Boost Windows 10 Performance

👤 Diwas Poudel 🕒 04 Feb 2021 📁 FIX

Current Windows 10 OS is not the same as 5 years ago, it has done lots of improvement in performance and speeds up its processing in many of its updates. If you are serious about optimizing your laptop performance in windows 10 then you can go with me and follows these steps:

1. Make sure you have the latest updates for windows and device drivers and software

Update your windows, device driver, and software so that it may resolve the performance-related issues. So, your System
may perform a smooth operation.

1 a. Windows Update

Generally, updates happen automatically on Windows 10, but you may still need to manually check to install a particular new quality update, feature update that may have been released to improve performance.

Steps:

Click on Windows icon on the left bottom corner and then click on the Setting icon.
Click on Update & Security on Left Pane.
Click on Windows Update.
Click the Check for updates button.

1 b. Device Driver Update/Upgrade

A device driver is a computer program allowing higher-level computer programs to interact with a device. If you update your driver then issue related to performance and other critical functioning may get solved because some version of the driver may be in beta states and they may not perform well.

Follow these steps:

Open Run
Type devmgmt.msc and press Enter.
Right-click on the device you want. In my case, I am selecting HDD (ST9500325AS)
Then click on Update driver

5. Then click on the first option if you want to download an update from the Internet ( if present) or Click on the second option if you have an update of the driver on your machine then go to the second option.

Software Update

Updating your application is good, it may boost your system performance. Software updates are important because they often include critical patches to security holes. All of these updates are aimed at making the user experience better.

Ex: MS OFFICE 2016 is faster and better than MS OFFICE 2010

2. Disable unnecessary programs running on startup

When you installed software in Windows then some of them will automatically be added to the startup list. It will get automatically loads when you start your PC.

It is better to disable some program which is not needed to load at windows boot up because they just waste resources and extends startup time.

In my case I don't need to load Utorrent to load on startup so, let us disable it.

Step 1) Press Ctrl + ALT + Delete to open Task Manager
Step 2)Then go to the Startup tab

Step 3)Find the application which you don't want to load on startup. My case: Utorrent

current state
Step 4) Look here, currently, Utorrent is in enable mode, let's disable it. So for this,
right-click on Utorrent and click on disable.

Which program should not be disabled?

Antivirus program which is running (like Avast, Avira, WindowsDefender)
Services and applications like audio, wireless should not be disabled.
Think many times before disabling Microsoft services
Application and Services for Intel and AMD should generally be set to enable

3. Turn Off Visual Effects

Windows 10 by default comes with visual effects from animations to shadows in action such as Reveal highlight and Acrylic material which are a part of the Fluent Design System. Don't expect too much performance increment after disabling visual effects.

Step 1: In the Start/taskbar search field, type sysdm.cpl and then press Enter key to open the System Properties dialog.

improve windows 10 performance
Step 2: Navigate to the Advanced tab. In the Performance section, click the Settings button. You should now see the Performance dialog box.

improve windows 10 performance Step 3: Then here, choose to Adjust for best performance if you want to turn off all visual effects. improve windows performance Step 4: Click the Apply button.

Now, let disable Acrylic Material And Reveal highlight.

Right-click on Desktop > Personalize> Colors> transparency effect toggle switch

improve windows 10 performance

4. Use Disk Defragmentation and Disk Clean Up Tools

First, let use Disk Defragmentation tools:

If your hard disk drive is fragmented then it does extra work that can slow down your computer. So let's defragment the hard disk if present.

Step 1: In the Start/taskbar search field, type defragment and optimize drive and then press Enter key to open the System Properties dialog.

Step 2: Select the Disk you want to defragment.

In my case, I am using Disk F because here I am having 70% fragmented files and it's a worse case.

disk defragmentation tools

Step 3: Click on Optimize and let windows do its task.

Additional Tips: You can run Task Schedule to schedule disk defragmentation on a timely basis: For this follow this link: Schedule your disk

Now, let's use Disk CleanUP

Disk Cleanup helps in cleaning up your storage which improves not only your computer’s performance but your productivity as well.

Why Disk Cleanup?

Disk CleanUp tools help to clear up unwanted files. These unnecessary items might be eating your disk space and preventing your computer from performing well.

Step 1: In the Start/taskbar search field, type disk cleanup, and then press the Enter key to open the System Properties dialog.

disk cleanup

Step 2: Select Desire drive to clean up

disk cleanup

Step 3: Press OK

Step 4: Tick items you want to clean

disk cleanup

Step 5: Click Ok and then the computer will automatically do the cleanup

If you want to clean up another drive also then again repeat those steps again.

5. Reduce Booting Time out

The boot menu time-out says about how long the windows boot menu is displayed before the default boot entry is loaded.

Step 1: In the Start/taskbar search field, type advanced system setting, and then press the Enter key to open the System Properties dialog.

setting Step 2 ) Then go to the advance tab

advance setting

Step 3 ) Click on Settings under Startup and Recovery Section

Step 4 ) Click the Ok button

Step 5) Then Startup and Recovery windows will open. There tick "Time to display the list of the operating system" and change the time to around 10 seconds. You can decrease the time further but never set time to 0, then it will just eliminate the booting time period.

timing

step 6) Press the Ok button

Alternatively Setting Boot-Time using CMD

command

 bcdedit /timeout new_timeout_value      // _timeout_value in second

Open command prompt and type below command to set boot time to 10 second

setting boot time using cmd

6. Stop unnecessary Background Apps

By default, many applications will run in the background even though they are not active which eats up system resources,data usage, and battery life. So, we can disable those unused background Apps.

Steps :

1) Go to Start (left bottom corner), then select Settings > Privacy > Background apps(located at left panel).

As soon as you clicked on "Background apps", you will get the list of background running apps on the main screen. That application which is ON state is running in the background. Here is my case "3D Builder", "3D Viewer" is running in the background. As I do not need those two apps, I am going to disable it by toggling the ON/OFF button.

backgroundapps

7. Disable Windows Search Indexing

This is one of the useful features of Windows OS. It helps to search your file faster. It searches much faster if the searched file content has been added to the index. It continually doing its task in the background. But if you find performance issues then you can try disabling search indexing.

Steps 1. Press Win + R from the keyboard and type "services.msc" and press Enter.

Steps 2. Then services windows will open, there search "Windows Search".Right-click on "Windows Search" and click on the "Properties" option

Steps 3. Change Search Status to Disabled and click on OK.

search-status-disable

You must get it like this:

windows-search

8. No Tipping and Suggestions

For making it easier for users, Windows 10 provides tips, tricks, and suggestions at the bottom right corner of the screen. Some tips can be helpful and sometimes it's boring and contains advertisements. Also, Some people stated that these notifications often resulted in high levels of CPU and memory usage. So, if you like to Turn Off these features then follow the below steps.

Steps to disable notification

1) Go to Start (left bottom corner), then select Settings > Systems > Notifications and Actions

2) Find "Get tips, tricks, and suggestions as you use Windows" and uncheck it.

windows 10 notification

9. Uninstall Unused Application

It is a good practice of removing unwanted and unused applications from your system. It unnecessary used the space so to free up space we uninstalled unused applications. There are various ways to uninstalling applications.I will explain here one of them

Step:

6 a) Press + R button and type "control" and press enter

This will open the control panel.

6 b) Select Programs > Programs and Features.

Then you will get all applications installed on your PC.

6 c) Click on your desire application you want to uninstall. Then right-click on it and click on "uninstall".You will get a popup, there click on "Yes".Then follow other directions.

That's it.

10. Upgrade your system

Suppose you are running the latest high-tech software and finds that your PC is not performing well. It may happen that your system does not meet the requirement to run that software. So, it is a good option to upgrade your hardware if your system does support it.

Upgrade RAM if possible

Upgrading RAM is one of the best options to improve the performance of your system. Today's generally available RAM is 8 GB.So, try your system with a total physical memory of 8 GB. Some system does support two RAM slot so try installing new RAM in remaining slot. THE latest RAM available in the market is DDR 4.

Note: For upgrading your System with RAM, please check up to how much your system can be extendable for RAM

Use SSD if possible

Another best option for improving the performance of the system is SSD. If your system has HDD only and has a place for SSD then it's better to add SSD to your PC. And install bootable stuff in SSD and used HDD for accessing files and documents.

Note: Not all the System supports SSD, so before buying SSD please check out your system.

Today's fast available is NVMe SSD which is much much faster than SATA SSD.For more click here.

11. Change Power Settings

There are Power Plan features in Windows OS. By default, it is set to "Balanced" plan. But there are other options as well like the "Power Saver" Plan and the "High Performance" Plan. Also, you can create your own power plan.

By default, the Power plan is set to "Balanced" so Windows wisely use medium label power and provides medium-level performance. But if you set to "High Performance" then Windows will boost the performance by consuming more power then normal for performing CPU intensive task.

Steps of Changing Power Plan to "High Performance"

Step 1. Press + R button and type "edit power options" and press enter.