It will be fun and interesting to explore the apps and settings available in Windows OS. Problem is that you will be ending up in installing too many software and making 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 on your older computer and it turns out that the operating system is as slow as molasses. If your computer was faster before, you should try to understand why it has slowed down so much. In this article, we have compiled easy ways for you to improve the experience of using Windows.
Upgrading to Windows 11
Microsoft announced the official end of support date for Windows 10 Home and Pro versions as 14 October 2025. The latest Windows 10 version is 22H2 and there will be no further updates released. Hence, plan for Windows 11 upgrade in case if your PC is slow and affecting your productivity.
Follow the below steps to fix sluggish Windows 10 PC.
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:
- Open Control Panel app 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: Fast startup option may cause other issues like hibernation and problem when working with multiple operating systems. So, check if 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 apps. Computer boot time becomes longer if many programs need to be loaded at the startup. Antivirus program contributes significantly in slowing down your computer as 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 default system apps. While these apps 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 will have some consequences. If you remove Alarms and Clock, you won’t be able to set reminders for you. Also, some built-in programs, like Windows Feedback, Edge and Copilot (or Cortana) 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, People, Bing Sports, Windows Store, Weather and Xbox, etc.
4. Stop Unnecessary Services
Despite its user-friendly appearance, Windows is a complex system and 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.
- Here you can view all the services running on your computer.
- Check unnecessary services in running status and double click on any of it.
- Click “Stop” button and choose the “Startup type” as disabled.
- Click “Apply” and then “OK” buttons to save your changes.
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, etc. Also, you can disable unnecessary services from third-party apps 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 hard disk drive (HDD). You can purchase a 40GB SSD for around $80 to install Windows installation with only some essential apps. 64-bit version of Windows requires about 20GB of space, leaving you enough space for few additional apps and some important files. In that case, your HDD will become the secondary disk for storing regular programs and files.
The migration process is a quite complicated for normal users and it’s beyond the scope of this article. It’s good to seek an expert’s help to do that for you (contact your reseller or official Microsoft support). 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 slowdowns.
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 spaces 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 to fetch data, degrading the performance. Defragmentation helps to rearrange your saved files contiguously for faster access. 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.
Note that defragmentation has much less effect on SSD as data is stored in a different way compared to HDD.
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. As mentioned, if fixing Windows 10 is not feasible or beyond economical repair, it’s time to consider upgrading to Windows 11.
Switching to SSD is the best choice that one can make to improve performance. You can easily double or even quadruple your performance depending on how strong your CPU is.