If you have a recent Windows PC, everyday performance issues might seem like a thing of the past. But resource-intensive activities like gaming or video editing will always still benefit from as much power as you can give them. And if your PC is getting long in the tooth, squeezing every last drop of speed out of your system becomes even more important.
You can try third-party utilities, such as Ashampoo WinOptimizer, CCleaner, or Iolo System Mechanic, to boost performance, but these apps tend to cost money and may interfere with your existing software. Windows itself also has tools that can make your PC feel faster, including Storage Sense and the Performance Options Control Panel, though they’re not a panacea, and they’re not all in one convenient place.
Now, Microsoft offers a single, streamlined utility app that collects all of Windows’ performance optimization settings: PC Manager. And it’s totally free. The company goes as far as to claim that it “enhances PC performance with just one click,” so I set out to test how well it works in the real world. Here’s what I found.
Getting Started With Microsoft PC Manager
PC Manager is available to download from the Microsoft Store, which is where its dedicated web page takes you. The app is available on both Windows 10 and 11, but I recommend taking security precautions if you are still using the older OS version. The app works on both Arm-based and traditional x86 PCs.
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
Upon first running the app, you see a Welcome experience dialog box with options for starting the app automatically when you sign in to a Microsoft Account. A check box option is available to restore the default settings for Windows, although I didn’t select it because I had set up the system the way I wanted it. These boxes are checked by default, so be sure to uncheck them if they don’t work for you.
Once you pass through the Welcome panel, you will see the main utility interface, which features an exceptionally clear design.
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
What Can PC Manager Do?
PC Manager has all of the following components:
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PC Boost. This involves cleaning your system and optimizing performance.
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Health Check. Scan your computer for issues and malware.
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Manage Storage. Windows already offers the Storage Sense feature in the Settings app, which can automatically clean up unnecessary files, but the tools here go a step further.
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Pop-Up Management. You can use this tool to reduce distracting app notifications.
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Toolbar. The app can display a mini toolbar that shows your system’s status. PC Manager also offers a toolbox of system utilities, including auto-captioning for audio and video playback on the PC, a sound recorder, and more.
I take you through my experience with each feature below.
Boost Your PC
Perhaps the most enticing aspect of the PC Manager’s interface is the big, light blue Boost button. When you press this, the utility frees up system memory by closing unnecessary processes and removing temporary files. An alternative option is Set Smart Boost, which detects high memory usage and automatically runs Boost.
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
I checked my RAM usage in Task Manager before and after clicking Boost, and found a 5% reduction in system memory usage. I also ran the PCMark 10 benchmark before and after running Boost on my test PC. I use a Windows 11 machine with a 3.6GHz 12th-generation Core i7 CPU, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060i graphics card, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB Samsung PM9A1 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD.
Here’s the PCMark result before running Boost:
PCMark Scored before running Microsoft PC Manager (Credit: UL Solutions/PCMag)
And here it is after:
PCMark Scored after running Microsoft PC Manager (Credit: UL Solutions/PCMag)
As you can see, my result after running PC Manager’s Boost was 9 points better. That’s hardly a huge number, but some of the sub-scores show bigger differences. Oddly, some went down. The most notable improvement was in the Video Conferencing score, which bumped up by 5.3%. The Writing and Photo Editing results increased, respectively, by 1.8% and 0.5%. The biggest decrease was 2.7% for Spreadsheets, followed by 1.9% for Video Editing.
Although I didn’t notice any significant performance differences, the improvement could be more substantial if your PC has less powerful hardware or is more cluttered.
Health Check
It may sound a little dull, but Health Check is one of the most useful and interesting features within the utility. It displays an animated visualization of system components as they are checked, and then generates a report highlighting areas for improvement.
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
As you can see below, you can select categories for optimization and click Optimize Now. I had a significant amount of storage and usage traces (small files and settings that programs leave behind), as well as several apps to uninstall, since I hadn’t used them in over 30 days. PC Manager also checks your network; mine showed a green circle indicating an excellent status.
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
You can click on the arrows next to each category for further explanations. I was curious about the default settings it wanted to restore and found that they were to reset the taskbar and to auto-start PC Manager, neither of which I wanted to do.
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Scrolling down in this window offers other useful system and settings information. For example, it displayed my system information, including the motherboard model, network adapters, and sound card. You can also view all the app data occupying space that the utility can delete for you, including items such as delivery optimization files, the DirectX shader cache, temporary files, and thumbnail files. You can run each optimization here separately.
I ran all the recommended optimizations, and PC Manager reported that I freed up 9.1GB of disk space and cleaned out 2,915 usage traces.
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
The app then identified a few other minor issues to clear up. I ran the system scan again and freed another 15.3MB of storage space and three usage traces—small beans compared with the first scan, but why not squeeze every last bit of system resources out of the PC?
I ran PCMark again after this optimization, and found that performance improved more significantly than after just running Boost alone, by 48 points:
PCMark Scored after running Microsoft PC Manager’s Health Check suggestions (Credit: UL Solutions/PCMag)
Once again, none of the subscores changed significantly, and some decreased slightly. PCMark calculates the main score to approximate overall performance, which, in this case, got a bump.
Deep Cleanup
The Deep Cleanup feature detected another 13GB that it could clean off my PC. This included more app data, such as caches. My biggest offender was Slack, which had cache data weighing in at 778MB. Deep Cleanup also searches for unnecessary system items, including log files, temporary files, Recycle Bin files, and Widget data.
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(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
Storage Management
You can dig even further into your PC’s storage via the Storage Management page. This section shows a graphic breakdown of your drive usage by application, other, Recycle Bin, system, and user. If you click on that chart in the main PC Manager window, a dedicated Storage Overview window opens. Here, you can scan for and clean up huge files, delete duplicate files, and manage downloads. I particularly like the Smart Select option, which allows you to eliminate duplicate files, saving you the time of examining them individually.
Process, Startup, and Apps Management
Any PC power user knows to open Task Manager to find and kill unresponsive and unwanted program processes, but PC Manager makes this simpler, with a clear interface offering End buttons for each inside the Apps section. This is particularly useful for applications that continue running processes even after you thought you had shut them down (Adobe Creative Cloud is a notable offender). However, you can only sort them alphabetically, whereas the Task Manager allows you to sort them by CPU usage, memory usage, publisher, and more.
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
PC Manager and Task Manager both let you control which apps start up automatically when you turn on your PC. Again, the former offers a simpler interface, but with fewer sorting options.
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
The Apps section also includes the Deep Uninstall option—uninstallation is a common feature among many third-party PC cleanup utilities. This removes not only the application code, but also its registry entries and residual files. It might surprise you how much an app leaves on your drives even after you thought you uninstalled it.
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
The final arrow in PC Manager’s quiver is the Toolbox. Here, you can enable an on-screen toolbar that shows system status items such as CPU usage and network traffic, along with a search button (via Edge). You can add or remove items from this toolbar, with options for Calculator, Captions, Notepad, as well as web-based ones, such as a currency converter and a weather forecast. The toolbar always appears on top of app windows, unless you choose the hide option.
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
System Protection
This section of PC Manager simply links to Windows’ included security features. From here, you can scan for viruses, update the OS, and restore defaults. You can also find a pop-up blocker, which works with applications rather than websites. Its Taskbar Repair option just resets the default options, while the Network Check is comparable with what you get in the aforementioned Health Check section.
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
PC Manager Doesn’t Mess With the Registry
Unlike some third-party PC cleanup utilities, PC Manager doesn’t do anything with the system registry aside from removing entries for apps you use Deep Uninstall for. The registry is where Windows saves all its data about apps, hardware, settings, and system capabilities. Frankly, it’s OK that PC Manager doesn’t try to optimize the registry: Microsoft reps have told me that the company recommends not using utilities that mess with the registry, and, indeed, plenty of system cleanup utilities that do this have turned out to be malware or ransomware.
Your Privacy With PC Manager
PC Manager has access to system resources and apps on your PC, but it follows the same privacy policy as other Microsoft products. You may have concerns that Microsoft China is developing and distributing the app. Still, it comes with Microsoft’s imprimatur. I don’t see this as an issue, and Microsoft has an R&D unit in China that develops other products. The app has the following permissions:
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Uses all system resources.
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Install a service on the machine that runs with maximum privileges.
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Install a service on the machine.
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Manage other apps directly.
PC Manager is a local system maintenance tool, not a cloud-based product. All of its features use local Windows API calls. It doesn’t sync settings, store data in the cloud, or tie features to your Microsoft identity. I didn’t see any network activity in PC Manager while using it, although other users have reported similar issues. The user agreement for the app states that user data “is processed on your device and is not sent to our server. Microsoft PC Manager will not read the contents of the files or any personal user information.”
A final caveat is that IT installations should probably disallow the installation of PC Manager, as it allows end users to modify the settings they want. On the plus side, the Microsoft PC Manager official Discord server announced that the utility had saved nearly 400,000TB of storage space and over 100,000 tons of carbon emissions by reducing PC resource needs over the past year.
Should You Use PC Manager?
I found PC Manager to be a well-designed app that simplifies the process of cleaning and maintaining my PC. Additionally, in testing, it actually reduced my storage footprint and provided a slight performance boost. A lot of what you can accomplish with it is also possible via Windows’ more detailed Settings app, but if you need to squeeze every last bit of performance from your PC and don’t want to look in multiple places, PC Manager is worth downloading.
About Our Expert
Michael Muchmore
Principal Writer, Software
Experience
I’ve been testing PC and mobile software for more than 20 years, focusing on photo and video editing, operating systems, and web browsers. Prior to my current role, I covered software and apps for ExtremeTech and headed up PCMag’s enterprise software team. I’ve attended trade shows for Microsoft, Google, and Apple and written about all of them and their products.
I still get a kick out of seeing what’s new in video and photo editing software, and how operating systems change over time. I was privileged to byline the cover story of the last print issue of PC Magazine, the Windows 7 review, and I’ve witnessed every Microsoft misstep and win, up to the latest Windows 11.
I’m an avid bird photographer and traveler—I’ve been to 40 countries, many with great birds! Because I’m also a classical music fan and former performer, I’ve reviewed streaming services that emphasize classical music.
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