Fans of Microsoft's PowerToys suite of tools have some good news today, as the company is now rolling out version 0.64 of the app. The latest release comes with a couple of major additions, the File Locksmith and Hosts File Editor.

File Locksmith is potentially the more interesting one of the two, and really, it can be useful for anyone. You've probably had a situation where you tried to delete a file but Windows showed you an error, claiming that the file can't be deleted because it's being used by another app. With File Locksmith, you can find out what that app is. That way, you can easily terminate the process so you can delete the file, so this is bound to be a great help for a lot of people.

The other addition is a bit more self-explanatory. With the Hosts File Editor tool, you can edit the Hosts file in Windows 11 (or 10) using a proper editor UI, rather than having to use the Notepad. The Hosts file lets you block certain domains from being accessed, for example, and having this UI should make it a bit less daunting to make changes to it.

Screenshot of the Hosts File Editor tool in PowerToys 0.64

Even beyond these two new tools, however, there are some great news in this update. The PowerToys settings now include a new feature that let you export or import your current settings from a file, so you can more easily migrate your settings across devices as needed.

Additionally, Microsoft has made improvements to FancyZones so that you can set default behaviors for horizontal and vertical screens. This is because, in some cases, monitor IDs can get reset, and the FancyZones settings don't apply anymore. With this fix, even if that happens, your layouts should at still make some sense based on the screen orientation.

There are a lot of smaller fixes and improvements in PowerToys version 0.64, so if you want the full list, you can check it out below.

There are some known issues in this release, too, including the Text Extractor sometimes not recognizing text on Arm64-based devices, or some users in very specific instances not being able to open the PowerToys settings, which happens because of conflicts with other apps. Microsoft also warns that after installing PowerToys, the context menu entries for PowerRename and Image Resizer may not show up until you restart the PC.

If those problems aren't major to you, you can download PowerToys version 0.64 from GitHub here. If you already have PowerToys installed, you can check for updates in the app's settings, or it will eventually notify you about the update.