Microsoft PowerToys could soon indirectly make your Windows 11 PC faster with a new feature

A new PowerToys feature may soon help improve Windows 11 performance by reducing background resource usage.

Recently we covered Windows 11's newest update, which although seemingly slightly flawed, is promising some worthy performance improvements in certain areas. This is certainly good news for users as many of them have been demanding for a long time that Windows 11 development focuses on areas like optimization.

While that's definitely appreciable, Microsoft and Windows fans could soon be in for another treat. One of the contributors of PowerToys has begun proposing a new feature that could significantly reduce idle memory usage. A newly submitted pull request is about an optional “low memory mode” designed for select utilities within PowerToys. Neowin spotted this while browsing.

The idea is simple; this low memory mode will allow supported tools to shut down their background processes when not in active use, relaunching them only when triggered via their usual shortcuts or interfaces.

PowerToys often keeps helper processes running in the background to ensure near-instant launch times. While this behavior improves snappiness and responsiveness, it can also lead to increased memory consumption, particularly for users who enable multiple tools but use them infrequently.

So instead of maintaining “warm” processes, the feature would let users opt into a configuration where supported utilities close while idle. When needed, they would restart on demand, potentially introducing a slight (likely imperceptible) delay but freeing up system resources in the meantime.

The dev explains: "This adds a shared low_memory_modules settings map and helper APIs so supported utilities can opt into idle-close behavior without adding a new schema field per module. Each supported utility defaults to false, preserving the existing warm-process behavior unless the user enables low memory mode. ... The runner refreshes the cached low-memory settings and reapplies the policy by restarting only affected enabled modules when a supported utility's low memory setting changes...."

Ultimately, this will indirectly help systems speed up if idle processes in PowerToys free up resources for use elsewhere. For entry-level and lower-end systems, the new low memory mode can be especially helpful. You can read the pull request and the related issue at the source links below.

Source: GitHub (link1, link2)

Source

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Posted Monday 4 May 2026 at 7:39 am AEST (my time).

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