How to Speed Up Windows

How to Speed Up Windows Computers?

Let’s face it, who does not like his/her computer to run fast? I bet not you; Everybody I know, including myself enjoys having a fast pc. It increases your productivity, plus, you just enjoy the experience. It is worth mentioning that having a slow PC is different from having a slow Internet will navigating the web. So, in this tutorial I will give you my best tip on speeding un your computer and keep it running fast.  

Most often, people want their PC to run fast but don’t want to do what it takes. Without wasting any more time, let’s get straight into it. We will start by the most obvious things you should do.

1. Restart your PC (weekly)

You got it right, and this also apply to smart phones. If you use your PC every day, it is recommended to restart it at least once a week. But why?

The reason is simple, when your restart your pc, it clears up the memory (or RAM: random access memory); the memory is where your data are copied to before being process by the processor (CPU). The memory gets full overtime, and the best way to really free it up is by restarting your PC.  Also, restarting your PC helps apply some system updates that could speed up PC.

In case you don’t know how to restart you PC, here is one way of doing it:

1. Right click on the Windows logo on the bottom left
2. Then hover on “Shut down or Sign Out”
3. Next, click of “Restart” 
   
   
   

2. Disable the app that starts automatically (One time):

    There are probably a lot of applications, you don’t even use, that start automatically when you boot your PC. This slow down your pc during start and while you are using it.

    Here is how you can disable them:

1.       Open the Task manager

•      Press Ctrl + Alt + Del (like shortcuts, check out my top 18 Windows shortcuts here), Then Select the Task manager
• Alternative way, Right Click on that Taskbar, then click on Task Manager
  

           2.       Next, Once task manager open

•        Click on the “Startup” tap
•        Then, Sort the by “Status”, so it can sort start by the enabled applications.                           -
• Now, you want to identify the applications that you want to disable when you pc boot up, “Right click” on each application and click on “Disable”. In my case, I have Disabled Webex app, as I don’t need it to start at boot time.

3. Defragment and Optimize your Drivers (Set it to auto run)

           To put this into context, imagine your computer storage (usually type HDD or SDD) is  your home, and every time you came back shopping, you throw all the things you bought everywhere in your house. This mean if you are looking for something in your home, you will take longer to find it. It is exactly why it is important to defragment and optimize your disk; because, when you store something on your pc (picture, video, doc etc.), your PC just put it in the first free slot it finds on the disk (because it is in the hurry and want to rearrange it later through defragmentation and optimization). Sometime defragmentation and optimization are not set to run automatically, so I will show you how do it manually and how you can set it up to run automatically. 

            a. Search “Defragment and optimize drivers” and click on the top result highlighted below

b.  Next, “Select the drive” you would like to optimize and click on “Optimize”.

If you have more than one disk like I do, select all (Ctrl + Click) and click on “Optimize All”            

Note: most of you probably only have the disk one disk “Local Disk C”, that is fine. You will have more than 2 disks (which I highly recommend) only if you have partitioned your C disk in the past.

Pro tips: It is recommended Turn on (1) Scheduled optimization Weekly or Monthly. You can do it by clicking on the Turn on button, the Frequency, and the drives (by default all drives are selected).

 

4. Partition your Drive (one time): VERY IMPORTANT

How long will it take you to look for something in your closet vs looking for something in the entire house (unpartitioned house – everything is mix)?

You guessed it right, it will take a shorter amount of time to look for something your closet. That is what partition does, logically separate your disk so that it can take a shorter among of time to look for data.  

If you are interested in partitioning your disk, I have created an entire post just for it. Click Here for details step on how to partition your disk.

5. Raise the limit of paged pool memory 

This will improve the performance if your system is opening and closing many files in the same file set and is not already using large amounts of system memory for other apps or for cache memory. 

Open the command line as an administrator (you don’t know how to do it Click HERE), then run these 2 commands:

Command1(display the current value): fsutil behavior query memoryusage

Command2 (set the value to 2):   fsutil behavior set memoryusage 2

 

Bonus:

Delete temporary files:

• This is just going free up some space on your disk.
• Press Windows + R on your keyboard
• On run, type %temp% then Select all the files and delete them.
• again , On run, type temp then Select all the files and delete them.
• Again, On run, type prefetch then Select all the files and delete them.

        Clean up your Disk: On file Explorer, Right click on disk C then click on Disk Cleanup button                                

 If you found this post useful in any way, please share it with anyone who may need it. 

Leave a comment below,  Let us know if these have speed up your PC.