Review of the PC Tools Desktop Maestro
PC Tools has revamped the popular Desktop Maestro to include some key new features and improvements. The result of the improvements to the PC optimization suite is being called the PC Tools Performance Toolkit 2011. See our review of the new and improved PC Tools Optimization Utility.
Some of the new features and advancements:
- Accelerated boot time and Windows start-up
- Improved performance and stability by removing orphaned references in your Windows registry.
- Easily optimize your system automatically improving system performance with a set of tweaks and fixes applied to the Windows registry.
- File Recover quickly scans and recovers your lost pictures, music, documents, and other files.
- Protect your Internet privacy and keep your web usage away from prying eyes.
- Securely erase your personal files and data from your computer.
- Bleaches unused hard drive space, making deleted files unrecoverable.
Here is a review or walkthrough of the PC Tools Desktop Maestro. The Desktop Maestro claims to be able to speed up and optimize performance of a computer by cleaning and defragmenting the Windows registry. The PC Tools utility also has streamlines with the Windows Disk Defragmenter to make better use of the space on your hard drive to make all those accumulated bits, bytes and gigabytes move faster. The Desktop Maestro claims to be able to optimize overall system performance. Let's put it to the test.
The system used for this review of the PC Tools Desktop Maestro has an Intel Core 2 Duo 6300 processor running at 1.86GHz with 1.00 GB of RAM. Not sure how much faster it can go but I want to get everything out of a computer that is possible. Hopefully the Desktop Maestro can help with this task.
The system currently boots up from a cold start to a usable desktop in 48 seconds. The Task manager shows about 555 megabytes of available physical memory. The Desktop Maestro claims to be able to increase the available resources on a computer. After the optimization process, I expect to see a faster boot time and an increase in available physical memory.
The first task is to install the PC Tools Desktop Maestro.
The installation of the Desktop Maestro was uneventful. After running the install and registering the product, this is the first screen you will see when the Desktop Maestro is started.
Looks like the best place to start would be the Scan Your Computer button to do a deep scan of the registry for problems. The Desktop Maestro incorporates the award winning PC Tools Registry Mechanic utility to do this job. This what the deep scan looks like in action.
The registry scan was fast and it shows that it found 259 problems with my registry. It looks like a repair of the registry is in order so I smacked the Repair button.
The Desktop Maestro very quickly repaired the registry errors. See our full review of the PC Tools Registry Mechanic.
The Continue button brought the program back to the main interface where I chose the Optimize Your Computer button. I skipped the Clean Your Computer button because for the purpose of this tutorial, privacy and activity traces would probably not increase the system performance.
After clicking the Optimize Your Computer button, the PC Tools Desktop Maestro System Optimizer appeared. This is where I will compact the registry, defrag the hard drive and optimize the overall system performance. I clicked the Start Compact to compact the registry. Registry compacting optimizes the registry by removing gaps and wasted space, thus improving system performance.
The Desktop Maestro found that there was 1.26 Megabytes out of 35.3 Megabytes of wasted space so I smacked the Compact Now button to let the utility go to work.
The PC Tools utility said it needed to restart to finalize the compacting of the registry.
After the reboot, the next step is to start a defrag of the hard drive. That step was as uneventful as any defragmenting job. The best word for it is boring. But the Desktop Maestro said it needed to be done. These are the results.
The next step is to click the Optimize Your System button. This button is supposed to apply a set of tweaks and patches directly into the Windows registry that are designed to improve system performance so I smacked the button. I'm guessing that it did something. It never said it was finished but it left me with the option to reset optimization.
So after repairing and compacting the registry, defragging the hard drive and clicking the Optimize Your System button, this system should have a faster boot time and increased available memory.
The Windows Task Manager tells the story.
After using all of the utilities included with the PC Tools Desktop Maestro, the boot time is now an even 40 seconds and it increased the available physical memory by about 42 Megabytes. The Desktop Maestro made the system boot up about 8 seconds faster and increased the available resources thus doing exactly what it claims that it can do. There was quite a decrease in the page file usage too. I did not expect too much of a change on this system because of the speed of it in the first place but the changes that the utility made were for the better.
This review of the PC Tools Desktop Maestro shows that the utility does what it claims that it can do. For that reason, the Desktop Maestro gets an honorable Brontobyte on a scale from Bytes to Brontobytes. This is a highly recommended optimization utility to have in your arsenal for the inexhaustible optimization process of day to day computing.
PC Tools Performance Toolkit 2011
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PC Tools Performance Toolkit 2011 is a computer optimization program that utilizes a registry cleaning and compacting utility to speed up your computer performance. This utility also has a set of tweaks to increase performance even further than the registry cleaning. We put it to the test and it works. For a limited time you can get 10% off when you enter the following coupon code when you order: Coupon Code: pctools10 See our review of the Performance Toolkit
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