How to Optimize Hard Drive in Windows 7?

No matter how wonderful Windows 10 is, Windows 7 can be called a significant release of the Windows operating system. This system was released in 2009. It was intended to be an incremental upgrade to Microsoft Windows because it improved many flaws of Windows Vista and polished many existing built-in tools. Thus, it can be said that Windows 7 was a massive success for Microsoft. Even though Windows 11 and 10 have been introduced, now many customers still use Windows 7 on their computers.

4 ways to optimize hard drive in Windows 7

However, no matter how great the OS is, after more than 10 years, the performance of Windows 7 decreases a lot. Many Windows 7 users must have experienced slow performance, errors, or even blue screens. These problems might be caused by hardware, but if your hardware is in fine status, then the trigger may be the old hard drive. Of course, you can change a new hard drive for your Windows 7, however, there are also some methods to help you optimize hard drive in Windows 7.

So in this part, we’ll introduce you to some methods to speed up HDD for your Windows 7 PC.

Way 1. Disable unnecessary visual effects

As you may be aware, Windows includes some visual effects by default. To improve computer performance, disable features such as Windows Aero, shadows, and thumbnails.

Step 1. Right-click “My Computer” and then select “Properties”. After the window opens, click the “Advanced system settings” button from the right side.

Step 2. In the “Performance tab” click the “Settings” button. Next, select an option from the ones available.

Step 3. You can adjust your settings for “best performance”, and “best appearance” or select the features that you want to activate one by one.

Way 2. Disable unused programs that run at the startup

Remember, your computer may automatically run software that is not needed all the time. Some of these programs can be disabled to increase speed. Here we can use the Microsoft System Configuration Utility tool to adjust these settings.

Step 1. Press “Windows” + “R” together, and type “Msconfig” from the run prompt.

Step 2. Navigate to the “Startup” tab and then deselect the programs that are not mandatory.

Way 3. Disable unused Windows Services

You can also optimize the computer’s performance by disabling unused Windows services. By disabling them, you increase the amount of RAM memory and CPU available.

Step 1. Press “Windows” + “R” together, and type Services.msc from the run prompt.

Step 2. Select the services that you want to disable, right-click them, and then select “Properties”. Step 3. From the following window, you can set the service “Startup type” to “Disabled”.

Way 4. Use a third-party tool to optimize HDD

Though Windows 7 has some built-in tools that can help you change settings, they can’t help you know your HDD deeply. If you feel your Windows 7 becomes slow, there’s no easy-operating tool in the system to test the read/write speed of your disk. And after the text, you might need to scan the hard drive to filter all junk files like system cache files, registry files, etc. Then, some users may defragment the hard drive to optimize.

You see, you’ll need to open many tools and wait for a long time to finish all tasks. What’s more, some junk files are generated by the system itself, and the Disk Cleanup program won’t allow users to clean them manually. Thus, in this case, we introduce you to a free disk and partition management tool, AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard.

It is a multifunctional Windows manager. With only one tool, you can conveniently and securely finish all tasks we mentioned above:

•Disk Speed Test
This function can measure the transfer rate of the hard drive. The data transfer rate of the hard disk refers to the speed at which the hard disk reads and writes data. Usually, the speed efficiency of the hard disk is assessed by measuring the speed of the hard disk transfer rate. After the test, you’ll know the status of your hard drive.

•PC Cleaner
After the test, you can use “PC Cleaner” to scan and clean all junk files on the hard drive and system. All unneeded files will be cleaned after the scanning.

•Disk Defrag
Disk defragment can reorder the separated data sequence on the HDD to save the data-seeking time and optimize hard drive.

Part 1. Test hard drive speed

Step 1. Install and open AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. Click “Test” in the top toolbar, and choose “Disk Speed Test”.

Step 2. The default mode is Simple Mode, click “Start” to run a simple speed test. Or click "Pro Mode" to get a more comprehensive test we introduced above.

Step 3. After the test, you can click “Export” to see the test result.

Part 2. Deeply clean junk files on the hard drive

Step 1. Open AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard, and click "Tools" and "PC Cleaner" in turn.

Step 2. Click "Start Scan" in the new pop-up window to scan your computer for unwanted files.

Step 3. After starting the scan, please wait for a while until the progress bar is loaded.

Step 4. Unneeded data will be automatically selected, you can directly click "Clean All" to delete them. If you still have other unnecessary files, you can tick the boxes of the corresponding files.

Step 5. When you see a correct symbol displayed in the interface, you can click "Back" to leave the function.

Part 3. Defragment and optimize hard drive on Windows 7 PC

Step 1. Launch AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard, right-click on the system disk and select “Disk Defrag”.

Step 2. Check the system disk and click on “Analyze”.

Step 3. After the analysis is done, the disk will be scored based on the fragmentation rate.

Step 4. Click on the “Defrag” button to start the defragmentation.

Conclusion

If you wish to continue to use a hard drive on Windows 7, then these 4 ways to optimize hard drive in Windows 7 are very helpful for you. However, the hard drive performance is limited by its structure and working mode, if you really need better performance on your Windows 7 system, we suggest you use SSD as the system.

You can upgrade to the AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional edition to directly clone your hard drive to the new SSD without reinstalling the system and all programs. All data will be transferred to the new SSD.

After the cloning, there are other helpful features like “App Mover”, “Convert to MBR/GPT”, etc. And if you also have a Server computer, there is the Server Edition for Windows Server 2025/2022/2019/2016/2012(R2)/2008(R2)/2003.