PC Tools Performance Toolkit For Windows Review
Written by John Thompson on September 8, 2011 · Filed under Review, Software
I’ve always been skeptical of so called ‘tune-up’ programs for Windows. There are quite a few of them, such as Uniblue Registry Booster, around from various software companies, but how much good to they actually do?
Whether it’s worth your while purchasing a tune-up program for your PC depends on how long you’ve been using it without formatting the hard drive, and why it’s running slowly. Of course many people like to stay on top of these things and run programs such as Performance Toolkit as a preventative measure, so that there are no registry errors present to slow down your system. If you want to use a tune-up program, and you’re interested in Performance Toolkit, read on to see what we make of it!
The initial download of Performance Toolkit weighs in at around 30MB, so it shouldn’t take too long although it’s not the smallest program in the world. Installation will be done in a flash though, so you can start to use it straight away. Just remember to register the program with your serial number before scanning, otherwise it will do a scan and then tell you to register before you can remove any errors anyway.
The interface of the program is easy to navigate, but as with every PC Tools application review I have ever done, I will have to whine a little about the custom user interface, which looks as bad as it does on every other PC Tools program. I can only hope that the developers will use a native Windows interface for the next version of the program, because running under anything from Windows XP to Windows 7, the custom blue interface of Performance Toolkit doesn’t look great.
As I said though, it is easy to navigate, and on the main window, you will be able to access everything from the registry scanner to the defragmenter and system optimiser.
The time that it takes to scan the registry will depend on how much data you have on your hard drive, although on our test machine the scan completed in under 30 seconds, so you won’t be waiting around for too long like you would if you were running a virus scan. If there are any errors found, Performance Toolkit will list them all for you to view if you want to, and you can fix any errors with the click of a button.
Also included in the program is a registry defragmenter and a disk defragmenter, both of which do what they say on the tin. If you want to keep things nice and tidy across all of your files and web browsers, then you can also use disk cleaner to remove unneeded temporary files from your drive and all of the cookies that are stored for your web browsers.
There’s no doubt that PC Tools Performance Toolkit is a very capable program which comes with a number of useful features, although you will be able to find a lot of the features here in other programs. Especially the disk cleaner utility, which will come with many free programs such as CCleaner. Although this is a good program, I’d struggle to recommend it at the £39.99 asking price. You can download it from PC Tools’ website.
