Use Microsoft PC Manager to Speed Up Your Windows 11 Computer

Microsoft Windows has been with us for more than 40 years at this point. Over that time it’s managed to gather all kinds of add-ons, companion apps, and utilities that you may not necessarily have discovered.

Some of these are made by Microsoft itself. There’s Microsoft PowerToys, for example, which lets you tweak everything from keyboard shortcuts to the layout of your desktop. There’s also Microsoft Journal, a journaling app designed primarily to be used with a stylus on Surface computers.

Here though we’re focusing on Microsoft PC Manager, which first appeared in beta form in 2022, and is now available for free to anyone who wants to give it a try. Microsoft promises it “effortlessly enhances PC performance with just one click,” and will “keep your PC running smoothly.”

In other words, it’s intended to clean up some of the clutter and baggage that your PC may have accumulated over the years—perhaps even giving it that “good as new” feeling you get when you boot a Windows computer for the first time.

The Microsoft PC Manager Interface

Once you’ve downloaded and installed the software, the first thing you’ll see will be a pop-up in the lower right corner of the screen. This gives you an overview of the current state of your system, including how much of your RAM is in use, how many apps and processes are currently running, and how many temporary files are taking up room on your hard drive.

You can see plenty of information from this pop-up, but many of the utilities and scans included with Microsoft PC Manager will launch a separate window. To begin with, you can head to Settings to make sure the software is configured as you’d like. You can have the app automatically launch with Windows, and automatically intervene by freeing up RAM or clearing out temporary files.

The app pops up in the corner of your screen.

Photograph: David Nield

Something that may give some users pause is that you don’t get an awful lot of information about what the program is doing behind the scenes in terms of optimizing and deleting. Presumably if these actions are so beneficial to your system, Windows would do them anyway, without recourse to an additional utility. Still, there is the reassurance that this is an official Microsoft tool, so it should know what it’s doing.

There is some overlap with the rest of Windows. Via the Toolbox panel, for instance, you can take screenshots, launch the Notepad and Calculator utilities, and open up links in Microsoft Edge. You don’t really need Microsoft PC Manager to do all this, but the shortcuts are here anyway. There’s also a Show toolbar on the desktop toggle switch on this screen, which puts a persistent dashboard on your desktop with key system information.