How to Boost an Old Laptop: 7 Ways to Run Faster

Is it possible to speed up an old laptop?

"Hi guys, my current laptop is very slow. Opening any application, or performing any task can cause it to freeze temporarily, or just not open the application at all. Who can teach me how to boost an old laptop? Thanks all."

No matter what brand of laptop you are using, HP, Dell, Samsung, or Lenovo, it's likely for you to suffer from slow performance from time to time, especially after using the PC for a long time. But this does not mean you need to buy a new laptop.

You can do something to speed up computer performance and make your aging laptop run like a new one to some extent. But how to boost an old laptop in Windows 10? We display seven useful tricks in the next part. Just keep reading to know more.

How can I make my old laptop faster?

Depending on the slow level of your laptop, you can employ one or two methods to optimize your old PC. Also, you can try the following methods one by one until the speed of your old laptop meets your expectations.

Way 1. Uninstall unnecessary software

You must have installed many programs on your laptop but hardly use them. These applications are always occupying disk space, which is an important factor for a slow or freezing computer. Thus, uninstalling these unnecessary programs is a good way to improve an old laptop.

Let's see how to boost up laptop by removing unused software:

Step 1. Press the"Windows + I" keys to open Windows Settings, and click "Apps" to move on.

Step 2. In the Apps & features section, all the applications you installed on your laptop will be listed. Select the software you don't need and hit the "Uninstall" button. Repeat this operation to remove all the unwanted software.

Way 2. Clean up hard disk

You are definitely not unfamiliar with C drive full issue or low disk space warning. These problems are most likely to appear in an aging laptop, which is not only caused by numerous installed programs but also junk files produced during usage.

In such a case, you can clean up your hard disk to get a better speed. The below guide will teach you how to boost an old laptop by using Windows Disk Cleanup to free up space.

Step 1. Type "disk cleanup" in the search box, and hit "Enter". Then, select C drive or other drive you want to clean and click "OK".

Step 2. You can see how much space you can free up from the selected drive, tick the files you want to delete, and click "OK" to confirm the operation. You can also click "Clean up system file" to do the deep cleaning.

Way 3. Disable startup programs

Startup programs mean they will launch by themselves when your laptop boots up. Some of them are useful but some are not necessary. Therefore, you can stop some programs from opening at startup to save valuable memory on the background.

Follow the steps to see how can I make my old laptop faster:

Step 1. Press "Ctrl+Alt+Del" simultaneously and choose "Task Manager".

Step 2. In the pop-up window, click the "Startup" tab, and all the startup apps will be listed.

Step 3. Right-click the program you want to disable from startup and choose "Disable".

Way 4. Scan and remove viruses and malware

The existence of viruses and malware can slow down your laptop and severely, may damage your PC. In Windows 10, there is a native antivirus program called Windows Security that can scan for the system and remove potential threats.

Here is how to improve an old laptop by running this tool to remove viruses and malware.

Step 1. Go to "Settings" > "Update & Security" > "Windows Security" > "Open Windows Security" > "Virus & threat protection" > "Scan options".

Step 2. Select a scan method and click "Scan now" to begin the scan. Here we choose "Microsoft Defender Offline scan" as an example.

Way 5. Defrag the hard drive

As time goes on, files on your disk may become fragmented. It takes Windows a long time to access these files. Consequently, your aging laptop becomes slower and slower. To make your device run faster, disk defragmentation is effective because it can rearrange those pieces to shorten the read and write time.

Read the guide below and know how to boost an old laptop by defragging your hard drive:

Step 1. Type "defrag" in the search bar and select "Best Match" – "Defragment and Optimize Drives".

Step 2. In the new pop-out window, select the target drive and click "Optimize" to defrag it.

Way 6. Add more RAM

How to speed up old laptop Windows 10? Upgrading RAM (random access memory) or adding more memory is a good trick you can have a try. If your older PC does not have enough RAM to run many programs at the same time, you can swap your RAM from a small one to a larger one.

Step 1. Open "Task Manager" and click the "Performance" tab, you can see your memory type and how many slots are used.

Step 2. Then, buy suitable RAM and install it on your old laptop.

Way 7. Upgrade to SSD

Generally speaking, the laptop performance is also relevant to the disk types: HDD or SSD. If your computer runs slowly in HDD and the above methods do not make a great difference, you can try upgrading HDD to SSD since it has faster speed, better resistance, etc.

In order to replace the traditional hard drive with a new solid-state drive, you can easily finish this task by cloning HDD to SSD. This can copy all the data including Windows, programs, settings, personal data, etc from the original disk to the new disk.

To make it, all you need is a reliable hard drive cloning tool like AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. Its "Disk Clone" feature is available to copy only used space to another drive, so you can clone a larger hard disk to a smaller one. What makes this software remarkable is that the whole cloning process will never ask you to reinstall or restart Windows. That is, you can directly boot the PC from cloned SSD after cloning.

Download the demo version and follow the guide on how to boost an old laptop by disk upgrade to have a free trial:

Step 1. Connect the new SSD to your laptop. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. Click "Clone" and then select "Clone Disk".

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

Step 3. Select the new 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.

Other available tricks

In addition to the above methods, there are some other tips that may be helpful:

1. Update device drivers

2. Clear browser caches

3. Disable automatic updates

4. Wipe hard drive

5. Extend the system drive

6. Reinstall Windows

Conclusion

After reading this post, you must have known how to boost an old laptop and make it run like a new PC with fantastic speed. These methods we mentioned above work on improving different Windows systems like Windows 11/10/8/7. Just try these fixes one by one.

If you need to change HDD to SSD on Windows Server, you can use AOMEI Partition Assistant Server to clone it.