Despite all the performance improvements bundled in Windows 10, your system might be somewhat sluggish if your computer is older or doesn’t have the most powerful hardware. The good news is, there are simple tweaks to speed up Windows 10 anyone can apply.
With a few changes in the system settings that will take you less than 5 minutes to complete, you’ll get a performance boost and make your Windows 10 a bit snappier.
5 Easy tweaks to speed up Windows 10
The difference might vary from one device to another, although it’s still worth a try. I’ll lay out below several easy tweaks to speed up Windows 10 and take you through all the necessary steps.
Disable transparency
The Start menu, Action Center and taskbar are all slightly transparent in Windows 10. While transparency effects always look stylish, they also require a low amount of resources. You can quickly turn off transparency in these UI elements by going to Settings -> Personalization -> Colors and disable the ‘Make Start, taskbar, and action center transparent’ option.
If you’re not seeing this option, you probably have ‘Automatically pick an accent color from my background‘ turned on. Simply toggle it off and you should be able to disable transparency.
Customize special effects
Now that you disabled the Start menu, Action Center and taskbar transparency, you should know these are not the only special effects Windows 10 includes. You can adjust the settings for them from the Start context menu (simply right-click on the Start button to access it).
There, go to System -> Advanced system settings and the System Properties window will open up. In the Advanced system settings tab, click on the Settings option located under Performance.
The Performance Options window will now be displayed. In the Visual Effects tab, you have several options. An easy fix is to select the ‘Adjust for best performance‘ option. Nevertheless, you can also review the list of visual effects and manually disable the ones you don’t find useful. Once you’re happy with the configuration hit the OK button to save the changes.
Disable Startup programs
The Startup applications can definitely slow down the system boot especially when you have too many of them. If your Startup item list is in need of a cleanup open the Task Manager either by pressing the Ctrl+Alt+Del shortcut or from the Start context menu.
In the Startup tab (if you don’t see it, click More details) you can see all the apps that are set to automatically start up with your system. Besides the Status and Publisher name, Windows 10 also shows the Startup impact for each of the listed programs, so you can easily decide which are worth keeping or not.
To remove an application from Startup, select it and click Disable.
Troubleshoot problems
Windows 10 includes a performance troubleshooter that can fix various common problems which might be slowing down the system. This one may or may not work since there might not be any issues, or the troubleshooter could fail to detect them, but it’s definitely worth a try.
To launch the trouble shooter, open the Control Panel (from the Start button context menu) and go to Troubleshooting -> System and Security. There, select Run maintenance tasks.
Lower the Boot Menu timeout
At system start, the boot menu appears and by default, it’s set to be displayed for 30 seconds. Reducing the boot menu timeout is an easy way to speed up Windows 10 start duration.
To do it, open the Control Panel from the Start button right-click menu and head over to System -> Advanced system settings. There, select Settings in the Startup and Recovery section.
Then you can lower the time for the ‘Time to display list of operating systems‘ to 20 or even 10 seconds, instead of the default 30.
