How Do I Optimize Windows 10 for Best Performance?

About how to optimize Windows 10 for faster performance

There have been a lot of user reports lately that their Windows 10 PC is getting slower and slower.

Indeed, Windows 10 performance slowdowns are annoying and frustrating. Whether for work or leisure, Windows 10 running slowly always affects our mood. That's why so many users search how do I optimize Windows 10 for best performance on Google.

Generally speaking, what causes poor Windows 10 performance are as follows:

✦Attacked by a virus or malware

✦Dust accumulated inside the machine

✦Disk has bad sectors

✦Junk files

✦Insufficient system disk space

✦Too many fragmented files

✦HDD throttling or aging

✦SSD partition is not 4K aligned

...

For these problems, you can find a lot of solutions on the forum, for example, scan the disk for threat programs, clean the dust inside the case, change Windows 10 settings, etc. But you will find that many measures cure the symptoms, not the disease. If you want to learn how to make Windows 10 run peak performance, please read on.

How to improve Windows 10 performance effectively

To make Windows run faster, the best disk optimizer on Windows 10 is necessary. What is the best optimizer for Windows 10? Here, I recommend you to try AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard (compatible with Windows 11, 10, 8, 7).

This is a powerful all-in-one disk optimization expert, providing multiple effective measures to stimulate the best performance of Windows, suitable for HDD and SSD users. Most importantly, it has a friendly graphical user interface, and each operation function is also very convenient.

How do I optimize my computer for best performance? You can download it and refer to the following solutions.  

▶ Option 1. Check bad sectors and fix it

A bad sector is an inaccessible or unwritable sector on a hard drive or flash drive. Bad sectors will affect the performance of the disk, so it is necessary to remove bad sectors from hard disk permanently!

Step 1. Install and run AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. Right-click the partition you want to check and select “Advanced” > “Check Partition”.

Step 2. In the pop-up window, select the way of checking errors to perform. There are three choices, and here we choose the first one “Check partition and fix errors in this …”. Then, click “OK” to continue.

Step 3. After that, you will see the window below. After the progress is completed, click “OK”.

▶ Option 2. Clean up junk files

In addition, insufficient space on the C drive will also affect the performance of Windows 10. Fortunately, we can clean up system junk files and registry junk files to free up space.

Step 1. In the main interface, click“PC Cleaner” under ”Free up”.

Step 2. Then, click “Start Scan” to find the junk files on the PC. Wait a moment, you will see that all junk files will be listed. You can click "Select all" and then "Clean all".

Step 3. After cleaning up, you will see the target junk files have been removed successfully.

▶ Option 3. Run disk defrag

Disk defrag can rearrange the discontinuous data on the sector to make it continuous, so that the disk can work more efficiently.

Warning: Since HDD are constructed differently than SSD, please do not perform SSD defrag.

Step 1. Right-click on the target disk and select “Disk Defrag”.

Step 2. Tick the disk you want to defrag and hit the “Analyze” button.

Step 3. After the process is over, the disk will be scored based on the fragmented rate.

Step 4. Hit the “Defrag” button to start the defragmentation.

▶ Option 4. Extend the C drive

As we all know, insufficient system drive space (usually C drive) will affect the performance of Windows. We need to make sure it has enough space to run Windows 10.

After upgrading to AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, you can easily and quickly allocate the space of D drive to C drive.

Step 1. Right-click D drive and select "Allocate Free Space".

Step 2. In the pop-up window, we could specify the free space to be allocated and the destination partition that the free space will be added to.

Step 3. Click "Apply" on the toolbar to execute pending operations.

▶ Option 5. Upgrade HDD to SSD

Since the read and write speed of SSD is faster than HDD, replacing hard drive with SSD allows Windows to perform the best performance. AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional can migrate all data from HDD to SSD without reinstalling, including Windows OS.

Step 1. Click "Clone" in the main interface, and select "Clone Disk".

Step 2. Choose the hard disk that you need to clone as the source disk and click "Next".

Step 3. Select another drive as the destination disk, and then click "Next".

Step 4. Then, you can check the source and destination disk in the next window or change to "Sector to Sector clone", and click the "Confirm" button to continue if there is no problem.

Here, you can also click the "Settings" button to adjust the partition size on the destination disk or tick "4k alignment" to improve the reading and writing speed of the SSD. 

Step 5. After returning to the main interface, check the pending operation and click "Apply" and "Proceed" to commit the operation.

▶ Option 6. SSD 4K alignment

SSD use the smallest 4K sectors in the file system to hold data, and if the smallest 4K allocation unit is not always aligned with the 4K pages in the SSD, then the performance of the SSD will suffer. 4K partition alignment can make SSD have stronger performance.

Step 1. Right-click the partition you want to align and select Advanced > Partition Alignment.

Step 2. In the pop-up window, select 4096 sectors from the given list and click OK.

Step 3. Click Apply > Proceed to execute the operation.

▶ Option 7. SSD secure erase

Secure Erase ensures that all data stored on the SSD storage device will be completely erased, and the SSD will then reach its original ideal performance level.

In the top panel of AOMEI Partition Assistant, click "SSD Secure Erase" under "Wipe" menu and click "Next".

Conclusion

How do I optimize Windows 10 for best performance? After reading this tutorial, I believe you already have the answer. This article shares 7 ways to speed up Windows 10 for you, each method is tested. Please choose the one you think is best for you.