Microsoft's official app for improving performance in Windows 10 and 11 lands in the store

The author of this Neowin article has added a comment...
 

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Hello,

 

I had written about why this program exists earlier on Neowin, so I do not want to repeat that. Since the program is now in the Microsoft Store, though, I thought I would take a look at that version. I just did that, and I found a couple of curious things about it:

 

1. Under Storage → Deep cleanup → System cleanup, there is an option to delete the items in the Windows Prefetch directory. Microsoft has long warned users and developers of cleaner/performance/tweaking tools not to remove the files in the directory as they are managed by the Windows operating system's prefetcher and the operating system should be allowed to manage it. This application not only has the option to delete the files in this directory, it even says "These files do not need to be kept." in the description. This represents a complete turnaround on Microsoft's guidance of leaving the prefetcher alone, which has been their advice since the Windows XP days.

 

2. Despite ostensibly being a Microsoft application, under Toolbox → Custom links this program recommends/links to two Chinese websites, https[:]//www[.]officeplus[.]cn/ppt-assistant/?source=OPCNPCMPromotion and https[:]//www[.]kingpdf[.]cn/?tid1=268&tid2=2 (URLs obfuscated to prevent accidental click-thru). The former offers some kind of PowerPoint assistant for making slide decks, and appears to be operated by a company named Microsoft Mobile Lianxin Internet Services Co., Ltd., which sounds like a Chinese joint-venture of Microsoft's. The latter appears to be operated by a company named Hainan Chuangye Star Technology Co., Ltd. and offers a PDF editor that appears to copy Microsoft Word's user interface and PDF editing functionality. Looking at these URLs, they both appear to contain some kind of referral code links, which could mean that Microsoft, or at least the author(s) of this application, are collecting some revenue from visits to or purchases made through those web pages.

 

Based on these two observations, I would be very cautious about installing this application, even though it is published directly from Microsoft.

 

Regards,

 

Aryeh Goretsky

 

Even he recommends against its install.

I just don't see the point of installing this kind of bloated and superficial software, its cleaning features are very poor and offer no exclusivity compared with specialized software like CCleaner or Bleachbit. 😶 😑

Tested some time ago, it was a beta version. It seemed to me simply a sort of menu to identify and manage the optimization tools available in the most recent Systems. It has nothing special, it seemed to me a solution created to support unexperienced users. Anyway, it's free, certified, and it may grow, who knows what the future holds... 
On the other hand, it's atm reserved to members using the MS account and it's very recent. So, imho, it's not yet completely reliable and not yet comparable with similar solutions, based on years of experience. It deserves consideration by the average user, but I doubt MS has any interest in, for example, disabling telemetry and other functions, useful for the development, and other obscure purposes, but counterproductive for System performance and users privacy