PowerToys 0.88 Adds (Not So) New Zoomit Utility

The latest addition to PowerToys is also one of the oldest in this suite of utilities: ZoomIt, written by Mark Russinovich back in 1996. Yes, really.

“ZoomIt is a screen zoom, annotation, and recording tool for technical presentations and demos,” the PowerToys 0.88 release notes explain. “This utility from Sysinternals has had its source code released and included in PowerToys. ZoomIt will still continue to be updated and shipped by Sysinternals for users who prefer to have it as a standalone utility outside of PowerToys.”

Mark Russinovitch is still perhaps most famous for having reverse engineered the Windows NT kernel in the 1990s, and he published an article in Windows NT Magazine describing how two simple Registry changes could turn NT Workstation into the far more expensive, and more powerful, NT Server. As the cofounder of Winternals, Mark published a wide range of Windows internals utilities that he had written him, ZoomIt among them. He went on the co-written several editions of Inside Windows 2000/Windows Internals, the successors to Inside Windows NT, with David Solomon. And Winternals was acquired by Microsoft in 2006. Mark has worked there ever since, and he is today the CTO of Microsoft Azure.

He’s also a great guy. I love catching up with Mark at Microsoft events, and we can all enjoy his wit and wisdom remotely via the Scott & Mark Learn To … podcast I wrote about back in October. I’m an avid listener–I haven’t missed an episode–and it was through that podcast that I learned a little about ZoomIt and that it was coming to PowerToys. But if you want to learn more, I strongly recommend watching the Ignite 2022 session video, Building 25+ years of SysInternals: Exploring ZoomIt, which features Mark and Scott. (They present together regularly.)

As for PowerToys, this incredibly useful set of utilities has received numerous updates over the past few years, and has added major new features like Workspaces that I could see coming directly to Windows as well. But ZoomiI is one of the best, so its inclusion is a win. Microsoft notes that one PowerToy, the now-superfluous Video Conference Mute, was also removed in this version.

You can download PowerToys for Windows 10 and 11 from the Microsoft Store. Highly recommended.