Anybody can go crazy when their computer is sluggish, jerky, or unresponsive! To keep applications operating effectively, computers need to have enough processing power and memory, but upgrading a computer can be expensive.

The good news is that there are 5 adjustments that may speed up almost any computer.

1. Turn Off Windows Animations for a Speed Boost

Disable Windows Animations to Speed Up – Although they may seem good, rich animations, fluid renderings, and slick user components offer little to improve performance. A computer can become slower for the short time it takes for the Start menu tiles to animate. Similarly, opening new applications, closing running programs, and moving windows all provide extra animations that can be simply turned off to speed up the computer.

How to disable Windows Animations

By default, the visual effects are on, and they can even reduce battery life. Fortunately, it’s simple to disable Windows animations:

1. Find Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows on the Start Menu, and then click it.

2. Choose Adjust under the Visual Effects tab for optimum performance, or choose Custom to manually enable/disable visual effects. We advise removing animations in order to:

• l Fade out menu items after clicking 
• l Fade or slide menus into view
• l Fade or slide ToolTips into view
• l Animate controls and elements inside windows 
• l Animations in the taskbar
• l Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing

Remember: Visual Effects will affect how typefaces are displayed as well. Make sure Smooth edges of screen Fonts is checked so that formatted fonts seem as intended.

3. Select Apply (changes can always be reversed by choosing Let Windows decide what’s best for my computer). Take note that some systems might require a restart for changes to fully take effect.

4. Press “Ok”

Now You will notice these changes :

You’ll find that your Windows System could feel a little bit faster when animations and effects are turned off. Applications will launch more rapidly, windows will react immediately to minimizing or resizing them, and the animation time delay won’t cause your computer to run slowly. Naturally, the absence of animation transitions is not appreciated by everyone, which is why they are turned on by default. Fortunately, you can speed up your computer by optimizing the hard disk as well.

2. Clean up and defragment your hard drive

Naturally, the hard disk might slow down computer resources when it comes to quickly accessing and loading programs. The hard disk may become even more overloaded by fragmented files, which will increase the time it takes to access and load programs. Hard drives can fortunately be defragmented quickly. The hard disk should ideally be cleaned before defragmenting unnecessary files. A fresh defrag could assist cut a few seconds off any programs that use a lot of files if you’ve disabled defragmenting or if you’ve recently deleted/moved a lot of files. By default, Windows 10 automatically defragments the computer on a regular basis.

How Can You Speed Up Your Computer by Cleaning It Up?

Cleaning out unused files can improve the efficiency of your computer and hard disk before defragmenting. When it comes time to index them (more on indexing later), unnecessary files might strain the hard drive and impede the system. There are numerous cleanup tools that may get rid of extra data including cookies, temporary files, and browser cache. Fortunately, Windows includes a disk cleanup tool that can get rid of common debris. Follow these steps to open it:

1.  Open the Windows Start Menu and search for Disk Cleanup

2. Open Disk Cleanup and select the drive you wish to clean. Click OK

3. Select the files you wish to clean up and click OK

Depending on how many data are being wiped, the disk cleanup process might take anywhere between a few minutes and several hours. Your hard disk has to be defragmented after the cleanup is finished.

Defragmenting a Hard Drive 

As was already said, defragmenting the hard drive can assist in reorganizing files into locations that are closer together (for speedier access). The steps below can be used to quickly defragment a hard drive for performance:

Note: Solid State Drives (SSD) are highly expensive but do not require defragmentation.

1. Type and click Control Panel in the Start Search menu

2. In the Control Panel, navigate to System and Security

3.  Next click on Administrative Tools

4. Click Defragment and Optimize Drives

5. The drive can now be optimized (to defragment the drive) or analyzed (to see how fragmented it is).

A few hours may pass during the defragmentation procedure, depending on how fragmented your hard disk is. For the greatest outcomes, it is preferable to leave the computer alone during this period. For convenience, disk defragmentation can also be automatically scheduled.

3. Disable unwanted Startup Programs

Applications that are memory and process intensive can exhaust your computer’s resources and prolong startup times! Even worse, unnecessary programs like spamware, bloatware, and others might continue to run in the system tray, further consuming resources. Fortunately, by following these easy procedures, unnecessary applications can be disabled:

1. Type MSConfig into the Start Search and click System Configuration

2. On System Configuration, navigate to Startup to disable or enable Startup applications. Note: Windows 8 and 10 requires you to Open Task Manager

3. On the Task Manager, navigate to Startup and select the unneeded programs you wish to disable at startup

4. Right-click and Enable or Disable the program from starting.

4. Reduce Windows File Indexing

While Windows 10 search indexing makes it easy to find files, it can also make the system more sluggish. Indexing enables your hard drive to quickly browse through thousands of file entries (much like a database), eliminating the need to wait the few seconds it takes to discover a file. Unfortunately, faster system performance may be sacrificed for almost instant search results. System indexing may, thankfully, be turned off quickly.

How to Limit File Indexing?

1. Search and open Indexing Options on the Search bar

2. A list of currently indexed files is displayed. On the Indexing Options, window click Modify.

3. Click OK after unchecking the folders you don’t want to be indexed.

You’ll note that not every file is indexed; this is done on purpose to improve system speed. The system’s default settings only index a small number of carefully chosen folders, but this can nevertheless result in hundreds of thousands of entries. It is suggested to deindex unneeded directories initially.

5. Delete Temporary Files Manually

You can go to the directories where these files are kept, select them all, and delete them to remove temporary files from your computer.

Search for “%temp%” and choose the %temp% result. The Temp folder, which houses all temporary files and directories, will be the next thing you see.

Select all files and click the “Delete” button, or right-click the selected files and click the “Delete” in the contextual menu.

Now press Windows key + R, and in opened Run dialog box, type the “temp” command and press Enter or click “OK”.

That’s it, we hope you find this guide helpful, and you can now notice performance of your computer is increased . If there is another way you are aware of and it is not mentioned in our guide – do not hesitate to share it with us and others by leaving a comment in our comment section below.

Please feel free to contribute any additional methods you may be aware of that are not covered in our guide by posting a comment in the space provided below.