Microsoft ditches ai bloat, ships powertoys 0.98 with taskbar-killing dock
Microsoft just proved it can ship a Windows update without cramming in another chatbot. PowerToys 0.98 landed this morning, and the headline is a blunt no-AI zone: no Copilot hooks, no generative gimmicks, just raw utilities that make the operating system bend to the user instead of the other way around.
Command palette dock turns the taskbar into a dashboard
The star is Command Palette Dock, a detachable, skinnable strip that parks itself anywhere on screen. Pin apps, scripts, folders, or entire PowerShell one-liners; each icon becomes a live tile showing CPU, GPU, RAM and network load in real time. Hide the telemetry you don’t want, keep the graphs you do. Windows 10 refugees get the toy too—no 11-exclusive lock-in this time.
Latency has been shaved by 42 % on average, Microsoft engineers claim, thanks to a full migration to WinAppSDK 1.6. The palette now remembers text queries across reboots and collapses into a 4-pixel sliver when you’re screen-recording.
Keyboard manager finally looks like it belongs in 2025
PowerToys Keyboard Manager graduates from its 1990s-era UI into a dark-mode-ready canvas. Remap single keys or Byzantine chord shortcuts—Ctrl+Shift+Alt+T can now spit out your entire home address—then export the layout as a JSON blob for teammates. The caveat: the new editor hides behind an experimental flag, so casual tinkerers must first toggle “Enable modern interface” in settings.
CursorWrap, the niche tool that teleports the cursor between monitors, stops glitching when one display scales at 125 % and the other at 4K. Hold Ctrl or Shift while dragging to momentarily disable wrapping; release and the warp drive returns.
Always-on-top gets a transparency slider
Need a Spotify mini-player hovering above Visual Studio? Tap Ctrl+Shift+Plus/Minus to dial opacity from opaque to ghost-level. The combo works even when the window is maximized, a trick third-party apps charge five bucks for.
ZoomIt, the long-neglected screen-zoom utility used by conference speakers, now embeds a bare-bones video trimmer. Record a demo, crop the fumbling first 12 seconds, and drop the mp4 straight into Teams—no Premiere required.
PowerToys 0.98 is already live on GitHub and the Microsoft Store. The installer weighs 118 MB, half the size of the last release, proving that subtracting can be more powerful than adding. Redmond’s next challenge: convince the Windows shell team to apply the same diet to the OS itself.