How To Speed Up Windows 10 The Easy Way

Frustrated with how slow Windows 10 is? There are many ways to speed it up – today I’m going to cover one of the easiest, and most effective. With some simple tweaks, you can certainly speed up windows 10 and boost its performance

Speed up Windows 10-Restart your device

This may seem like a no brainer, but a lot of us get into the habit of putting our windows device on sleep mode or standby mode.

While this does save your work and you can start right from where you left off the other day, it also adds on a bunch of temporary files, cookies and leaves unneeded apps running in the background.

So, every now and then, get into the habit of saving your stuff and shutting down your windows!

Update your system

We all get frustrated with the constant updates that Windows keeps prompting us with. But there is a reason for that.

Windows updates often contain a lot of bug fixes and driver updates, and they also refresh the operating system’s built-in anti-virus software. So, even though it may cause a few moments of inconvenience, updating is always a wise choice. 

Here’s how to check for a Windows 10 update: 

1. Open Settings. You can easily find Settings using the search bar in the left-hand corner of your screen.

2. Select Update & Security. From the Settings menu locate the Update & Security submenu, there’s a search bar at the top of the window if you’re having any trouble locating it.

3. Click Check of updates. At the top of the Update & Security submenu, your device will tell you if you’re fully up to date, and if not you can manually begin updating by pressing the “Check for updates” button. Make sure you’ve saved all required work beforehand, and be prepared for the process to take a little time as well. 

Disable apps from running automatically

Do you have too many apps launching when you start your system? Having too many apps launching on start up in your Windows PC can cause it to be slow from the get-go.

We, actually, might not even be aware of how many apps are launching on startup!

Here’s how to disable startup apps:

1. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del. Press the Ctrl+Alt+Del keys on your keyboard at the same time to bring up a blue screen (officially called the GINA screen)  with several options.

2. Select Task Manager and navigate to the Start-up tab. From the GINA screen select Task Manager, then head over to the Start-up tab which is located on the top navigation bar.  

3. Disable any non-essential programs. From the Start-up tab, you can see the “Start-up impact” value for each program, anything labeled as “High” is likely to slow your system down. If it’s not essential then right-click and choose disable. This won’t remove the program from your device, it will just stop it from automatically opening every time you switch it on. 

Delete unnecessary files from your hard drive

Clean out the junk!

There’s a lot going on under the hood- temporary files, caches, cookies etc. So every once in a while, its handy to clean it out and free up the storage space. More free space =Faster windows!

Windows 10 has a Disk Cleanup ability built-in. This makes it very easy to clean out all the junk.

1. Search for Disk Cleanup. Using the search bar in the left corner of your screen, locate Disk Cleanup.

2. Select the drive you wish to clean up. If you have multiple drives on your device then you will be asked which one you specifically want to clean up. 

3. Remove unneeded files. The Disk Cleanup tool will offer you a choice of what files to remove, simply mark the ones you want rid of and then hit “clean up system files” to start the removal process. 

Thats it!

Uninstall Unused Software

My golden rule is, that if you have never opened a software in 3 months, then you probably don’t even need it.

Over a perid of time, we tend to install a lot of softwares but what we don’t do, is clear them out.

So, just head over to the programs and features in control panel and hit the uninstall button next to the softwares you don’t want.

Disable effects 

Windows 10 has a lot of fancy visual effects and animations especially when opening and closing menus or switching between apps. They look cool, but they can slow your computer down if your hardware’s not up to the task. Thankfully, there’s an easy way to switch them off. Here’s how to disable visual effects in Windows 10.

1. Press Windows+X. Press the Windows key and X together to bring up a menu on the left side of your screen.

2. Select System. From this menu, select the System option which is located on the top half of the list.

3. Scroll down to Advanced system settings. From the window that pops up after selecting System, scroll down right to the bottom and you’ll see an option labeled “Advanced system settings”. Click it. 

4. Open Performance Settings and disable Visual Effects. From within “Advanced system settings” there will be a tab called “Performance settings.” In there you’ll see a “Visual Effects” tab where you can uncheck any effects you want to disable. The more you get rid of the better impact it’ll have on system performance. 

And thats it!

How to Speed up Windows 10-Add RAM or an SSD

Upgrading the RAM or a super fast SSD can help too ,this is the easiest hardware upgrade to make and most devices will support this.

Obviously, there is a lot more to upgrading hardware than just the RAM and SSD. We will cover that in a seperate article.

Easily defrag your hard drive to Speed Up Windows 10

Here’s how to defrag your hard drive to make it faster:

1) Open the hard drive in CMD by going to “This PC” and right click on the hard drive. Choose “Properties” then go to the “Tools” tab. Under this tab you should see something that says “Defragment now”. Click it and follow the instructions. TIP: A good trick is to use multiple smaller drives instead of one large one. This will help speed up your computer, as these drives are faster than most single large drives.

2) But if you don’t want to defrag your entire hard drive, you can just defrag certain files instead. To do this, open a new command prompt (not PowerShell), type “defrag <driveletter>” without quotes and hit enter, where <driveletter> is the drive you want to defragment. You can replace defrag with optimize if you want, because they are essentially the same thing. For example, if I wanted to optimize my D:\ drive I would type “optimize d:\” into a new command prompt window and hit enter.

With these simple tweaks, I hope you have a better understanding on how to speed up windows 10. Stay tuned for more updates!

If you have already upgraded to windows 11, then do check out our guide on how to speed up windows 11 here.

Download the latest version of windows 10 here.