Adjust windows for best performance

Windows by default come installed with several settings that are improving appearance of your windows system. Some of them are animations, shadows, translucency etc… All of these consume some CPU power, and it means that windows is always crunching something in the background. If you wish to change those settings , follow these intructions :

• 1. Open Control panel
• 2. Find & click System & Security

• 3. Click System once again within System and Security

• 4. On the left, open Advanced settings

• 5. Within System Properties , find Advanced tab, and click on settings

• 6. Here are all you Performance options that are enabled on your system.

I suggest you pick a Adjust for best performance option that will improve your system performance by several percents…
While there, head out to Advanced tab, and there adjust for best performance of Background services. This might sound weird, but from my past experience working with windows, it is best to have that option enabled as your computer will be faster.

Windows Startup options

When windows is starting , there are several programs / services that are starting automatically while windows is booting. You can investigate which one’s of them are by looking on Startup tab within Task Manager.
There are several ways to open your Task manager within windows 10, either you rightclick your taskbar, or press and hold CTRL ALT DEL key combination to open it.
If you are opening your Task manager for the first time, you need to click More Details to gain access to everything.

Please note, that programs in your startup list will probably wary from yours and the reason for that is simple, we don’t have same softwares running on our system. But, review this list and disable all programs you don’t want to be automatically loaded while booting. The most interesting tab is Startup Impact. Let it be your guidance.

If there are some, or maybe several, programs that are set to auto-start and you don’t recognize. I would suggest google-ing to find additional information about them to see how are you going to proceed. I’d suggest uninstalling all unknown programs via control panel.

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Task Manager

Everything you need to diagnose problem and repair it is already pre-installed on your Windows system. Task manager is one of the tools you need. To open task manager press & hold key combinations ctrl+alt+del to get started. If this is the first time you are opening it, you’ll probably see list of programs that are running on your system, but the list is not complete as administrative programs are hidden from sight. To see the complete list, press „Show details“ in Task Manager.

Example of Task Manager

Now, take a look of all processess that are using your computer resources. I’d advise you to sort all processes by their CPU usage, Memory Usage, and last one by Disk usage. Then google process name – to identify it. If the process is „unknown“ or suspicious, then right click on its name, and End Task. This will kill that process from running. I’d advise to kill all processes that consume enormous ammount(s) of CPU/Memory or HDD. This will at least free up some resources so you can proceed with reviving your PC.

Investigate your Windows system

Another neat utility in Windows, is Resource Monitor which displays information about the use of your hardware ( CPU, memory, disk and network ) and software resources in real time. To find out where and why your computer is underperforming, this is one of the places you have to visit to understand where the root of your problem is.

Uninstall Programs

Head out to Control Panel and find Add/Remove Programs – or Uninstall a Program ( that’s how it is called in Windows 10 ) . Review your list, and remove all software’s that you don’t recognize, or don’t need. I would suggest that you don’t remove software from official publishers ( for example , Microsoft, Intel , IBM etc… ) just to be sure you won’t uninstall drivers you need for windows to work properly.

Example of Control Panel – Uninstall a program

Uninstall all programs you are not using and that are unknown to you. Remove all antiviruses, except for one. Antiviruses are conflicting with each other and are consuming a lot of PC power. I suggest you install Malware Antivirus, to scan your computer and clean it from threats.

Windows updates

Head out to your windows updates ( control panel – windows updates ) and update your OS to the latest version. Sometimes, updates gets stuck, unfortunatelly there is no universal way to resolve that, so you’ll have to find someone who is able to resolve windows update errors.

Clean your HDD

Often, I’ve noticed that users don’t have any disk space on their hard drives. This will have serious impact on your PC performance as Windows needs at least 200. Mgb to operate normally, that’s what Microsoft says, but I would advise you to free up to at least 5. % of your HDD.
To start cleaning your HDD, you need to Right click on your (Local disk C:) then click Properties

• Within Local disk properties select Disk Cleanup

From the list, select which files you want to delete, and then when satisfied with the amount of hdd space you’ll gain – click OK to get started. Don’t worry, it is safe to remove these files. They are mostly logs, cookies, temporary internet files etc…

Defragment your disk

While speaking of hard disk, from time to time, you should defragment your hard disk. Defragmentation is the process of physically organizing the contents of storage devices. In windows 10. this is being done automatically for you, but in older windows version, you’ll have to manually start the process. Click Start, and look for Disk Defragmenter.

Select your disk , and click Defragment disk to get started. Please note, that this process might take a while, it depends on how big is your hdd and on how fragmented it is.

Internet Browser add-ons & Plugins

There are add-ons which can get attached ( hooked ) on your internet browser ( google chrome, mozilla firefox, etc. ) and can seriously slow your browser. I advise you to remove all 3rd party plugins/addons from your browser.
To remove extensions from your Google Chrome, within google chrome open settings. ( click on three dot menu, then from a drop down menu, choose settings )

On the google chrome settings page, look on the left for a Extensions option. Its just under Reset & Cleanup option which is also a nice Google chrome’s feature, to reset/delete everything and launch google chrome just as it was when first downloaded.
On chrome://extensions/ page you’ll see all extensions ( plugins) that are imported in your chrome. I’d advise you to remove all unknown / 3rd party plugins .
As there are several internet browsers out there, and they all have different user interface, I won’t be providing a short guide on how to remove extensions in all of them. You’ll have to google for that solution. But, if you don’t know how to remove them, you can always uninstall complete browser from control panel, and then download and install a fresh one .

Conclusion

There are so many things why your PC is under performing, that only an IT expert could and able to find the cause for it, and if these minor „fixes“ described in this article ain’t helping, you’ll have to find a IT guy you can trust.

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