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4/13/2016
6 easy ways to speed up Windows 10
Windows 10 may be practically brand-new, but it still suffers from
some typical Windows performance issues -- especially if you're running
it on an older machine. Here are some quick, easy ways to improve your
PC's performance on the new operating system without swapping out your
hardware. (Most of these tricks will also work on older versions of
Windows.)
Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET
Windows 10's
new Start menu is sexy and see-through, but that transparency will cost
you some (slight) resources. To reclaim those resources, you can
disable transparency in the Start menu, taskbar, and action center: Open
the Settings menu and go to Personalization > Colors and toggle off Make Start, taskbar, and action center transparent.
No special effects
Making
the Start menu, taskbar, and action center transparent is one thing,
but Windows 10 still has a lot of other snazzy, built-in special
effects. To really go bare-bones on the special effects, right-click the Start button and click System.
Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET
This will open the Performance Options menu. In the Visual Effects tab, either choose Adjust for best performance to turn off all unnecessary animations and special effects, or choose Custom: and deselect the visual effects you think can live without. When you're finished, click OK to apply your changes.
Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET
If your PC is taking a long time to boot up -- and you've enabled Fast Startup and everything -- you may have too many programs starting up when you turn your computer on. To fix this, right-click on the Start button and click Task Manager. Click the Startup tab (click More details
if you don't see the Startup tab) and peruse the list of programs that
start up with your computer. If you see a program that doesn't need to
be there, right-click it and click Disable. You can also arrange the list of programs by Startup impact, if you'd like to see the programs that are taking up the most resources (and time).
Find (and fix) the problem
Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET
Windows
10 has a built-in performance troubleshooter that can help you find and
fix any problems that might be affecting your PC's speed. To open the
troubleshooter, right-click on the Start button and click Control Panel. Go to Troubleshooting and under System and Security, click Run maintenance tasks.
Reduce the Boot Menu Time-out
When
your computer starts up, the boot menu is displayed for a certain
amount of time before the operating system loads. This gives you time to
do things like start Windows in Safe Mode. You can shave a few seconds
off your startup time by changing the boot menu time-out, which is set
to 30 seconds by default.
Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET
To do this, right-click on the Start button and click Control Panel. Go to System > Advanced system settings, and, under Startup and Recovery, click Settings.
Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET
Next to Time to display list of operating systems:, change the value from 30 seconds to 10 seconds and click OK.
Restart your PC
Is
speeding up your computer as simple as...restarting it? Maybe.
Restarting your PC clears out its memory and stops any processes that
might be taking up resources. Also, shutting down your computer is not
the same as restarting it -- shutdown is affected by Windows 10's Fast
Startup, which saves a snapshot of your PC and its processes in a
hiberfile for faster boot-up. Restart is not affected by Fast
Startup, so if you have Fast Startup enabled, restarting your PC is the
only way to fully clear the memory and shutdown processes.
