How to Speed Up Windows 10

If you have been lately noticing delayed start-ups or slow performance on your Windows 10 machine then we have a few tips to help you speed up Windows 10.  Unfortunately, Windows 10 is not without its faults. It is notorious for its occasional crashes, frequent and forced updates, as well as the fact that it slows down significantly over time. This slowdown is a subject of much annoyance among gamers who have to deal with slow load times, even slower boot times, and various other problems.  While a lot of it may have to do with the kind of programs you run on your computer, there are other factors that play a role.  Let us find out how to speed up Windows 10 for smoother performance.

Ways To Speed Up Your Windows 10

•Speeding Up the Boot Time

Windows always boots up at seemingly lightning-fast speeds after a fresh installation, but within a couple of months, it slows down to a crawl for apparently inexplicable reasons.  But are they really?

The main culprit behind slow boot-up times are programs which are scheduled to run on startup.  There could literally be over a dozen needless programs slowing your computer down.  Some of these might have been installed automatically, with only a few of them having actually asked you for a permission to run on startup.  On the other hand, you might have enabled some of them yourself because they are programs that you commonly use.

Whatever the case, here’s how to clean up the startup queue and give the Windows 10 boot times a boost!

1. Open Task Manager by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc.
2. Click on More Details if the window opens in a compact mode.
3. Select the Startup tab.

Here, you can see every program that is scheduled to run on startup.  The tab also displays some additional details about each program, whether they will or will not run on startup, as well as how much of an impact they make on the speed of the startup process.

Disabling a program is as easy as selecting it and choosing the Disable option in the lower right corner.  To best optimize your startup times, it is best to simply disable all but the non-essential programs, even if they have a “low” startup impact.  Of course, it is acceptable to leave a high impact program on is if it is one that you would launch immediately anyway.•

•Check For Programs That Are Bringing Down The Performance of Your Windows 10

There are times when the performance of your operating system is affected by misbehaving programs that have developed faults over a period of time or those that haven’t been updated to incorporate latest changes.  You can easily find the programs that are leaching your computer’s performance by checking them on task manager.  This is helpful when you are in the middle of work and you experience slow performance.  You can check on the programs that are running and find out if one of them is the reason for slowing down your computer.

• Right click on the Start button and click on task manager.
• Check the programs that are running and see if any of them seem to show the wrong numbers.
• You can click on that program and then click on More Details to find out more about a program and the processes that are running.
• If you feel it is causing a problem, click on End Task and end the program and check if it changes the performance of your computer.

•Uninstall Irrelevant Software/Application

As with all the startup programs clogging up your boot times, there could also be miscellaneous programs running in the background.  Again, this could be software that you installed yourself and then never really used, pre-installed bloatware, or programs that got installed along with some other software.

Luckily, these are fairly easy to get rid of, albeit it can be a tedious and slow process if there is a lot of trash to clean up.

1. Press Win+R and type in “Control Panel”.
2. Once there, click on the Programscategory or directly on Programs And Features if category view is not enabled by default.

Here, you can see every program currently installed on your computer, along with other information, including how much space it occupies on your HDD/SSD. From here, getting rid of the needless software is easy:

1. Select the program.
2. Select Uninstall from the bar above the list or from a right-click drop-down menu.

It is a good idea to get rid of everything you don’t really use and that is unlikely to come in handy at any point down the road.  Not only will you slightly speed up your system, but you might also end up freeing up quite an amount of space.

NOTE: You should be careful not to delete any important programs, such as software related to your GPU drivers and the like. If you come across a program and you are not sure what it is, a quick Google search will let you know whether it is important or not.

•Optimize the Visual Effects

If you do not require all the animations that your Windows 10 computer brings in for you then it is a good idea to reduce these visual effects to help you speed up computer.  You can either customize it to suit your needs or you can choose from an option to optimize performance.  Follow these steps to change the visual effects for better performance.

• On the search bar in your Start menu, type Advanced System Settings and hit Enter.
• Click on the first result which will open a new box that has a section for Performance.
• Click on the Settings button next to Performance and you will see a host of settings that define the way animations work on your system.
• The easiest way to optimize performance is by clicking on the radio button that says Adjust for best performance.
• Alternatively, you can customize the performance to ensure that you do not lose all the visual effects on your Windows 10 device.

Changing the visual effects can improve the overall performance of your system.

•Clean Up the Registry with CCleaner

Another thing that can bog down your computer’s speed over time is all the junk that accumulates in the registry.  It is not as relevant as cleaning up the startup list or the needless programs, but it is still something that should be done to keep your PC operating smoothly.

Unfortunately, Windows doesn’t have an automatic registry cleaning utility.  As such, you would have to clean the registry manually if you don’t want to use third-party software.  On the bright side, there are numerous free registry cleaners out there, the most popular being CCleaner.

CCleaner comes with a plethora of useful features, although some are locked unless you buy the full program.  For the purposes of simple registry and junk file cleaning, however, the free version will be more than sufficient.

1. Click here to go to the official CCleaner download page.
2. Download the free version and install it like any other program.
3. When you run the program, you will see it as follows:
4. Select which programs you want CCleaner to scan and clean up the junk files.  All the important areas will be automatically flagged from the start, so you needn’t worry too much about this.
5. Simply click Analyze and then Run Cleaner once the scan is finished.  Note that the scan might take a bit longer and might appear stuck if you’ve never cleaned the registry before/haven’t done it for a longer period of time.
6. Select the Registry tab on the left and repeat.

•Defragment Your HDD

Next up is defragmentation, something that is very relevant for your hard drive’s health and efficiency.  So, what is it, exactly?

It all comes down to the way that an HDD itself functions.  The disk spins and the head mounted on the arm writes and reads data as the disk is spinning under it.  This ultimately leads to individual files being split into multiple pieces on the drive, and it mostly happens when there is a lot of reading and writing involved.  That is what’s called fragmentation, and it is quite obvious as to how it can negatively impact an HDD’s speed.

What the defragmentation process does is it takes all that fragmented data and organizes it properly.  Defragmenting your HDD regularly can prolong its lifespan and lead to overall better performance, and it’s as easy as making a couple of clicks in a built-in Windows utility.

1. Press the Windows key to access the search bar.
2. Type in “defrag”, without the quotation marks.
3. That should bring up a program called “Defragment And Optimize Drives”.
4. Upon opening the program, you will see the following:

As you can see, it shows all the partitions that currently exist on your HDD.

5. Select a partition (or all of them) and click Analyze, which may take a bit to complete.
6. Once the analysis is done, you will see the fragmentation percentage displayed in the Current Status column.
7. As before, select the partitions that you want to defragment and click Optimize.

Note that the defragmentation process might take quite a while to complete, especially if the percentage is in double digits.  However, it shouldn’t impact performance too much while its active and you can always stop the process and continue it later at any point.  Furthermore, note that solid-state storage such as SSDs, memory cards, flash drives etc. do not need to be defragmented.

Conclusion

These are some of the easiest ways in which you can speed up Windows 10.  Try them out and save some time while working on your computer.

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