Six ways to speed up Windows boot time.
Hi, everyone. Leo.
Noteenboom. Here for Askleo.com.
A slow boot is a common, common concern among Windows users.
Over time, for various reasons, the machines often become slower
and slower and slower for reasons that we don't completely understand.
What I'm going to do is walk through six
of the approaches you can take that I believe stand the biggest chance of making
the biggest difference in your Windows boot time.
Number one on the list,
if you haven't yet done so, if you don't already use one, replace your hard disk.
Your old spinning metal platter hard disk with an SSD.
I swear it makes a huge difference not
just in boot time, but often in overall system responsiveness.
It's one of the simplest conceptual changes you can make to your system.
And while it can cost a little bit
of money, it is one of those things that honestly pays for itself very quickly.
It's a really nice experience.
I strongly suggest you do that if you can.
Another approach, again, that involves hardware is adding Ram.
Now, what I'm going to do is take a look over here on my Windows Ten system.
We're going to take a look
at Task Manager, and where I'm going to go here is in performance and memory.
Now, you can see that this machine has
a little shy of 4GB of Ram in it, and it's 75% used, 72% used.
That's fine.
It's not a bad situation, except I'm running exactly one thing.
I'm running a browser.
Now, Windows memory usage can often seem like it is being used excessively.
For example, why is a single browser using that much memory?
Usually for performance,
it actually doesn't necessarily need that much memory.
It doesn't need that much Ram.
But because that much Ram is currently
available, it just says, okay, I'll use it.
If you run another program, the browser may reduce its memory footprint.
But the bottom line is that most of your memory will get used most of the time.
Now, if that correlates with a performance issue for you, especially at start up
time, then one of the things you can do is add Ram 4GB.
Probably enough for light usage.
But as things seem to be expanding and using more and more memory and using
more and more of your resources, being able to add Ram is another one
of those things that really can allow Windows to optimize its performance
in ways that both subtly and directly impact the speed or the perceived speed
of the machine, both at boot time and as you're using it.
Now, one of the things that I often
recommend people do, and I'm firing up settings here while we
talk about this, is to uninstall apps that you don't need.
So one of the things you can do is go
to Apps and features in Settings and just run down this list.
Now, it may seem not obvious why
installing an application that you never use might impact your boot time.
But many applications, and I do mean many, actually run something at startup.
Sometimes they'll run something and then be done with it.
Maybe it's an update check,
maybe it's some other kind of utility for that specific application.
It'll run, it'll exit, but it will have impacted your boot time.
Another thing that happens is some programs like to leave things running.
Not only does that then impact your boot
time, but it actually reduces your available system resources later.
One of the ways you can see some of the things that are running of course,
is here in the notification area you can see that I have one drive running.
One drive is running all the time.
That's because I use One drive.
If it was something that I didn't use, then one of the things I might consider
doing is going here to Microsoft OneDrive and hitting uninstall.
The important thing to do here is to run through this list of apps and features
and consider uninstalling anything you don't use.
It will free up a little bit of disk
space, it might free up a little bit of processor time at startup depending
on the specific app that you're uninstalling.
Now, speaking of startup,
more specifically if we go back to Task Manager and we hit the startup
tab, you'll see that I have a number of different things that are listed here.
This is my example machine.
So my list is pretty short on my quote unquote real machine.
It's a huge list of all sorts of things that start up automatically because I have
so much software installed on that machine.
The question here then is do we need these things?
Same thing that we were asking about, the apps that are installed,
if they stayed installed, did they actually still need to be run at startup?
And the answer for, well many of these, is actually not.
I don't need Cortana so I'll disable it.
I actually don't use Skype,
so it's already disabled the VirtualBox guest edition.
Well, that's something I should actually
uninstall, but I'm going to go ahead and disable it here to get the idea.
There are things that are in this list
that were either part of Windows or as in the case of Macrium Reflect,
something that gets installed by software that I've installed since installing
Windows that I may or may not want to have run.
I've disabled the ones that I don't care
about that I really don't want to run at startup.
And as a result, my startup will be a little bit faster.
Now, there is one additional tool that I will just call as being very scary because
what you find in your startup list for Task Manager is really just a subset
of what actually runs when you boot Windows.
The tool Auto Runs, which is part of the Sysinternal suite
that's available in the Microsoft Store, actually lists everything.
And you can see here that even for this example machine, where I don't necessarily
have a lot of things installed, it's already a fairly long list of things.
Now, I will caution you,
auto runs should not be used lightly, but it is something that will let you
control at a much more granular level exactly what it is that does and does not
start with Windows, along with a few other things.
The problem, the risk with auto runs is that if you disable the wrong thing,
you could render your machine unstable or even unbootable.
So before you play with auto runs, before you do anything with auto runs,
take an image backup, make sure you're safe.
That way, if something does go wrong in auto runs, you can simply restore
the image backup and know not to do whatever it was you did.
Again, finally, at this one, I have to include for completeness,
but it's not nearly the issue that it once was.
If you've replaced your hard disk with an SSD, this doesn't apply to you.
If you're stuck with a hard disk,
a magnetic hard disk, the old style of spinning platter drive, then defrag it.
And I know even then Windows, as of Windows 7 and on,
will automatically defrag the hard drive once a week.
It's still worth taking a look at,
seeing how defragged it is, because especially at start up,
it is possible that some of the things that Windows is doing when you start
the machine up could be adversely impacted by fragmentation.
It's not high on the list, it's not the number one on the list,
and in fact, if you don't do it, you'll probably never notice it.
But it is something else that can make a minor improvement to your startup speed
if your disk turns out to be heavily fragmented.
So I hope that was helpful.
I hope that your machine starts up a little faster now.
For updates, for comments, for related links, and presumably for some
more ideas in the comments, visit askleo.com/146947.
I'm Leo Notenboom.
And this is Askleocom. Thanks for watching.