Speed up Windows 10: 6 Ways for a Faster PC

User case: How can I speed up Windows 10?

"My Windows 10 computer is really slow. It used to be fast and loaded up quickly when I first bought it, but over time it has slowed down. What I can do to speed up Windows 10? Any suggestions?"

An increasing number of computer users complain that their Windows 10 PCs become very slow and sometimes unresponsive after being used for a while. The reasons behind a sluggish computer mainly include low disk space on the C drive, too many background programs, too much file fragmentation, etc.

No matter what causes the decreased performance of the computer, they may wonder whether there is a way to speed up computer Windows 10. Luckily, here is the right place where you can learn 6 practical ways to increase the write and read speed of Windows and even can optimize Windows 10 for gaming.

6 easy and effective ways to speed up Windows 10

Now, you can read this part to begin to improve your Windows 10 performance with the help of these 6 advanced methods. For quick navigation, you can click on the blue link below to jump to the relevant section.

• Way 1. Disable startup programs
• Way 2. Disable Background Apps
• Way 3. Increase virtual memory
• Way 4. Defrag the hard drive
• Way 5. Free up disk space
• Way 6. Switch to an SSD

▶ Way 1. Disable startup programs

Startup programs are often ignored by computer users. As their name suggests, they will be loaded automatically when you start up your computer, consuming valuable memory in the background. Thus. Disabling startup programs can save room to support Windows 10 running.

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

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

Step 3. Right-click the program that you disable to load automatically while booting and choose "Disable".

▶ Way 2. Disable Background Apps

When you close some programs, are they really shut down? Some of them are not. They still keep running in the background, causing high CPU and Memory. So, you need to end them in Task Manager to help you speed up Windows 10.

Step 1. Right-click the taskbar and choose "Task Manager" to open it.

Step 2. Under the Processes tab, you can see which program is biting your memory. Right-click the apps you want to close and select "End task".

▶ Way 3. Increase virtual memory

Virtual Memory is a built-in feature in Windows. It can compensate for physical memory shortage.

So if you find your Windows gets slower and slower, you can speed up computer Windows 10 by increasing the size of virtual memory. Here are the steps:

Step 1. Right-click "This PC" and choose "Properties".

Step 2. In the pop-up window, click "Advanced system setting".

Step 3. On the "Advanced" tab, click "Settings" under "Performance".

Step 4. Click "Advanced" and click "Change" under "Virtual memory".

Step 5. Uncheck "Automatically manage paging file size for all drivers" and type a new size in megabytes in the "Initial size" and "Maximum size".

Step 6. Click "Set" and "OK" to save the changes.

▶ Way 4. Defrag the hard drive

File fragmentation means it will take a longer time for the system to access the file, which can inevitably cause slow performance. Defragging the hard drive refers to putting files together again. This will help the system find the information faster so that you are available to speed up Windows 10. Let’s see how to get it done

Step 1. In the search bar on the lower left of the desktop, type "defrag" and select "Best Match" – "Defragment and Optimize Drives".

Step 2. In the "Optimize Drives" window, click on "Change settings".

Step 3. Now, you can preset defrag frequency and select the drives to defrag. After that, remember to tick the option "Increase task priority…". Then click on "OK" to save the changes.

In addition to Windows 10 own defraggler, I recommend you a more powerful disk defrag tool named AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. It can help you perform disk defrag with more schedule options. And most importantly, it can optimize SSD by making 4K alignment as well. Now, you can download the demo version and have a try.

Step 1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, select the target disk, and choose "Disk Defrag".

Step 2. In the pop window, you can see all your used drives. Because we need to set a schedule, you need to click the button "Schedule", but you can also directly defrag the disk or partition if you want.

Step 3. In the schedule settings, you can select drives, the specific date and time to defrag the target drives, then click "OK" to save the settings.

Step 4. Click "Conditions", you can set the rate of fragmentation to trigger the schedule to defrag your disk and tick other options to help you make a detailed schedule based on your needs. Then click "OK" to save the settings.

▶ Way 5. Free up disk space

Most Windows 10 computers are slow due to insufficient space on the C drive, thus, you can make the PC run faster by removing junk files from the hard drive. This can be done by Windows built-in PC cleaner - Disk Cleanup. Follow the below steps:

Step 1. Type "disk cleanup" in the search box, and hit "Enter".

Step 2. In the Disk Cleanup, select C drive (or other drives you want to clean) and click "OK".

Step 3. Tick the files you do not need and click "OK" to confirm the operation. And you can click "Clean up system files" to get more free space.

If disk cleanup is not working in Windows 10, you can fix it or turn to other practical ways to free up space on the C drive such as moving applications from C drive to D drive or deleting large files. Both of them can be realized by AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional we mentioned above. You can see how powerful this disk optimizer is to help you speed up Windows 10 via various features.

Step 1. Open AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, click "Free up", and select "App Mover".

Step 2. You will see 2 options: move apps or move folders. In this step we choose "App Mover".

Step 3. In the new window, you will see all partitions. The number and size of installed programs on every partition will also be displayed. Select C drive or one partition that you want to move applications from and click "Next".

Step 4. Choose the applications you want to move and select the target location, then click "Move".

Step 5. In the pop-up window, you need to confirm forcibly closing running applications when moving starts. Click "OK" to begin the process.

▶ Way 6. Switch to an SSD

Sometimes, the speed of Windows has something to do with the type of hard drive: SSD vs. HDD. If you are using a traditional hard disk drive (HDD) as your boot partition, you can upgrade HDD to SSD to make your PC perform better due to the advantages of the SSD.

With the best disk clone software, AOMEI Partition Assistant makes a big difference to successful cloning. If you want to just keep OS on your new SSD without reinstallation, you can transfer only OS to SSD. If you are running on SSD right now, you can clone the entire SSD to a larger SSD without all apps, programs, and files on it.

Now, let's see how to clone hard drive to speed up Windows 10.

Step 1. Connect the destination disk to your PC and make it well-detected, run AOMEI Partition Assistant, and click "Clone" > "Clone Disk".

Step 2. Choose your previous HDD or the smaller SSD as the source disk and click "Next".

Step 3. Select the new SSD 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 6. Here you can preview the operation result, click "Apply">"Proceed" to commit the operation.

After cloning, you can reboot the computer and enter BIOS to set the SSD drive as the first boot device to boot your PC from the cloned SSD.

Conclusion

In this post, we have covered 6 useful methods to speed up Windows 10. You can choose whatever tip you think is best for your situation and enhance the computer's performance. All these methods we presented above can also work on Windows 7/8/11 computers.

Apart from what we have mentioned, AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional has other fantastic features that can also help optimize Windows 10: add space to the C drive, wipe the system hard drive or securely erase SSD, etc. If you are a Windows Server user, you can turn to the Server version.