It almost seems inevitable that after you buy a new computer, at some point it's going to
slow down, start having weird issues, and just generally not perform as well as it used to,
but that doesn't have to be the case. So in this video, I'm going to go over seven different ways
you can potentially speed up your computer again that are not ways that usually you hear about,
like the typical, "oh, disable starting up programs and uninstalling programs you don't use."
We already know that. What about ways that not many people think of at first? So starting off
with number one, this one is probably going to be surprising to a lot of people, and that is
how to do a true restart of your computer. You see, there's a feature in Windows called Fast
Startup that I have mentioned in other videos, where basically if you go and hit Shut Down your
computer, thinking that's how to restart it, and when you start it up, it'll just be fresh,
that's not actually the case. When you do a regular shutdown of Windows,
as opposed to hitting a restart, it actually does more of a hibernation,
where it keeps things running by storing them on the drive and then loading them back into
memory once it boots up, so that it doesn't have to restart everything from scratch.
But if you're having weird issues with the computer and you want to turn it off and
on again to hopefully fix it, then just shutting down will not actually restart
everything potentially. So what you want to do is instead hit actually restart,
and that will completely clear out all the stuff running and truly restart everything.
And this actually means if you shut down your computer every single night,
it may not have actually done an actual shutdown in a very long time. You can actually go into the
Task manager and look at the uptime, and it will tell you the last time you did a true restart. And
for some people, it's a very long time, despite thinking they were restarting it by shutting down.
So anyway, to sum things up for this tip, if your computer usually runs okay, but occasionally
randomly slows down and kind of stays that way, the first thing to try is to just go to the power
button and actually click on restart, sometimes that's all it takes. All right next up, number
two is more of a way to identify a potential issue, and that is to look in the Event Viewer.
If your issue is that somewhat regularly, or maybe even randomly, you start to have the same issue,
whether it's some kind of crash, or Windows freezes or goes to a black screen for a second,
something like that, it may be that something is crashing in the background.
But a lot of times there might not be any kind of error message that pops up,
so it'll just seem like Windows is being weird. But what you can actually do is look in the event
Viewer by just searching for event viewer in the start menu, and then going to Windows Logs,
and then System is where most of this will be, and just looking through for errors most
of the time. So what you want to do is if you are having an issue like this, where
it keeps happening recurringly, the next time it happens, immediately go to the Event Viewer
and check the latest entries and see if there is something that is showing up, and keep checking.
And you might notice a pattern, if it's the same thing every time,
that could be an issue. Now you can totally ignore the information entries,
and even the yellow exclamation mark warning ones aren't a problem in themselves. So
you can usually ignore those too, unless you do notice that it's the same warning
that happens the same time as these weird issues all the time, then it could be related.
But if you aren't noticing any specific issues, don't worry about these warnings.
Every computer is going to have these, even if everything is fine. But those
error ones with the red symbol are the main ones you want to look for,
and usually that means something has crashed. Now again, this is not necessarily a huge deal.
It's possible that you'll see a couple random errors that occur, I don't know,
every couple days, and you didn't even really notice because it just happened in the background,
Windows restarted it, and it was fine again. But if you do notice a recurring freezing or
something, and you go and every time you look in the event viewer, it's the same error that
keeps coming up, then you can look in the info about that error in the box below, and basically
just copy and paste it into Google and see what this thing is that could be causing the issue.
So while this isn't a way to in itself speed up the computer, this should
hopefully point you in the right direction, or potentially tell you exactly what is crashing,
and lead you to the solution that will. So to summarize this one, if you notice any recurring
issues that keeps happening, that's probably the best case to look in the Event Viewer.
If it's just some random crash that happens every once in a blue moon and never happens again,
well things just crash sometimes, so it's not necessarily going to help you
if it never happens again anyway. But it's still good to know about,
should be really helpful with troubleshooting in the future.
Alright before we move on though, I want to thank today's sponsor, Mine,
which is a really cool service. Mine lets you find out which companies have your data,
and lets you control where you do or don't want to keep it. You start out by going to SayMine.com,
and just sign in with your email account you want to analyze, and give it a minute to do its thing.
Mine will only analyze the subject line and sender of the email,
the first line preview snippet, plus some metadata, to figure out which
companies you've interacted with. But as their privacy policy states, they don't collect the
content of your emails for analysis. Then when it's done, it shows you the results.
For me, there are over 250 companies that have data on me, which I don't really like. On the
My Footprint page, I can see a selection of these companies, but I took a deep breath
and looked at the tab showing all the companies, and it is eye opening. By clicking on a company,
it shows me for example, that EA stores info about my financial and identity data,
and even online behavior data. And I can see that it has a pretty elevated exposure risk.
Here's another company that I barely remember signing up for, but never ended up using,
and I don't really want them having my data. So I can just click reclaim, and it will compose an
email that will be sent directly from my inbox to the company. And this point is important,
because companies generally only honor requests coming directly from the person.
Then after you allow it to send the email, you can track and review your request,
and cancel it within an hour if you change your mind. And since privacy
is important for businesses too, Mind has created a solution for companies to help
manage their own privacy operations, including automation of handling requests from consumers.
So if you want to start reclaiming your own data, be sure to visit SayMine.com now and sign up. I'll
also put the link in the description. And with all that being said, let's continue. All right
next up, this is a tip that can directly speed up your computer potentially. And that is if you have
an SSD, which I think most people do these days, if that drive is starting to get full, especially
if it's very close to being full, then you could speed it up by clearing out some space on it.
And the reason for this is how SSDs write data, and I'll give you a super quick crash course.
Basically, when an SSD goes to write data, even if it has to write a very small amount,
there is a minimum amount that can be written at once. And it is written to a
set of storage cells called a block. So even if you're only saving a text file with one
single character in it, it still is going to write a block's worth of data minimum.
If the SSD has a lot of free space, then it's not a problem, it has plenty of choices for
where it could write this data. But if the SSD is starting to get kind of full, there might not be
any completely empty blocks left, and they might all have some amount of data that are partially
filled. So in this case, if the SSD wants to add data to one of these partially filled blocks, what
it has to first do is copy all the existing data out of there onto a cache, then erase the whole
thing, and then write the new data along with the cache data it just copied out, back into it.
So it's not like it can just add data onto a partially filled block, it has to copy it out,
erase it, and then put it all back in. So obviously this takes a lot longer than if there's
plenty of completely empty blocks, and it could just write to it without having to copy it all
out first. Now sometimes it can be tough to figure out exactly what is taking up space on your drive.
So I would recommend a free program, it's free for personal use, called WizTree,
it's my personal favorite at the moment. And basically it will show you what percentage
of the drive is taken up by different directories, and you can actually have
this tree view map thing, where it'll show every file as a block basically,
so you can visually see what types of files in what location are what size.
So if you see some massive block somewhere, you might look at that and say, "Oh my gosh,
there's this random video file for a movie I downloaded one time, never watched it, and I
don't need this. I can delete it and free up how many gigabytes," something like that. So a disk
analyzer like that is definitely one of the best ways to figure out what's taking up all the space.
Just be aware that there are some system files that might potentially look really big,
like the "hiberfil", it's like the hibernation file. If you don't know what a file is,
maybe look it up first and don't just go and delete it without knowing what it is,
that usually is not the best idea. But still, this tool should come in handy.
All right next up number four, this is a quick and simple one. And that is if your computer
has a lot of dust in it, then dust it out. You see, if there's a lot of dust in your computer,
like a visible layer especially, it's going to get on stuff like the heat
sink for your CPU that is meant to cool it and impede that cooling performance. Which
could lead to the CPU getting to its maximum temperature without getting to its maximum
performance and having to throttle down, which could really slow down the computer.
If it's a desktop, it's probably easier to clean out, make sure you unplug the computer,
and then you can just dust it out by opening the case. On a laptop,
it might be a little bit more difficult, usually there's not really a easy way to
open these up. So probably the best thing is just take out the battery and then blow
some canned air into whatever vents you see, and hopefully that'll clear some stuff out.
So yeah, if you've had a computer for a while and you've never looked inside,
that could potentially be an issue. Okay next up is a potentially more extreme measure,
but that is to reset the PC. Now this is totally different from restarting the PC.
Windows has a feature called resetting that basically is a factory reset.
If you go into the start menu and just search reset, you should see a thing comes up that says,
reset this PC. And you'll be presented with two different ways for how you might want
to do this. You can keep all your current files, which will basically keep anything
in your documents folder, your other libraries like videos, whatever, should keep all those.
Or the other option is to just wipe the whole computer clean. I think in most cases,
keeping the files is fine. Though keep in mind, if you have program settings and stuff,
I believe it might still delete those. So it'll keep your documents and stuff, but any programs
you have installed will be erased. So if you are going to do this, even if you select to
keep all your files, definitely do a backup of anything you care about first, either way.
I would say doing a reset is almost as good as just doing a complete reformat of the drive,
which wipes literally everything and you reinstall from scratch. Though that is a
lot more complicated. Now there is one situation where I definitely recommend
reformatting instead. And that's if you have a really bad virus on the computer, that's like
a deep-seated Trojan or rootkit or something that you're really having trouble removing.
In that case, I don't know if resetting would be the best option. In that case,
I probably would do a complete reformat. And in that case, you might have to ask someone
who knows their way around computers, or ask a professional. Because potentially if there is
a really nasty virus, it could survive a reset if it's really sophisticated.
So reformatting would probably be the best way to be sure. But if the issue
is not a virus and it's just slowing down in general, resetting could be potentially really
useful. Just keep in mind, you will need to reinstall any programs, which might be kind
of a pain. All right onto number six, this is another really simple one, thankfully.
And that is to disable visual effects. This could potentially make a big difference
depending on the power of your computer. The easiest way to get to this is to search
the start menu for this: sysdm.cpl. Then in this window that comes up,
look in the Advanced tab, and then under Performance, click the Settings button.
And then you'll have a few different options. You can optimize for visual quality,
but in this case, the one you probably want to select is Adjust For Performance. And
this will basically just disable any visual effects in here. Now you could
also ask it to automatically adjust what settings based on the computer's power.
It might do a good job, but if you still find that it's slow, maybe try adjusting it for
performance. And then if you notice it really speeds up, just keep it on that. Or you could
just try randomly disabling some effects and see what makes a difference there. Though just
keep in mind, this is probably going to make the biggest difference on lower end computers.
If you have a computer that's really fast already, this probably isn't going to make it any faster.
All right finally, onto number seven, which is check your computer's power plan. By default,
Windows will have it set to balanced, which is fine for most people. It won't limit the power
of your computer, but if there's nothing really going on, then it will lower the
frequency of your processor because it's not really in use and that'll use less power.
However, if you do want to ensure that you have the maximum performance all the time,
then you can set it to high performance, which keeps the CPU at its max frequency all the time,
which means that it could potentially increase some of the response time for running programs
and that stuff, because it doesn't have to take the CPU out of a sleep state,
even though it's not really going to make a huge difference, might make a little bit.
But also check to make sure that your computer isn't in low power mode if you
don't want it there. If you're using a laptop and you want to maximize the battery life,
then yeah, you could keep it on that. But just keep in mind that
the battery saver mode will lower the maximum performance of the computer to save battery.
So it likely will be noticeably slower than if you had it on one of the other ones. Just keep in mind
of course, that the trade-off if you have it on high performance is that it will use more power,
more battery if you're on that. But if it's a plugged in desktop or something,
and you're not super concerned with power consumption, I just keep mine on High performance.
So those are the seven tips, but I do want to mention a couple of myths that are out
there that are not going to help you speed up the computer. The first are these registry
cleaner programs. The registry is not going to slow down your computer, even if there's
these unused entries that these programs claim to clear out, that's not going to make a difference.
And the other one is defragmenting your hard drive, which is really old advice. Windows,
for the past several versions, will defragment any hard drives in the
background automatically, so you don't have to do it. And if you have an SSD,
then you don't want to defragment it at all, because it won't make a difference,
and it could potentially lower the life of your SSD just because of the way they work.
So cleaning the registry, defragmenting any drives, don't worry about that. Now finally
though, even though those were some tips that are unexpected, still probably the
best way to speed up your computer is to reduce any programs that are running in
the background and starting up with Windows. Usually that probably is the biggest culprit.
So I did make another video that I'll have pop out, that shows you how to find all the
different ways that hidden startup programs might be hiding. Because sometimes they're
just like running in the background and they might not even have a user interface,
but they're still running, slowing things down,
so I'll have that video pop out. Anyway, if you enjoyed this video,
definitely give it a big thumbs up and let me know down in the comments if any of these worked,
if you knew all of these, or maybe if there's a tip that you think would
also be helpful to people. And thanks again to Mine for sponsoring the video.
Be sure to visit SayMine.com now so you can start reclaiming your own data too,
the link is also in the description. If you want to keep watching, I'll put links to two
different videos. One is the one for how to find all the startup programs and disable
them. The other one is how to fix Windows corruption in a bunch of different ways.
If that could potentially be your issue,
you can just click on those. So thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.