Operating System

Improve Your PC’s Startup Time: Simple Tips to Speed Up Windows 10

Sometimes, you may wait for a long time to start up your PC. This might happen when you install various programs and increase the space and CPU consumption. It can be super annoying, especially when it seems like it takes a longer time than before.

Reducing Windows loading time is a problem that most Windows users are dealing with and are looking for different ways to increase Windows boot speed.

Windows 10 is totally faster than the previous Windows versions, but you can speed it up with some tips and tricks. Follow us till the end of this article to find out How to speed up Windows 10 startup.

15 simple ways to speed up Windows 10

1.      Disable apps and programs that run on startup

One reason that might lower the startup speed is the programs that run on startup.

You need to find and uninstall the app that you rarely use to increase your Windows performance.

First of all, run Task Manager. To do so, hold Ctrl + Shift + Esc keys or right-click on Taskbar and choose Task Manager.

In the opened window, go to the Startup tab. There, you will see all programs and services, with their full information, that are active on your Windows. It also shows you how much it affects the speed of your Windows.

To stop the programs from launching on startup, move the mouse cursor on the app that you want to disable. Then, right-click on it, and choose the Disable button.

Note: this action does not disable the program completely, but it stops it from launching at the startup time.

You can always change this setting and enable the programs by returning to the Task Manager, right-click on the app and choose Enable.

Speed Up Windows 10 Startup

2.      Change the Power Settings

If you want to speed up your PC, you need to put aside the Power saver plan. This option has been created with the aim of saving energy, but it lowers your PC’s performance, and this will slow down the PC.

So, in order to boost your Windows performance, you need to change your power plan to High performance or Balanced.

To do so, open the Control Panel from the Start menu, and follow the steps below:

  • In the opened window, click on Hardware and Sound.
  • Then, choose Power Options.
  • Now, you should see two options: Power saver and Balanced (recommended).
Speed Up Windows 10 Startup

3.      Stop OneDrive from Syncing

OneDrive is Microsoft’s cloud-based storage. This tool makes sure that your files are synced and up to date. OneDrive is a great backup tool that performs synching operations constantly. But, although it is necessary to ensure a clear and smooth operation, this action will slow down your PC.

Stop OneDrive from Syncing is another way to speed up Windows10 startup.

But before that, you might want to check out whether it is really slowing down your Windows or not. To do so, follow these steps:

  • Right-click on the OneDrive icon, which looks like a cloud. (you can find OneDrive from Taskbar)
  • Then, click on the More option.
  • Choose Pause syncing from the popup screen that appeared.
  • Under the Pause syncing, choose 2 hours, 8 hours, or 24 hours based on how much you want to pause it.
  • Now, during that time, you can check out your Windows speed.

If it worked and boosted your speed, you will want to turn off syncing. To do so, do as below:

  • Right-click on the OneDrive icon.
  • From the popup window, click on Setting.
  • Then, go to the Account tab.
  • Choose Unlink this PC, and then select Unlink account.

This action only stops the OneDrive to sync with the cloud, and you will still be able to save the files to the local OneDrive folder.

If even though the OneDrive is slowing down your PC, you want to use it, you can try to troubleshoot OneDrive problems.

Speed Up Windows 10 Startup

4.      Use OneDrive Files On-Demand

If you do not want to stop OneDrive from syncing, you can keep syncing to a minimum and do it only when it is necessary. By this, you can speed up your Windows performance and still use the best offers that OneDrive provides you.

To do so, you need to use Windows’ OneDrive Files on-Demand feature. By this action, you can select to keep some specific files, but still, have access to all other OneDrive files in the cloud. If you have fewer files on your PC sync, you will see a performance boost.

To do so, work as follow:

  • Right-click on the OneDrive icon from the Taskbar.
  • Click on Settings.
  • In the popup window, go to the Settings tab.
  • Then, checkmark the option under the Files On-Demand.
  • Now, click on the OneDrive icon and choose Open Folder. (OneDrive will appear in a File Explorer window).
  • Find your file that you want to store only in the cloud but not on your PC, and right-click on it.
  • Then, hit the Free up space option.

This action will keep your files in OneDrive in the cloud, but remove them from your disk.

If you want to keep files in every folder on your PC:

  • you can right-click on the folder.
  • Then, choose Always Keep on this Device.

If you changed your mind and you wanted to keep all your files in sync through OneDrive, you need to remove the checkmark of the Files On-Demand.

Note: OneDrives only is available on Windows version 1709 and higher.

Speed Up Windows 10 Startup

5.      Switch off your Windows Tips and Tricks

Windows keeps an eye on your activities with your PC, so it will give you some tips and tricks depending on them to do with your operating system. Honestly, I barely could find these tips useful, so it is better to shut them off because These tips and tricks would slow down your PC’s speed.

To switch off your Windows Tips and Tricks, you can work as below:

  • Open the Settings from the Start menu.
  • Then, click on System.
  • In the opened window, select the Notifications and actions from the menu on the left side of your window.
  • Then, go to the Notifications section and remove the tick of Get tips, tricks, and suggestions as you use Windows option.
Speed Up Windows 10 Startup

6.      Run your Disk Clean up

A hard disk with many files can affect your PC’s speed so much. One way to speed up your PC’s performance is to delete unwanted, unnecessary, and old files. You should delete junk files as well because they have more harm than benefits.

To run Disk clean up, follow these steps:

  • Open Settings from the Start menu.
  • Go to the System section, then choose Storage from the left side menu.
  • Turn off the first option of the window.

After that, Windows will immediately begin to keep an eye on your activities and will delete the files that you have not opened in a month.

You can also customize storage sense. This can help you to choose how to free up space on your system.

To do so, select the Change how to free up space from the menu. You can also choose how often you want to run your disk to free up space. There will be options such as daily, weekly, and monthly.

Another way is to delete the old version of Windows. If there is still the old version of Windows, this will slow down your PC’s speed. You better delete it because you no longer need them. To do so, click on the box of the Delete previous Windows version option.

Speed Up Windows 10 Startup

7.      Switch off search indexing

Windows 10 indexes your hard disk in the background. The Indexing feature helps you to search your PC more quickly. But if you have a slow PC, this indexing can lower your PC’s performance, so you may need to turn off the indexing feature. Switching the indexing off will boost your speed, even if you have an SSD disk.

To switch off search indexing, follow the below instruction:

  • First of all, type services.msc in the Windows search box, and then press the Enter key.
  • Then, the Services app will pop up.
  • Scroll down to find Indexing Services or Windows Search from the services list.
  • Then, double-click on it.
  • In the opened window, select Stop.
  • Then, reboot your system.

If you want, you can turn off indexing only for the files which are in a specific location. To do so, work as follow:

  • Type index in the Windows search box.
  • In the popup window, click on the Indexing Option. This will head you to the Indexing Options page of the Control Panel.
  • Now, hit the Modify button to see the list of locations that are being indexed like your personal files, Microsoft Outlook, etc.
  • Remove the checkmark beside each location that you want to stop it from being indexed.
Speed Up Windows 10 Startup

8.      Clean up the Registry

To speed up your PC, you need to clean up the Registry. when you uninstall a program on your system, the setting of that program will not always get cleaned up in the Registry. So, by the time, the Registry will be filled with many outdated settings of all types, and your PC will slow down.

The Registry’s task is to organize your Windows, keep track of your activities, and it is like an information bank that keeps all the essential information of the programs on your PC.

It is impossible to clean up your Registry by yourself. To do so, you need a Registry Cleaner. There are a lot of Registry Cleaners, some are free, and some are paid. One of the free Registry Cleaners is Auslogics Registry Cleaner.

Before working with any Registry Cleaner, you have to back up your Registry so you can regain data if system errors happen. The Auslogics back up your Registry, but it cannot hurt to back up twice.

To back up your Registry yourself, follow this instruction:

  • In the search box, type regedit.ext and hit the Enter key.
  • When the Registry editor popup, click on Export from the File menu.
  • In the popup screen, under the Export Range section, choose All.
  • Next, select a file name and file location, then hit Save.

Whenever you wanted to restore the Registry, from the Registry editor, click on Import from the File menu, and next open the file you saved.

            Now, it is time to download and install Auslogics Registry Cleaner. Open the program and follow these steps:

  • First of all, you can choose the type of Registry issues that you want to clean up.
  • Next, you need to scan the Registry to find the problem. To do so, click on Scan Now, and choose Scan from the drop-down menu. This action will show you the Registry issues. (if you select Scan and Repair instead of Scan, the program will fix the problem without you checking them).
  • Now, after scanning, it will show you what problem it found. To help you decide better, it ranks the errors based on their intensity.
  • After you made up your mind, select Repair. Make sure that you put the checkmark on the Back Up Changes option. (this will help you to restore the Registry when something goes wrong).
Speed Up Windows 10 Startup

9.      Turn on automated Windows maintenance

Every day, Windows 10 do maintenance on your PC behind the scenes. It performs stuff like doing system diagnostics and security scanning to make sure everything is ok and solve the problem if it found any. This will boost your PC’s performance. The automatic Windows maintenance runs by default every day at 2:00 am when your PC is plugged into a power source and is asleep.

But, sometimes this feature is not on by default or you did not plug your PC into a power source for a while, thus the maintenance has not been done. To speed up your PC, you have to make sure that this feature is turned on and works daily. If you would like, you can also run it manually.

To do so, follow these steps:

  • Open the Control Panel.
  • Go to System and Security, then choose Security and Maintenance.
  • If you want it to run now, under the Automatic Maintenance section, choose Start maintenance.
  • If you want to make sure it runs daily, choose Change maintenance settings.
  • From the popup window, select the time that you want maintenance to run, and make sure to put the checkmark next to the Allow scheduled maintenance to wake up my computer at the scheduled time.
  • Then, press OK.
Speed Up Windows 10 Startup

10.  Disable animations, shadows, and visual effects

Windows 10 has nice features like animations, shadows, and visual effects. Usually, these features do not affect newer PCs, but they will definitely affect older and slower PCs.

To turn off animations, shadows, and visual effects, work as below:

  • Type sysdm.cpl in the search box and hit the Enter key. This action opens the System Properties dialog box.
  • In the opened window, go to the Advanced tab.
  • Then, from the Performance section, choose Settings. This action will head you to the Performance Options dialog box.
  • Now, you should see a list of visual effects and animations.

Here is the list of the animation and special effects that you would like to turn off to boost your PC’s speed.

  • Animate controls and elements inside windows.
  • Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing.
  • Animations in the taskbar.
  • Show shadows under windows.
  • Fade out menu items after clicking.
  • Fade or slide ToolTips into view.
  • Fade or slide menus into view.

Also, instead, you can easily click on Adjust for best performance at the top of the screen. Then, click on OK. By this action, your system will turn off the effects that make your PC slow.

Speed Up Windows 10 Startup

11.  Disable transparency

If you want to speed up your PC, you need to disable transparency effects as well as the animations, shadows, and visual effects. Windows spend a significant time creating these transparency effects, so disabling and turning them off will significantly affect your PC’s speed and performance.

To do so, work as follow:

  • Open Settings from the Start menu.
  • Go to Personalization, and choose Colors from the left side menu.
  • Then, turn off the Transparency effects option.
Speed Up Windows 10 Startup

12.  Defrag hard disk

As much as you use your hard disk, it becomes fragmented more, and this can slow down your PC. Windows 10 has a built-in defragmenter to defragment hard disk. Also, you can ask it to run automatically so it can stay defragmented all the time.

To do so:

  • In the search box of Windows 10, type defrag, and hit the Enter key.
  • In the opened window, choose a drive that you want to defragment.
  • Hit the Optimize button.
  • Hold down the Ctrl key to choose multiple disks you want to defragment.
  • If you want your system to defragment the disk/disks automatically, chit the Change settings button, and put a checkmark for the Run on a schedule option.
  • Click on the drop-down menu beside the Frequency, and choose the defragment frequency (the options are Daily, Weekly, and Monthly, which you should choose among them (we suggest Weekly).

If you use an SSD, defragment will not increase the performance significantly. Also, it can cause wear on your disk. So, it is not worthy to defrag SSDs.

Speed Up Windows 10 Startup

13.  Eradicate Bloatware

Sometimes, Windows 10 does not slow down your PC itself. Bloatware or adware that takes up your system resources and your CPU can slow down your PC. Bloatware and adware are so mischievous because they might get installed by your PC’s manufacturer. When you get rid of bloatware and adware you, will be surprised how fast your PC work.

To do so, work as follow:

  • First of all, to find malware and adware, run a system scan. (some system scan apps are such as Norton Security, McAfee LiveSafe, and Windows defender)
  • To use Windows 10’s built-in anti-malware app called Windows defender, type Windows Defender in the search box and hit the Enter key.
  • Then, click on Scan Now.

Then, Windows defender will find malware and remove them.

Speed Up Windows 10 Startup

14.  Turn off the Game Mode

Game Mode is a great feature that optimizes your PC for gaming. But, if Game Mode is enabled while you do not play, it will slow down your system because it executes with a lot of processes in the background. So, turning off the Game Mode can boost your PC’s speed.

Game Mode is turned on by default even if you never used your PC for gaming. To turn Game Mode off, you need to follow this instruction:

  • Open Settings from the Start menu.
  • Go to the Gaming section.
  • Then, turn off the Game Mode option.
  • When you have done the steps above, click on the Xbox Game Bar section from the left side menu.
  • Then, on the opened page, turn off the first option of the page.
Speed Up Windows 10 Startup

15.  Restart your computer

Shut down and restart are the best methods for troubleshooting and speeding up your PC. This action clears up any surplus use of RAM that otherwise cannot be cleared. It also kills the processes that you have started but no longer need them and are slowing down your PC. If your Windows 10 gets slower without any apparent reason over time, you may be surprised about its running speed when you do this.

The last words

Many reasons that can affect your PC’s speed and function. Here, we described 15 ways that help your PC startup work faster. These ways are so easy and practical to execute.

Have you ever faced with a slow PC? What did you do? Have you ever tried any of these 15 ways to speed up your PC? Do you know more methods?

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