10 ways to make Windows 10 and 11 faster.
Most of them are free.
Hi, everyone. Leo, Notenboom, here for
Askleo.com We've all been there.
You've got your machine,
you've been using it for a while, and it just seems to be slow for some reason.
What I've got here are 10 things you can do to hopefully speed up your machine.
Obviously, if you've done some of them already, they may or may not help.
But I think some of them are things that are worth doing and are worth doing
every so often because, well, things happen over time.
Our first one is simply too much running software.
And I mean that very specifically for applications that you install
that themselves install something that starts every time you fire up Windows.
Not only does that slow down the startup process, but by leaving that software
running all the time, it can impact performance throughout.
Here's what we do.
We'll head over to Windows 11,
right-click on the toolbar, an empty area there we'll do,
hit task manager, and in task manager, look for startup apps.
Now, I'm using Windows 11 for these examples.
Everything I'm talking about applies
to Windows 10, it just may show up in some different areas.
Usually very similar or very close to what I'm showing you here.
So in this particular case,
I have several different things that start up automatically.
The first thing I'm going to do is click
on the Status column to sort by who's enabled and who's not.
You can see I've already been through this
process with this machine because I have several different things disabled.
Defender doesn't need to start up.
Microsoft to do doesn't need to start up.
Phone link, I never use it.
Power Automate desktop, I'm not even sure what it is.
Terminal does not need to start up automatically.
Xbox, I never use Xbox applications on my PCs.
You get the idea.
Now, your list will be different than mine.
Absolutely.
But this is a place to look to see what's starting every time you fire up Windows.
In this case, I noticed that Teams is running.
I never use Teams.
So right-click on it and click on Disable.
Now, the next time I reboot this machine, Teams will not start up
and Teams will not be running the entire time I use my computer.
Number two, malware.
Obviously, we want to avoid it wherever
possible, but sometimes malware can make its way onto your machine.
And sometimes, the only way you might even
realize that it's there is that it's slowing you down.
Malware these days really tries hard to hide.
And by hiding, it really means that it's
trying to not show any visible indication that it exists.
However, sometimes the malware is working,
and that working can manifest as slowdowns.
So what I want you to do is run a full scan.
In this case, I'm going to fire up Windows Defender or
Microsoft security, depending on what it's called this week.
Go to virus and threat protection,
hit scan options because we do not want to run a quick scan.
I want to run a full scan, and then we'll just click scan now.
Now, this may take a little while on your machine,
but the point here is that you're scanning your entire hard disk for threats.
The quick scan scans the most
common areas, the most common places where malware shows up.
But if you're going to intentionally run a scan for some reason,
I do recommend that you run a full scan, if at all possible.
Now, while we're on the topic of malware, number three is your anti-malware tool.
Well, it's going to start up when you sign in, and it does take some effort,
some CPU cycles, some whatever, while it does its initial scans in.
Honestly, this is not something I want you to play with.
This is not something I want you to change
because that initial scan, when Windows starts up, is important.
The one way to potentially work around
this, and this also is a much larger issue that depends exactly on how you use your
computer, is to leave your computer on 24 hours a day.
That way, the malware scan that it's trying to do every day when you sign
in will probably run overnight instead while you're not using the machine.
That is essentially what I do with all of my machines.
I have a different article on whether or not you should leave your machine turned
on or off overnight, and this feeds into that discussion.
While we carry on, I'm going to let this scan continue in the background.
Now, number four is Windows Search.
Windows Search is a background service that can be turned off.
It is a service that basically creates
and maintains that index that the actual search function can use.
To turn it off, we're going to right-click
on the Start button, click on Computer Management.
In Computer Management, we'll click on services and applications.
We're going to click on this little greater than sign here to expand things.
Click on services.
Now, you can see we've got a nice long
list of services sorted alphabetically by name,
which means that we will go all the way to the bottom and find windows search.
Right-click on it and click on properties.
We're going to do two things in properties.
One is we're going to stop the service, just turn it off right now.
But the other thing we're going to do is
change the startup type to disabled after we hit OK.
Now, when we reboot this machine,
the search indexing service will not start, and therefore
it won't slow down your machine while it's creating or updating the search index.
Your search will still work.
Search is designed to work with or without the index.
It's just going to take a little bit longer if you don't have an index.
Perfect for if you use the Windows Search
to search for things on your machine infrequently or perhaps not at all.
Number five, visual settings or visual effects.
Let's quickly have a look here in settings,
and I'm going to search for visual, and there you'll see visual effects.
There are several effects here that may or
may not impact performance on your machine.
Animation effects are the things where things basically when you open a window,
it basically gets bigger on the machine magically or other kinds of things.
And the transparency effects are exactly what you think.
Some of these windows have portions
that are semi-transparent, so you can see what's behind them.
The issue is that with some, not all, but some graphics, cards,
especially low end ones or older ones, this functionality can actually make them
work harder or make your CPU work harder, potentially slowing down your machine.
If you're at all concerned about that,
or if you just don't care that these things happen at all, turn them off.
That way, they won't.
Number six, power mode.
Now, this is one that mostly applies
to laptops, but it's actually present in most desktop PCs as well.
What we're going to do is search for power
mode, optimize your device based on power, use, and performance.
Right here, we have power mode.
You can see that on this machine, it's set to balanced.
I believe this is probably the default setting for most new PCs.
For a laptop, you're going to want to make a judgment call here.
What's more important?
Your battery life or your CPU performance or your computer's performance.
If, like me, your laptop is mostly plugged
in or the battery is really healthy, certainly long enough for whatever it is
you take the laptop with you for, then change balance to best performance.
That way, the CPU will run at max speed more often, and a few other tweaks will be
made so that the system runs as quickly as possible.
Like I said, on laptops, this is often set to balanced.
Sometimes it'll be set to best battery life.
On desktops, honestly, there really isn't a reason not to set it
to best performance to therefore speed up your machine.
Number seven.
Number seven is okay,
I'll just call it a little judgy on my part, and that is simply this.
And I see this often.
You're trying to do too much.
It's not uncommon at all for me to run across people's machines where they have
multiple applications over, dozens of tabs open in their browser.
They've got Word running,
they've got Excel running, they've got other programs running.
Many more programs, well, to be honest, than they need at that point in time.
And if they do enough of them,
then depending on the system characteristics, how much RAM or disk or
CPU or whatever that specific machine has, that can dramatically impact performance.
So to speed up, try and do one thing at a time.
Or as few of things at a time as is
necessary to do whatever task you're attempting to accomplish.
When you're done, close the application.
When you're done, close the browser tabs.
That way, all of these applications won't be
competing for the limited resources on your machine.
Again, speed up your machine by trying to focus on doing one thing at a time.
Number eight, this one is a little bit harder
to quantify and to solve it isn't necessarily free.
Very often, what we think of as speed
of our machine is in reality the speed of our internet connection.
For example, if I bring up
Com, there was a delay there.
That's not the fault of this computer.
That's a function of both the speed of my internet connection and,
quite honestly, the speed of the Ask Leo server.
There's a little bit of a delay there.
You can't speed that up by necessarily doing anything specific to your machine.
This is a case where you either learn to live with the speed of your internet
or you spend a little bit of money and pay
your internet service provider for a faster connection.
Obviously, since this is my business, that's what I've done.
But it may not be the solution for everybody.
This really does impact the kinds
of things you're doing if you're doing things online.
If you spend your life in your browser,
if you read all of your email in your browser, if you're doing all sorts
of online shopping, if you're doing whatever,
if what you're doing is 90% in your web browser, then the speed you are likely
experiencing is the speed of your internet connection.
And you can speed up that whole scenario by getting a faster internet connection.
Number nine, insufficient RAM.
So I've talked about RAM several times, and this issue is that Windows loves RAM.
More importantly, it really dislikes not having enough RAM.
It will try to soldier on.
This goes back to running all these different programs at the same time.
One of the big impacts is that they all end up using RAM.
If you don't have enough to service
the needs of all those programs you're trying to run, then Windows is going
to try, but it's going to use the disk as virtual memory, and that will be slower
and will dramatically impact the overall performance of your machine.
I've already said try and do less, but the other side of that coin is to try
potentially adding more RAM to your system if it will accept more RAM.
Now, you can see here on this machine, I have four gigabytes of available RAM.
Quite honestly, these days, that's probably on the low end.
I certainly wouldn't really want to run
Windows 10 or 11 with less than four gigabytes these days.
On the other hand, there are certainly machines that can accept a lot more.
How much more your machine can accept depends on your specific machine.
Newer ones can probably handle more than they come with.
Older ones may be maxed out by now.
The only way to find out is to explore.
But if you have the opportunity, honestly, right now, RAM is not horribly expensive,
and it can be a relatively fast improvement for your system.
In that same vein,
one of the fastest ways to get more speed out of your system,
unfortunately, it's probably the most expensive option that I'm going to talk
about so far, is to replace your old spinning platter hard disk with an SSD.
Older hard disks,
the old magnetic spinning platter style, they are simply slower than SSDs.
Ssds stand for solid state drive.
That means they have no moving parts.
It's all electronics, and it's all much faster.
Prices have absolutely come down of late and they are absolutely cost effective.
They will not get you as many terabytes
per dollar as a spinning platter hard drive.
But honestly, for most machines,
one terabyte of SSD is plenty for a working system.
So if you have the budget,
if you can do it, one of the most effective ways to speed up
your machine is to replace your hard disk with an SSD.
Now, 11.
Yes, I said they'd be 10.
I actually have more than 10.
One of the things that can impact your
performance is I'll call it software rot or Windows crust or Windows Compromise.
I'm going to point you at a different
article and video, Five Steps to Repair Windows 10
Without Losing Programs, because those steps, which involve running
the system file checker to DISM to doing repair installs on Windows,
they can have an appreciable impact on the resulting speed of your system,
and they're absolutely worth considering if you find yourself in this situation.
There's an obscure setting in many video
adapters, mostly older video adapters, called color depth.
In other words,
does each pixel on your screen require eight bits, 16 bits, 24 bits, or 32 bits?
Again, especially for the older displays,
older video cards, having fewer bits per pixel can actually speed up the amount
of time that Windows takes to display things on your screen.
With more modern or current display adapters, not really as big of an issue.
Also, in the case of older hardware, if you're still still running a regular
old magnetic platter spinning hard drive, defrag it.
I don't know which version of Windows
you're running, and of course, if you're running Windows Seven or better,
Windows is probably already defragging it for you once a week.
However, it's certainly worth checking.
If the drive is fragmented heavily for any
reason, that can also sometimes dramatically impact your performance.
This does not apply to SSDs.
And again, in the hardware scheme of things, especially for older machines,
it's possible that you just may have a slow machine, a slow CPU,
and there's not really a lot more you can do about that.
It's very rare for you to be able
to simply replace the CPU chip on your Motherboard for something faster.
It usually requires a complete change of the Motherboard, which honestly is most
cost-effectively done by just getting a new machine.
Unfortunately, there's no real rule of thumb here.
If your machine is older,
you've had it for maybe five or 10 years, it's worth considering.
Most machines right now are coming
at pretty peppy CPU speeds, but it is something to at least be aware of.
And typically, it's one of those things
you'll resolve next time you get a new machine.
And finally, it's funny.
Honestly, this probably should be item number zero before everything else,
but I'm going to throw it here at the end because I'm sure you've already done this.
But in case you haven't, reboot your machine.
I know it sounds silly, it sounds obvious.
It's like I said, the first response we have to so many different problems.
But I think you'd be surprised at how many people just never get around to it.
They're running their machine,
maybe they're running it 24/7, and they reboot maybe once a month.
Great that the system is staying up that long, but if it does,
it is very possible the system is still getting slower over time.
Time. My recommendation, reboot once a day.
In my case, the machine I'm using right
now, my desktop machine, since I run a nightly script to do a few
things anyway, it automatically rebutes the machine every night so that when I get
to the machine in the morning, it's up, it's fresh, the default programs are all
running, everything's stabilized, and I'm good to go.
Finally, as it turns out,
some of this material came from a PDF that I offer for free if you subscribe
to the Ask Leo Confident Computing newsletter.
Ten reasons your computer is slow and what to do about it.
This video, there's more than 10.
But many of the things that I've talked about here, I go into in more depth
in that ebook so that you have a better chance of understanding exactly what these
things I've been talking about really do and what you should do about them.
I hope this helps you get a faster machine.
I really do.
For updates, for comments,
for links related to this topic, and more, visit
askleo.com/165168 I'm Leo Notenboom.
This is Askleo.com
Thanks for watching.