, 318 for 318.
Next is ZoomIt, and this one has the most human flavor. Gleb Khmyznikov added 47 automated test cases to the screen-zoom utility, and during validation he caught a product bug worth a laugh: an unnecessary Space and Backspace "indentation probe" in Notepad's Demo Type mode. Notepad has no real indentation to probe, so the code was doing nothing at all. Other editors keep their existing behavior, so only Notepad users get the clean-up.
Under the hood, three more changes aimed at stabilizing the build. Dustin Howett removed Spectre mitigations from the native build, calling them "no longer recommended best practice" and fragile. Boliang Zhang, who also published the release itself, fixed certificate-generation flakiness and a Workspaces process-list race, keeping CI green across Windows 10, Windows 11, and ARM64.
The Spectre removal deserves a bit of skepticism. Stripping mitigations to simplify the build is fine for a developer utility, but it's the kind of decision that looks harmless in a pull request until someone connects the dots later. For PowerToys specifically, that risk is about as low as it gets.
Download
Nine downloadable assets ship with this release. The installers run about 277MB for ARM64 and 286MB for x64. Both per-user and machine-wide variants exist for each architecture, plus symbol packages and a group-policy zip. Per-user downloads lead with the x64 build at 96 downloads, while ARM64 trails a bit behind.
Microsoft PowerToys is a free, open-source suite of 25+ utilities for Windows power users. It's developed alongside its community, and this build is a fine example: most of the meaningful work came from contributors rather than Microsoft staff. Grab And Move, PowerRename, and ZoomIt are among the tools most likely to matter to you day to day.
Head here to download the Preview build from the GitHub release page. Just back up anything precious before swapping it in, since this is still a preview.
