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Upgrading your hardware isn’t the only solution for slow startup, laggy performance, and a poor Windows experience. You can improve your computer’s performance and responsiveness by making a few simple adjustments to your system settings.
1Optimize Visual Effects
Windows mainly offers two options for managing visual effects: best performance and best appearance.
As the name suggests, selecting the best appearance option enables attractive animations, effects, shadows, and transparency, improving the visual appeal of your system. However, these effects can impact your PC’s performance, especially on low-end computers.
To improve your Windows PC’s responsiveness, you shouldoptimize or turn off these extra animation effects. To adjust them, follow these steps:
This will turn off additional effects but may reduce the visual appeal of your display. To strike a balance between appearance and performance, selectCustomand manually toggle specific effects on or off.
2Manage Startup Programs
Many apps automatically get permission to run at startup, either during installation or the first time you launch them.
As the number of these startup apps increases, boot times slow down, making Windows take longer to be ready for use. To improve performance, you should disable unnecessary apps from launching at startup.
Todisable startup programs, follow these steps:
3Disable Background Applications
Many apps, especially third-party antivirus and password managers, are allowed to run in the background even when you’re not actively using them. While this can occasionally be useful, having too many unnecessary apps running in the background can drain system resources, slowing down your computer’s performance.
To boost your system’s performance, you shoulddisable unnecessary background apps. Here’s how you may do that:
By freeing up resources from background apps, your system will have more power to focus on essential tasks, ultimately improving performance.
4Adjust Power Settings
By default, Windows power settings are set to a balanced configuration, which offers a good mix of performance and energy efficiency.
This can help extend your laptop’s battery life. However, it also limits the amount of power Windows uses, affecting performance. To eliminate this restriction, switch to a high-performance power plan, allowing the hardware to operate at full capacity.
Toadjust your power plan settings in Windows, follow these steps:
Enabling the high-performance plan will consume more battery, so keep your laptop plugged in during resource-intensive tasks.
5Force Apps to Use Your Dedicated GPU
Even if you have a dedicated graphics card, some apps may still default to using the integrated GPU because they don’t have permission to use the dedicated one. As a result, you may experience subpar performance since the more powerful GPU isn’t being utilized.
To get better performance,set your dedicated GPU for specific appsthat require more resources.
If you’ve never made the tweaks mentioned above, try them out, and you’ll notice an instant performance improvement.
However, remember this isn’t a one-time fix. You’ll need to assign apps to your dedicated GPU as you install them, regularly remove unnecessary apps from the startup list, and regularly turn off new background processes as needed.
