▷ My computer is very slow (20 useful tips to improve its performance)

How many times have we thought: my computer is very slow, what can I do to improve its performance? Well that's why in this article we have set out to find all possible ways to improve the performance of our poor team.

In this article we will cover all the topics we can, both in terms of operating system and software, as well as hardware and features. Keep in mind that a computer with weak hardware and a current operating system will have certain processing difficulties when we demand too much of it.

We start with the tips that we think are most useful to improve the performance of our computer. Actions that really have an impact if errors or malfunctions are detected.

Index of contents

Avoid using optimizer programs

Surely many times you have heard about programs for optimizing the PC, such as CCleaner, TuneUp and a long etcetera. Well, in my opinion, with these programs, the only thing we can do is load more of our process computers in the background of programs than the only thing they manage to do is gather all the utilities that Windows brings natively under the same interface.

Always, everything you can do manually with Windows media is going to be better than using programs that when their free license expires will leave us with less than half of their useful options, if they had them.

Don't use Registry Cleaners either

As with previous programs, I think that the Windows registry should not be touched, much less "cleaned". There are quite a few registry cleaner programs, we ourselves have an article talking about the best and most reliable registry cleaners for those who actually use one of them.

But, even so, we will never be completely sure if these are going to remove something that is really important and, consequently, spoil the programs or the system. What's more, after a registry cleanup we are not going to notice absolutely any performance improvement on the computer. It is precisely for this reason that I see the use of this type of programs totally unnecessary.

Scan your computer for viruses in Windows Defender

The second thing we have to do is pass our antivirus, whatever we have installed to make sure that we do not have any type of virus. We are going to use the antivirus that Windows brings natively, called Windows Defender. Although it seems like a joke, it is one of the best free antivirus that we can have on our system, it is more than proven by the experts of AV-TEST. Also, it is natively implemented.

You can check out our article on Windows Defender vs Avast Free antivirus to see how good it is.

Well, to scan for viruses with Windows Defender, let's go to the Windows taskbar and click on the shield icon. Then we will click on “ Antivirus and threat protection ”. Now we must click on " exam options ", do not do a quick exam, do it more thoroughly.

Here inside we have interesting options to test for viruses. The two most recommended options are:

“ Personalized exam ”: to examine absolutely all the files on our hard disk.

“ Windows Defender Offline Exam ”: This will be an exam that will be carried out after restarting our computer. With it we can eliminate viruses that are running on our computer, and that, otherwise, it would be impossible to eliminate them.

Do not have two antivirus installed and activated on your computer

But of course, you will think it is silly, since there is no way to remove Windows Defender from our computer. But yes, deactivate it friend. The fact of having us antivirus active and working, can cause a poor performance of our system, since each of them will contain a multitude of active processes that will load more our memory and CPU, and in addition there may be incompatibilities between them.

So what you can do is uninstall some free antivirus that you already have on your computer and leave Windows Defender, or disable the latter. To do so, again click on the shield icon in the taskbar and enter the antivirus.

Here we must click on " Manage settings " to bring up a menu of options that we can disable.

In addition, so that notifications do not bother us, we will go further down in this window and click on " Change notification settings ", then " Manage notifications ", to access the entire list of notification options.

If we disable everything, we can forget about the presence of Windows Defender on our PC.

Of course, to uninstall an antivirus other than Windows Defender, you will have to access the list of programs. To do this, open the start menu and type " Add or remove programs " and click on the search result. All the programs you have will appear in this list.

Uninstall programs you don't need

We take advantage of the previous section to cite another of the most relevant and useful actions, to say the least, my computer is very slow. It is about eliminating all the useless programs that we have on our computer, which are consuming space on the hard disk and background processes.

We will go to the start menu and write " Add or remove programs " and click on the search result. We will see the entire list of programs that are installed on our computer. We will only have to select one and click on " delete ".

But be careful because absolutely not all programs will be here, and this is because Windows also has programs installed from the Windows Store that will not appear in this list. Also, there may be others of them that are hidden or poorly installed. There is a great free program to uninstall absolutely everything we want from our team, its name is IObit Uninstaller.

Visit this tutorial to see how to use IObit Uninstaller and uninstall a program you don't want to remove.

Disable visual system options

If we do not have too powerful hardware or an old or integrated graphics card, we can try disabling the visual improvements of Windows 10 to improve performance in navigation and window management.

To access these options we have to open the control panel, and click on the " System " icon. Now we click on " Advanced system configuration ".

A window will appear in which we must go to " Advanced options " to click on " Settings " in the " Performance " section. In this new window we must choose the option " Adjust to obtain the best performance " and activate only the option " Smooth edges for screen fonts ".

Install latest drivers on your computer

Another reason that most often cause poor performance of our computer is precisely the fact of not having the official drivers for the components that we have installed. A very clear example is the graphics card, which will not perform at all well with the drivers that Windows installs from the factory.

If we do not know the components that our PC has, we will have several options at our disposal to do this. The simplest of all we have directly in our system, and is the Device Manager.

Once again we will press " Windows + X " to open the tools menu and we will choose " Device Manager ". Here we will see a large list of components classified according to their name and function. If we display the list, we can see the make and model of the components that are installed.

Of course we will have to search for these drivers on the website of the manufacturer of each one of them.

Another way to know exactly what hardware our equipment carries, is to know its brand and model, and locate it on the manufacturer's website. This is very useful for laptops.

There are also programs specialized in listing the components of our equipment, such as Everest Portable. It is a free program that does not need installation, just open and locate the hardware we need.

Update Windows

Another of the actions that we must carry out gradually is to update our operating system. Microsoft frequently releases system updates that add or improve functionality to provide us with a better user experience. In addition to this, it also provides patches to solve small system errors, so it is recommended to have it updated.

The process is very simple, we open our start menu and write " check for updates ". We choose the search result and click on the " Check for updates " button in the configuration window that will appear.

And it would be.

See how much space is available on your hard drive

Having the hard disk where the operating system is installed very full will also mean worse performance, since the work that it has to do to find the files within it will be greater, and also there will not be enough space for memory virtual that the system manages automatically.

To see the available space on our hard drive, we will only have to open the file explorer and enter " This computer ". If the bar under each hard drive or partition is red, it means space is running low, so it's time to delete files, programs, or junk.

Remove junk files from hard drive

A very interesting utility that Windows implements is that of being able to eliminate the junk files on the drive from the configuration panel, in addition to the traditional option “ clean disk ”. The interesting thing about it is that it breaks down the files that are stored on our hard drive by categories, so that we will know which of them are occupying the most space.

To enter it we have to click on the gear icon in the start menu. Then we click on " System " and " Storage ". All the storage units and the space occupied by the files in it will appear.

We will click on the unit in which we want to free up space and wait a few seconds for it to finish analyzing its content. We will have to pay attention to the section that says " temporary files ", since we can eliminate all the space that these files are occupying.

If we click on it, we will break down all the content of temporary files into categories. We will only have to select absolutely all of them and click on “ Remove files ”. Be careful with the first option, since Windows takes the downloads folder as one of temporary files.

If we go to the " this computer " directory, right-click on the hard drive and choose properties, we will also have the option to " free up space ". This tool does the same as the previous one.

Click on " Clean system files ", and in the resulting list we choose everything we want to delete. We will also have cleaned up junk files from here.

Check the load of RAM and CPU

If my computer is very slow, the least I could do is check how many hardware resources the system is consuming, and this is what we will see now from Task Manager.

To access it, right-click on the taskbar and choose " Task Manager ". If we see it very small, we will click on the " More details " date.

In the " Processes " tab we can see the entire list of programs that are currently active in our system. In addition, we will see different columns such as CPU, Memory, Disk, GPU and Network that show us the total consumption of the programs that are running.

In this way we can see if something abnormal is happening on our computer. If we do not have open programs in the foreground, the CPU should have a very low consumption and for the equipment to work well, the RAM memory cannot be above 80 or 85%. Overcoming these limits, we must pay attention to which program is consuming so much.

In the " performance " tab we can see in more detail the consumption of these components. Similarly, excessive consumption of Hard Disk or Network will mean that the program is still slowing down our equipment. Or simply that the hardware we have installed has become too small.

In any case, the procedure after locating a program that I consume a lot will be:

• Know what program it is by consulting the Internet Know its usefulness for the system If it can be uninstalled and kill its process If its uninstallation would trigger a malfunction of the system or other programs.

Remove programs from Windows startup

Precisely one of the actions to be taken, given the above, will be to eliminate a program from Windows startup, to prevent it from automatically running on the system.

Be careful because not all programs must be disabled from Windows startup, since some are the hardware drivers of our computer. To see the list of Windows startup programs we go to the " Start " tab of the Task Manager.

To deactivate a Windows startup program, right-click on it and choose the " Disable " option.

Activate the high performance power plan

Windows by default has implemented several power plans in order to achieve a balance between the amount of energy that our team consumes and performance. On older computers, we may pay the price of this " balanced plan " with lower performance. For this reason, what we are going to do is choose the most aggressive plan so that all our components perform at their maximum, without taking into account energy savings.

To access the power options, the quickest is to press the " Windows + X " key combination and choose the " Power Options " menu option. Then we will click on “ Additional energy configuration ”.

Initially, two plans will appear, Balanced and Economizer. We will click on " Show additional plans " to also see the High performance. We activate it, and if we want to change the options of this plan in a more advanced way, we will click on " Change the plan configuration ".

If we click on " Change advanced energy settings " all the available plan options will appear, to customize them.

Run the error checking tool

Windows also has a tool that is responsible for locating errors that occur in the sectors of our hard drive. It is interesting to run it from time to time to check that everything is in order.

Well, let's go to " This team ", open the properties of the hard drive with the drop-down menu when you right-click on it, and we are on the " Tools " tab. Here we will have a section called " Error checking " in which we are going to click on the " Check " button.

In the best case, a window will appear notifying us that it is not necessary to examine the unit. In any case, we can click on " Examine unit " to carry out the exam.

If errors are found, Windows will try to fix them or notify us of the corresponding event. This action can also be executed through the command terminal with CHKDSK.

Defragment the hard drive (only if it is mechanical)

If we have mechanical hard drives on our computer, and especially if we have the operating system installed on one of them, it is highly recommended to pass the disk defragmenter tool occasionally.

Windows has a tool to defragment the hard disk called Defrag. To access it, we will only have to write in the start menu " Defragment and optimize ". We must differentiate two actions:

• Analyze: it is the option that we will carry out on mechanical hard drives. After this, the defragment option will appear and the system considers that it is necessary. Optimize: It is the option that we will use for SSD hard drives, since defragmenting them would not make sense.

We recommend Defraggler software, which is free and does a better job than the Windows program. Download it from its official website.

Run the RAM analysis tool

We also have another tool that is natively implemented in the operating system that is in charge of analyzing our RAM memory to verify that all the cells are correct.

To access it, the quickest will be to open the Run tool with the " Windows + R " keys. We will write:

MDSCHED

Now we will have a window in which it will ask us to restart to run the tool on the next startup of the computer.

If nothing works for you, formatting never comes out too much

If you have already tried everything, and it has not worked for you, it is possible that the slowness of your equipment is due to the time that you have not formatted your hard drive. Having an operating system installed on a hard disk for years takes its toll, because despite the care we take of it, the immense amount of updates, programs installed and uninstalled, recorded and deleted files… All this gradually causes our computer to go slower and slower.

At this point, it is best to take everything we do not want to erase and give a complete format to our hard drive and install Windows from scratch. Surely the performance will improve considerably.

Visit this tutorial to see how to reinstall Windows 10 step by step

You don't have to worry about your files, because when you install Windows on top of the previous installation, the system will create a folder called Windows.old with all the files that were on the disk. Of course this will be viable if we have enough space to have this folder in addition to the Windows installation itself, which needs an additional 10 GB.

After picking up the files, don't forget to delete this folder from the system to free up space.

If you don't have an SSD, this is the source of your problems

As simple as that, if today you do not have your operating system installed on an SSD, you can already have a 32-core processor that the huge bottleneck that you are going to have with a mechanical hard drive is going to be insurmountable.

Currently it is practically mandatory to have an SSD hard drive installed on our computer to store our operating system on it. The speed of a normal SSD SATA hard drive compared to a mechanical hard drive is triple or quadruple, depending on which disk we have.

So under any circumstances the performance we will experience will be much higher with one of them, and much more if it is a PCIe or M.2 NVMe unit.

In addition, a SATA SSD drive can come as pearls for a computer that we have old, since thanks to it we can give a second life to our equipment. The performance jump can be very noticeable.

To find out what's latest in SSD, check out our guide to the best SSDs on the market.

Expand your RAM

It may also be time to expand your RAM. If in the task manager you have seen that the memory resources are insufficient to support the work that your PC is undergoing, you need to perform a memory expansion using a new module.

For this you must know what type of RAM memory your motherboard supports, since not all are compatible, of course.

Visit this article to learn more about what RAM is, types, and how it works.

Or if you already know all this, what you have to do is visit our guide on the best RAM memory on the market

Also consider changing CPUs (full refresh)

And of course, if your team is old enough, you won't be able to do too much for it. Test if an SSD drive improves its performance, otherwise your performance problems will continue as much as you can optimize the system with these tips.

You have to know what type of motherboard we have to see if it is viable to update the processor. For example, there are users who mount Intel Xeon LGA 1366 on x58 motherboards to take advantage of their power. The cost price of these processors on Ebay or Aliexpress is low and you can extend the life of your PC. It is also necessary to assess whether upgrading to a new platform implies buying new RAM and whether the other components are compatible.

Many users who have bought an i7 or i5 just by buying a graphics card will improve the gaming experience.

We also recommend the following items:

If you can think of any other method to improve the performance of a PC, write us in the comments. At least, we hope that these here help you.