Microsoft PC Manager helps tidy up the inevitable muddle that clogs PCs: remnants of outdated updates, downloads, huge ZIP recordsdata that you just downloaded, unpacked, and forgot about. But it’s now a basic tuneup app that may assist you do all kinds of issues — even put a secondary toolbar in your desktop with shortcuts.

It’s truthful to say that this app has flown below the radar: PC Manager debuted as a Chinese-language beta in 2022, and emerged last year on the Microsoft Store. Now, it’s a full-fledged, considerate utility with quite a bit below the hood. We’ll stroll you thru what it may do for you.

Naturally, any point out of PC Manager has to additionally point out CCleaner, the favored cleanup instrument that turned a lot much less beloved after Avast purchased it in 2017 after which accidentally bundled a Trojan-horse malware file inside of it. Now, Microsoft has stepped in. PC Manager jogs my memory a little bit of PowerToys — Microsoft’s toolbox of useful utilities — and a little bit of Microsoft’s Game Bar app, too.

The best approach to download PC Manager is by way of the Microsoft Store, which instantly downloads it on to your PC. It will ask on your permission to load itself once you boot your PC.

PC Manager: What can it do?

PC Manager consists of 5 completely different capabilities: The Home display supplies shortcuts to data and utilities that may enhance the efficiency of your PC. On the left-hand rail are 4 different deeper dives into varied capabilities: Protection, which faucets Windows Defender and Windows Update; Storage, which affords deep cleansing on your arduous drive or SSD; Apps, which appears at which apps run at startup; and a Toolbox of utilities.

The weirdest factor about PC Manager — which is on model 3.3, as of press time — is that the whole consumer interface is smooshed into a skinny wedge of your display, with no choice to enlarge it. That compresses numerous data in a small space; it could be good to have the ability to alter it.

The Home display is basically a dashboard, principally doubtless providing to provide your PC a “health check” and offering perception as to what’s happening along with your PC. An enormous “Boost” button encourages you to spice up your PC’s efficiency.

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Choosing the “Health Check” choice permits PC Manager to rapidly determine recordsdata that Microsoft deems worthy to delete: your Windows cache, your browser cache (presumably Edge, although this isn’t said), non permanent recordsdata, and so forth. It doesn’t actually do the rest, no less than on the floor.

Microsoft doesn’t actually inform you why you need to delete these recordsdata, merely assuming that you just’ll need the additional area again. On my PC, the 1.2GB that PC Manager supplied to delete didn’t appear price it when it comes to area saving, primarily based upon the tons of of gigabytes of area my SSD allowed. But it rapidly deleted these “junk” recordsdata.

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The PC Boost part affords a “Smart Boost” that can kick in when there may be “high usage” of RAM or greater than 1GB of non permanent recordsdata. It’s off by default.

PC Boost appears prefer it merely eliminates some non permanent recordsdata, which on my PC took simply a few seconds. My reminiscence utilization shrank by a couple of proportion factors, however that’s it. However, it is likely to be more practical in the event you’re the kind of individual with loads of random utilities, or who oversees a baby’s PC who can’t say no to downloading issues.

Mark Hachman / IDG

Other parts simply offer you a fast, easy-to-find take a look at a few of the parts of your PC. For instance, the “startup apps” button reveals what apps load once you boot your PC. (You can nonetheless entry these by way of the Windows Settings menu — however once more, “quick” is the watchword right here.) Disabling them will velocity up your PC’s increase time, although maybe at the price of performing background updates behind the scenes.

The “Deep Clean” choice is one other instrument that’s replicated elsewhere, as a part of the Storage Sense instrument inside Windows. Again, Microsoft makes suggestions for recordsdata that you could safely delete, erring on the conservative aspect. It even dives into the caches for varied browsers and purposes, like Photoshop or Mozilla Firefox.

It’s attainable that Microsoft would provide to delete recordsdata in my Recycle Bin if I had much less storage on my PC, but it surely didn’t achieve this this time.

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Speaking of storage, although: Make positive you take a look at the Storage tab on the left-hand rail. Here, you’ll discover hyperlinks to Storage Sense, your PC’s cleanup instrument, but in addition a nifty choice to “Manage large files.”

This permits you to search your arduous drive or SSD for recordsdata which can be bigger than 1GB, say. It additionally permits you to search by file sort. The message right here is that possibly you have got an outdated recreation file, or a LLM parameters file, or an outdated ZIP obtain — no matter. By figuring out these, you would possibly be capable of regain some space for storing in giant chunks.

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The “System Protection” choice is one other instance of gathering capabilities which can be elsewhere in your PC, like Windows Security and Windows Update. Interestingly, clicking the Windows Update part doesn’t take you to Windows Update in any respect — it simply supplies an inventory of accessible updates, and asks whether or not you need to set up them.

There are additionally a few options that aren’t apparent: “Taskbar repair,” which apparently repairs your taskbar, and pop-up administration, which “blocks pop-up windows in apps.” It’s not clear whether or not this can be a conventional pop-up blocker, like in a browser, or whether or not this might block the Windows “ads” for options, which might generally seem in your Start menu.

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Under the Apps part, you’ll discover some instruments to inform which processes are presently operating (Task Manager, mainly) and one other approach to handle your startup apps. The fascinating factor right here is that Windows really tracks your startup time — mine was 5 seconds. There are shortcuts to the Windows Settings “Apps” web page in addition to the Microsoft Store.

The Toolbox part is the final, and it hides one thing fascinating: a floating utilities toolbar.

The menu itself teams collectively varied capabilities that Windows consists of, however is likely to be hidden inside apps or behind forgettable keyboard shortcuts: Sound Recorder, the Snipping Tool, the automated captioning of video, Notepad, and Calculator. Microsoft guarantees to gather all of them in a toolbar that lives in your desktop.

Unfortunately, that toolbar was short-lived, popping up for a second within the backside right-hand nook of my main show, then disappearing. (It wasn’t minimized, and I didn’t have the “block pop-up windows in apps” choice on, both.) It then, nonetheless, reappeared.

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The toolbar is fairly primary, and possibly wants a little bit of tweaking to enhance its performance and utility. But it’s one thing just like the floating widgets of Windows builds of outdated.

So is PC Manager price protecting? I’ll go away it on my PC for some time and see the way it, like PowerToys, evolves. Remember, PC Manager is there to tweak an present Windows set up, particularly as you obtain apps and improve and set up patches. There will likely be instances the place you’ll need to begin recent, with what’s often known as a “clean install” of the Windows working system. That will likely be a way more intensive operation, however it should more practical than something PC Manager affords.

Still, one of many extra irritating features of Windows is how some actually strong options sadly change into buried within the interface. If PC Manager helps expose and remind customers that these options exist, all of us profit.