How to Speed Up Your Windows 11 and Windows 10
Microsoft has improved Windows 10 and 11’s performance a lot through regular updates. However, several factors still bring down your PC’s performance. Third-party applications, bloatware, malware, etc. can slow down your Windows 10 or 11 PC. So, you need to perform regular maintenance tasks to speed up your Windows 10 or Windows 11.
By taking some simple steps you can make your Windows 10 or 11 fast again. These steps include uninstalling bloatware, tweaking Windows settings, etc. However, with time, things get piled up on your PC again. So, you need to perform these steps regularly to keep your Windows 10 or 11 running smoothly.
SEE ALSO: How to Upgrade your PC to Windows 11 (4 Methods Explained)?
Make your Windows 11 and 10 Fast Again using Simple Steps (2024)
So, in this post, we are going to share 10 simple tips and tricks to speed up your Windows 10 or 11 PC. These tips and tricks are quite simple, so, you won’t have any troubles. Let’s start with the simplest one.
Step 1: Disable Startup Programs to Reduce Startup Time
You might be wondering why your Windows 10 or 11 PC takes so much time to start. You might not be aware but most of the programs you install on your PC, register themselves to run on Windows startup. So, every time you start your PC, those programs also start in the background and use system resources and internet data. This causes your Windows PC to boot slower.
So, to speed up the booting of your Windows 10 or 11 PC, you need to disable those programs on startup. This will reduce boot time and hence make your Windows 10 or 11 PC fast.
First of all, open Task Manager on your PC and go to the Startup tab. Here, you can see the list of programs that are registered to start with your Windows 10 or 11. To disable a program on startup, simply select it and click the Disable button. Make sure to disable all unnecessary programs from the startup.
SEE ALSO: How to Check System Uptime in Windows 10?
Step 2: Disable Third-party Services to Speed up your Windows 10 or 11
Just like startup programs, some third-party services also run in the background eating up resources. You would never know about them but they will keep using your RAM and CPU, hence reducing performance. So, to prevent those unnecessary third-party services from starting, you need to disable them.
So, press Windows + R to open RUN, type msconfig
, and press Enter. This will open the System Configuration utility. Here, go to the Services tab. Now, you can see the list of all services on your Windows 10 or 11 PC.
If you check the box at the bottom left to Hide all Microsoft services, you will see all third-party services running on your PC. Now, you can select all unnecessary third-party services and click Disable all to disable them. This will reduce a lot of burden on your PC and speed up your Windows 10 and 11.
Step 3: Disable Animations in Windows 11 and 10 to Make it Fast
You may like the animation effects in Windows while opening or closing apps etc. but they cost you system resources. The more “animation effects” Windows displays, the more CPU it consumes; in turn, reducing the performance. So, if you disable animation effects up to some extent, it will give your Windows 10 or 11 PC some performance boost.
So, let’s see how to disable animation effects in Windows 10 or 11. First of all, launch the RUN utility, type sysdm.cpl
, and press Enter to open System Properties. Now, go to the Advanced tab and click on Settings… under Performance.
Here, you can manually disable animation effects and speed up your Windows 10 and 11. Or, you can select Adjust for the best performance option to disable all animation effects. After that click Apply and OK to save the settings.
SEE ALSO: How to Change Paging File (Virtual Memory) Size in Windows 11 or 10?
Step 4: Disable Transparency Effects to Speed up Windows 10 or 11
Just like animation effects, transparency effects also consume system resources making your computer slow. So, you can also disable transparency effects in your Windows 10 or 11 PC to reduce the load on your CPU.
However, the setting for disabling transparency effects is found in different places in Windows 10 and 11. So, we will show it for both Windows 10 and Windows 11 separately. Let’s start with Windows 10.
Windows 10:
Go to Settings > Personalization > Colors. Here, turn off Transparency effects.
Windows 11:
Go to Settings > Accessibility > Visual Effects. Here, turn off Transparency and Animation effects. This will free up some system resources and help speed up your Windows 11.
SEE ALSO: How to Start Windows 11 in Safe Mode and Get out of it?
Step 5: Choose a High-Performance Power Plan to Boost Performance
Besides all the tips and tricks, Windows Power plans are great ways to adjust performance. If you check in Power Options in the Control Panel on your Windows 10 or 11 PC, you will find several plans there. These plans are pre-configured to provide you with the best experience.
So, to give a performance boost to your Windows 10 or 11 PC, simply select the “High performance” power plan. This plan will speed up your Windows 10 or 11 PC at the cost of energy (battery). With the “High performance” plan, your PC may consume more battery but you will get better performance.
Step 6: Defragment Hard Disk Drives to make Windows 11 or 10 Faster
As you use your Windows PC over time, files in your hard drive become scattered (which means your HDD becomes fragmented). And it takes more time for Windows to read and write data on a fragmented hard drive. Which in turn causes a drop in performance. This problem is very common on HDDs compared to SSDs.
So, to boost up your Windows 10 or 11’s performance, you need to defragment your hard disk regularly. However, Windows 10 and 11 automatically defrag your HDD or SSD weekly. But you can still give it a shot.
To launch the Windows defragmentation tool, search for defragment
on Start and select “Defragment and optimize hard disk” from the search results. Here, you can see the current fragmentation status of all hard disk drives.
So, if you see any drive that needs optimization, simply select it and click on the Optimize button to start defragmentation and boost the performance of your Windows 10 or 11 PC.
Step 7: Run Windows Update to Fix Performance Issues
Sometimes, old and outdated drivers may cause your PC to underperform. Even a corrupt USB driver may hang your PC after plugging in a pen drive. You can use Windows updates to fix driver-related issues. Besides that Windows updates also bring bug fixes and performance improvements with them. So, always keep your Windows 10 or 11 PC updated to the latest version. It will solve most of your performance issues and speed up your Windows 10 or 11 PC. If you are having low disk space in the C drive, you may consider changing the default Windows Update folder location.
Windows 10:
To update your Windows 10 PC to the latest version, go to Settings > Update & Security. Here, click on the Check for updates button to install the latest Windows updates.
Windows 11:
Similarly, you can update your Windows 11 to the latest version from Settings. So, go to Settings, select Windows Update from the left pane, and click Check for updates.
SEE ALSO: How to Fix Windows Update Errors in Windows 10?
Step 8: Use SSD instead of HDD to Boost Performance
Hard disk drives are the best choice for data storage but if you are looking for performance, SSD is the best option for you. Most of the new computers these days come with SSDs to boot Windows performance. SSDs effectively reduce Windows boot time. You might have noticed an SSD Windows 10 or 11 PC booting faster than the HDD one. Check the comparison of HDD and SSD here.
So, you can go for SSD to speed up and make your Windows 10 or 11 faster. And if you are looking for better storage options, you can go for the combination of SSD and HDD. You can combine a 250 GB SSD with a 1 TB HDD to get speed and storage together. Install your Windows 10 or 11 on SSD and use HDD to store your data.
SEE ALSO: How to Check the RAM Details in your Windows 10 and Windows 11 PC?
Step 9: Use Windows Security to Protect against Viruses/Malware
Viruses and malware are some of the most common reasons for your PC to run slower. Sometimes, they can make your PC inoperable. In such cases, emergency rescue disks are the only option. But you can prevent this from happening by using antivirus programs.
Several antivirus programs like Quick Heal, McAfee, ESET, etc. protect your PC against virus or malware attacks. However, these antiviruses also consume your PC’s resources and hence slow down your PC a bit.
But since Windows 10 and 11 both come with a decent antivirus/antimalware tool, you can use that to protect against viruses or malware. It is called Windows Security (formerly Microsoft Defender) and it is the default antivirus for Windows 10 and 11.
Step 10: A few more Things to Try
Besides the tips described above, you can try these to make your Windows 10 or 11’s performance even better.
Kill Applications that are eating resources
Some of the applications keep running in the background even if you close them. They keep using your system resources even when they are not in use. So, it’s a good idea to close background programs to release CPU and RAM.
You can close background programs from Task Manager. So, open Task Manager and scroll down to the Background Processes section to see which programs are consuming more resources. Simply select them and click End task to close them and speed up your Windows 10 or 11 PC.
Uninstall Bloatware from your PC
If you purchase a new laptop, you will find a lot of bloatware already installed on it. Most of them are useless programs that run on Windows startup and share your data with manufacturers. Though manufacturers do this to improve the user experience that may cost you in terms of performance.
So, go to Control Panel and uninstall all the bloatware from your laptop or PC. You can check this tutorial to uninstall programs from the Control Panel or Command Prompt. If you have purchased a new laptop, don’t forget to perform these steps before you bring it to daily use.
SEE ALSO: How to Reset your Windows 10 PC using Recovery Options?
10 Simple Tips to Speed up your Windows 11 and 10 PC
The above tutorial explained 10 simple steps to boost the performance of your Windows 10 or 11 PC. You should perform these tasks at regular intervals to keep running your Windows smoothly. You can also try running a scheduled maintenance service for automated maintenance. But you will still need to do some tasks manually.
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