PC Tools Performance Toolkit product reviews

I'm a bit of a sceptic when it comes to toolkits of this nature, as I have had to repair damage done by a number of badly written programs over the years. They promise endless performance and stability improvements, and seem to rarely deliver on promises. So it was with some trepidation that I turned my trusty workhorse PC over into the hands of the PCTools Performance Toolkit.

Minor stumble out of the gate - I misunderstood the licensing arrangement, thinking that the "toolkit" was a suite of programs, as when I keyed in my registration there appeared to be a number of programs to download, but I was frustratingly unable to register all but one. It was then that I realised my mistake, the Performance Toolkit is the "name" of a specific program, not a reference to a suite of programs. With that slightly embarrassing moment passed - onto the install.

Download was quick - the main install file is small by today's standards at only ~30MB. Installation is also quick and painless, without requiring a pesky reboot to complete. There was an easy option to "Smart-Update" to the latest version, which was also hassle-free, quick to download and still no reboots required.

The Performance Toolkit Interface is clean and fairly simple, with a nice speedometer indicating your systems current health. There is a link on the front page taking you to an itemised breakdown of how your system health is calculated, based across the three sections that make up the Toolkits focus areas - namely Registry Health, Privacy Health and Disk Health, with links to optimise the sections that aren't scoring so well.

The Registry and Privacy tools are fast to run and caused no issues on my 6month old install, finding a number of problems and things to fix, mostly missing/broken links, cookies and temp files and other minor hiccups. There is an option to "Optimise your System" which has the standard "Performance Car" icon, but I found little difference after setting the performance tweaks, and no indication of what had been tweaked. I was very impressed though with the "Tune up your Services" feature, which offered to simple window allowing the setting of a recommended or minimal set of services to be allowed to run, which will definitely improve performance by reducing unnecessary resource hogging by unused services.

The Disk Defrag tool is quite impressive also, offering general and specific defragmentation settings with informative layout maps using colour coded blocks (with legend), and also a "Boot Optimisation", which first runs a scan to check what items are loaded at boot time, and then after a reboot is completed a second option to optimise based on the first boot-time scan. There even also a 'free space bleaching' option, to permanently erase all traces of deleted files from your system.

All in all I was impressed with the offering - its fast and fairly simple, but still offers a valuable set of optimisations, and I believe that it does live up to its promises, which is nice to see in today's market. And if you still aren't happy - they even offer a 30-day money back guarantee.