It will be fun and interesting to explore many new things on Windows 11. At the end you will be ending up in installing too many software and make changes to settings without consideration. If you use your computer in this manner, it doesn’t take long for your once blazing-fast computer to slow down into snail-like pace. The problem can be more serious if you have installed Windows 11 on your older computer and it turns out that the operating system is as slow as molasses.
If your computer is fast before, you should know why it has slowed down so much. In this article we have compiled easy ways for you to improve the experience of using Windows.
6 Easy Ways to Speed Up Your Windows PC
Here are things you should do:
- Speed up the login process
- Disable unnecessary startup programs
- Remove unnecessary apps
- Stop unnecessary services
- Migrate to SSD
- Defragment your hard drive
Let us discuss each topic detail in the following sections.
1. Speed Up the Login Process
Windows comes with “Fast Startup” feature and make sure that it’s enabled. With this feature enabled, Windows will save the current state of the system to the hibernation file when you shutdown. The next time when you power on the PC, the system initialization is done from the previously stored hibernation file. This will save lot of time by avoiding reloading of driver files.
Follow these steps to enable Fast Startup in Windows:
- Go to the “Control Panel” and then to the “Hardware and Sound” option.
- Click on the “Power options” and look for “Choose what the power buttons do” on the right sidebar and click it.
- Click on the “Change settings that are currently available” link to enable “Shutdown settings”.
- Enable “Turn on fast startup (recommended)” option.
This feature should have been enabled by default on a Windows. But if you upgrade from older Windows with customized power settings, Fast Startup may be disabled. Once the feature is turned on, you will notice significantly faster boot times.
Warning: Remember fast startup option may cause some other issues like hibernation and working with multiple operating systems. So check out you are convenient in using with fast startup option, otherwise you may disable it.
2. Disable Unnecessary Startup Programs
Many third party programs are loaded automatically when Windows is started. This includes antivirus program and instant messaging. Computer boot time becomes longer if many programs need to be loaded at the startup. Antivirus program contributes significantly in slowing down your computer, because it does virus scanning in real time.
Though antivirus program is essential, there are many startup programs that are not needed and can be disabled. Follow these steps to disable the programs that are not required in Windows startup:
- Right click on taskbar and choose “Task Manager”.
- Choose “Startup” tab to get the list of programs that are run on the background. If you are seeing any tabs, click on the “More details” option to view all tabs.
- Look for programs with higher “Startup impact”, because they contribute in making boot up slower.
- Select the program name that you don’t need and click on the “Disable” button.
Disable all non-essential startup programs and close Task Manager. Restart your computer to see whether there are changes in boot up time and overall performance.
3. Remove Unnecessary Apps
Windows is meant to be highly functional and it comes with a bunch of apps. One app may be very useful for some users, but not for many others. It’s not uncommon to find apps that you will never use, not even once. If your PC seems a bit more push in speed, it’s a good idea to delete unnecessary built-in apps. As an example, you may remove Bing News, if you don’t need Cortana to deliver you daily stories.
However, you should know that deleting an app could have some consequences. If you remove Alarms and Clock, Cortana won’t be able to set reminders for you. Some built-in programs, like Windows Feedback, Edge, Cortana and Contact Support can’t be removed.
- Go to Windows search box and type “PowerShell”.
- Click on the “Windows PowerShell” option and go to the application.
- Enter the following command to remove apps.
Get-AppxPackage *app-name* | Remove-AppxPackageFor example, if you want to remove 3Dbuilder, you may type:
Get-AppxPackage *3dbuilder* | Remove-AppxPackage
You may remove apps that operate in real time, such as Bing News, Calendar and Mail, Skype, Zune Video, People, Bing Sports, Windows Store, Weather and Xbox.
4. Stop Unnecessary Services
Despite its user-friendly appearance, Windows is a complex system and just like earlier versions, it comes with a long list of services. These services help to keep the OS remain versatile and can do many tasks at once. However, enabling most of them will make your computer resource-intensive. Follow these steps to disable unnecessary services:
- Go to Windows search field, type “services” and open “Services” app.
- You can view all the services on your computer.
- Check unnecessary services in running status and double click on the any of it.
- Click “Stop” button and choose the “Startup type” as disabled.
There are many services that you can safely disable, like Xbox Live Game Save, Xbox Live Auth Manager, Bluetooth Support Service, Geolocation Service, Phone Service, Touch Keyboard and Handwriting Panel Service, Windows Biometric Service, Windows Mobile Hotspot Service, Adobe Acrobat Update Service and others.
Also you can disable unnecessary third party apps installed and running on the startup. Or choose manual startup type so that you can run whenever you need the service.
5. Migrate to SSD
Your PC will perform much better if you move it to SSD. Solid State Disk or Solid State Drive (SSD) is more expensive than regular HDD. You can purchase a 40GB SSD for around $80 to install Windows installation and only some essential programs. 64-bit version of Windows requires about 20GB of space, leaving you enough space for a few programs and some important files. Your HDD will become the secondary disk for storing regular programs and files.
The migration process is a quite complicated for casual users and it’s beyond the scope of this article. Look for instructions online or ask an expert to do that for you. After Windows installation is fully migrated, boot up and loading times will be drastically shorter. You may install programs that you use often, such as web browser, document editor and graphics editors, if you have enough available space in your SSD. Remember to always leave a few hundred megabytes of free space in your SSD to avoid slow-downs.
6. Defragment Your Hard Drive
If you are using hard disk drive then defragmentation is the basic method to speed up your PC’s performance and should be performed regularly. Defragmentation happens when you regularly delete small files, leaving thousands of tiny free space throughout your hard drive. When you copy a large file into your hard drive, it will be split up into hundreds of parts to occupy these non-contiguous tiny free spaces.
It means that read/write heads will need to travel longer distances to do their tasks, degrading the performance. Defragmentation is a task for making your files stored contiguously. Fragmentation has much less effect on SSD, because data is stored in a different way, compared to HDD.
Follow the below steps for optimizing disk drives.
- Go to search box and enter “defragmentation” and open the “Defragment and Optimize Drives”.
- Choose the drive and click on the “Analyze” button to see the status.
- Click on the “Optimize” button to start defragmentation.
- The process will run for some time with multiple passes based on the data and drive volume size.
Wrapping Up
Nowadays there are no possibilities to live without having a good computer. The slowness in your PC will affect each activity and hence the complete productivity. So it is highly recommended to have latest and fast PC so that you don’t need to waste long time for doing daily chores.
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