Your computer is like your best friend. It’s with you through thick and thin, and it’s always there when you need it. But for most of us, our computer doesn’t work as fast as we would like—sluggish booting, sluggish shutdowns, memory-hogging… these things put a damper on your productivity and your mood.

You know that feeling: You’re trying to get work done at the office and can’t seem to get anything done because your computer is so slow that you can’t even open up any apps? Or maybe you’re at home and are just trying to watch Netflix on your laptop, but there’s just too much buffering? We’ve all been there! And for many of us, it feels like an impossible situation. What do we do? How do we make our computers faster?

Well, don’t worry! We’ve got ten tips that will help you improve your Windows computer performance and make sure that your computer works better than ever before.

Table of Contents

1) Restart Your Computer

You may have heard this one before, but it’s true: Restarting your computer can make it run faster. When you turn off your computer, it doesn’t actually shut down completely—it just goes into hibernation mode. This means that the RAM is cleared out, and most of the programs are closed down, but some processes still remain running in the background, which can slow down your computer when you start it back up again.

So, if you want to make sure that your laptop is working at its best, try restarting it once a week or so—this will clear out any leftover programs and clean up memory usage.

2) Uninstall Useless Software & Bloatware to Improve Your Windows Computer Performance

The second step to boost your computer performance is to uninstall all the useless software like Epic Games Launcher that came bundled with your computer and was probably installed by default when you first turned on your machine. These programs are bloatware — they take up space and can slow down your computer by running in the background. They may also be collecting information about your activity and sending it back to their creators, which could be a security risk.

To check whether any unwanted programs are still installed on your system, open Control Panel (or right-click an empty area of the Start menu), navigate to Programs > Uninstall a program, then select Programs and Features from the list of options shown on the left side of the window. Click Uninstall if there’s anything listed that shouldn’t be there at all or click Change (if available) if you just want to uninstall updates or service packs for those programs instead of getting rid of them entirely; then click Uninstall again when prompted to confirm that you want to proceed.

This is a quick and easy way to clean up your system and get rid of any unwanted programs that may be installed.

Alternatively, you can use the Windows Control Panel to uninstall programs (just search for “Control Panel” in the Start menu). For more advanced options, you can use a dedicated uninstaller like IOBit Uninstaller to automatically scan and fix broken application entries, delete leftover folders and files, and remove the program from the list of applications that load on startup, and more. The best part is that it’s completely free.

Uninstalling unnecessary or unwanted programs can help clean up your system and free up storage space. It can also help improve performance by freeing up resources that would otherwise be used by those programs.

3) Clear Out Your Temporary Files To Increase Your Computer Speed

Clearing out your temporary files is a great way to speed up your computer. And it’s really easy too!

Your temporary files are all the stuff that gets saved automatically by your browser or when you download a file from the internet. They’re usually stored in a temp folder somewhere on your hard drive—and they can really slow down your computer! Clearing out these temporary files will help speed up Windows performance significantly, especially with large downloads like videos or music files. To do this, simply search for “temporary files” in the search bar of your Start menu and then delete any of those temporary folders that you find on your hard drive (like Temp).

You can also try clearing out other temporary folders like:

“C:\windows\temp” or “C:\users\your-username\appdata\local\microsoft\windows\temporary internet files” (if you’re using IE).

Of course, if you have any large downloads going on at the moment, this could get tricky—but don’t worry! You can still clear out these temporary files later. Just go back into that same search bar and type in “temp,” which will show all the folders on your hard drive with that word in them (including some other folders with temporary data saved inside them). Then just pick one at random and delete it!

4) Update Your Drivers To Increase Speed of Computer

One thing that can seriously affect performance is outdated drivers—these are the files that tell your computer how to use its hardware components (such as graphics cards and motherboards). If these files are outdated or broken, then they might not work as well as they should be working, which can cause serious issues with performance.

To check for driver updates, open up Device Manager by pressing WinKey+X (or right-clicking on the Start button) and selecting Device Manager from the pop-up menu. From there, you can right-click on each component and select Update Driver from the drop-down menu. The computer will look for any updates that are available, so you can update them individually or in groups.

As well as updating drivers, it’s also worth checking for BIOS updates. These are firmware updates for your motherboard that can improve performance and fix any bugs or problems that might be present in the current BIOS version. You can usually find these on your manufacturer’s website, and they’re generally pretty easy to install (just follow the instructions).

After updating your drivers and BIOS, restart your computer to see if the changes have fixed any problems. If not, there are a few other things you can try.

5) Remove Unnecessary Programs from Startup

Some programs automatically start when Windows boots up, which can slow down boot times significantly and cause other problems as well. To remove these programs from startup, click on Start, type “MSConfig” into the search box, and press Enter on your keyboard. When System Configuration opens up, go to the Startup tab and untick any programs that you don’t want to run at startup anymore by unchecking them or right-clicking them and choosing “disable.” Click “Apply” and then “OK” restart your computer and see how much difference that makes.

6) Change Power Plan Settings

Your Microsoft Windows computer is set to use a balanced power plan by default, which is fine for most users. However, you can change this to High Performance to boost your PC’s performance; do this by clicking Start and typing “power options” into the search box, then selecting the Power Options from the list of results that appear above.

Under “Show additional plans,” click on High Performance. If you’re on a laptop, also click Change plan settings next to it and make sure that both “Dim the display” after X minutes and “Put the computer to sleep” are turned off. Click Save changes, restart your PC again, and see what difference these simple tweaks made!

To give you a detailed overview of what these power plans do to increase speed of computer below, we will discuss each of them in more detail:

Balanced

The Balanced power plan is the default for all PCs running Windows 10 and Windows 11 and can extend battery life while also providing adequate performance by using a balanced approach between performance and energy efficiency. It is best for most users as it will automatically determine when to run your processor at full speed or conserve power depending on what you’re doing with your PC. This option uses a moderate amount of energy to control CPU usage depending on whether the PC is plugged into a power outlet or running on battery.

High Performance

The High-Performance power plan is designed for users who want maximum performance from their PC. This option uses more energy than the other plans but can provide better performance when you need it, such as gaming or video editing. It’s also a good choice if your system is plugged into an outlet most of the time and you don’t mind sacrificing some battery life for increased performance.

Battery Saver

This option reduces performance so that your battery lasts longer before needing another charge. You may notice that certain features like Cortana don’t work as well because they’re using less power than normal, but you’ll get more runtime out of your battery pack before needing a recharge.

7) Use Drive Defragmentation

Drive defragmentation is a process that is used to rearrange files and folders on your drive to make it more efficient. This will not only improve your Windows computer performance, but it will also make sure that your computer runs more smoothly and faster than before.

Defragmentation can be done manually or automatically by using third-party software. However, it is important to note that not all drives need defragmentation. For example, if you use an SSD drive (solid-state drive), then you don’t have to worry about defragmenting because they are not susceptible to fragmentation like other types of drives.

If you’re still interested in defragging your hard disk, then here are some tips on how to do so

  • Open up the Windows Disk Defragmenter tool by typing “Defragment” in the search box on your Start menu, right-click on your hard drive partition and choose Properties from the context menu or click View my Computer > Properties > Tools > Defragment Now on the left pane (Windows XP).
  • Click on Analyze button and wait for it to finish analyzing how fragmented your hard disk is (it may take several minutes). After it finishes analyzing, click on Defragment button, and it will start defragmenting your hard disk. Depending on how fragmented your hard drive is, this may take a while (several hours in some cases).

8) Add More RAM to Improve Your Windows Computer Performance

The more memory you have in your system, the faster it will generally perform. That’s because each application that’s open and running on your computer requires its own chunk of RAM to operate. The more applications you have open at once, the less room there is for Windows operating system to work with, and the slower your computer will become.

Why? Because the Windows operating system is constantly swapping pieces of itself and your applications in and out of memory. It’s a crucial process that happens behind the scenes thousands of times per second, but it’s hindered when there isn’t enough RAM to work with. So, if your computer has less than 8 GB of RAM, it’s time to upgrade.

In fact, in today’s world, 8 GB of RAM is really the bare minimum. Most power users would be better off with 16 GB or more. And given RAMs are no more a costly upgrade than they’ve ever been, you can’t afford to not have enough. Just get some best DDR4 or latest DDR5 RAM with good CL values, and you’re set for most uses.

9) Invest In SSDs or Better Yet NVME SSDs to Boost Your Computer Performance

If you have an older computer, chances are that it still uses spinning disks for storage. These hard drives are what we call “rotational,” and they store data in a circular pattern on the disk surface. This is an old technology that has been around for decades now.

An SSD (or Solid-State Drive) is a storage device made entirely from flash memory chips. Unlike traditional hard disk drives (HDDs), SSDs have no moving parts and therefore can’t suffer from physical damage like fragmentation or mechanical failure. They also have no read/write head that needs to move across the media’s surface, making them much more durable than HDDs.

The results are much faster startup times and much better overall system responsiveness. However, there is even a newer technology called NVMe (or Non-Volatile Memory Express) that is even faster than SSDs. These drives connect directly to the PCI Express bus instead of using a slower SATA interface, and they use specialized controllers that are optimized for flash memory to achieve far higher speeds than SSDs. In fact, the latest Samsung 980 PRO Gen 4 NVMe SSD can easily reach nearly 7,000 MBps read speed, and nearly 4,800 MBps write speed—nearly 10 times faster than conventional SATA SSDs.

In essence, by investing in a new NVMe SSD, you may experience more than 10 times faster startup and shutdown speeds, as well as very fast application and file loading.

10) Consider Disabling Some System Visual Effects

If you’re using Windows Vista, 7, or above, you can try disabling some of the system’s visual effects. These are just a bunch of things that make your computer look pretty and cool, but they don’t actually help with anything. In fact, by disabling them you can improve your Windows computer performance.

To do this: Right-click on an open area of your desktop and select “Personalize.” Click on “Adjust Visual Effects” in the left-hand column. Then click the button that says “Adjust for Best Performance” instead of one of those options that have a list of checkboxes (like one called “Let Windows choose what’s best for my computer.”)

Final Conclusion

Nothing and I mean nothing, is as important as a good computer. The most advanced computer in the world can be slowed down by having too many programs running at once. If you have a program that uses many resources (like an MMO game or a video editing software), make sure to close any other applications before running it. And if your computer is old or very slow, consider upgrading it. Just follow these simple tips and your computer will be running like new in no time!