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Tech Desk Ground Report: Why does your laptop start slowing down over time? When the laptop suddenly starts hanging or the loading wheel starts rotating during work from home, online studies or important office work, the entire work flow gets disturbed. Many people assume that the system is outdated as soon as the laptop becomes slow and immediately run to the service center to upgrade the RAM or SSD. The ground reality is that in most cases it is not the hardware that is faulty, but the digital clutter accumulated in the operating system, unwanted apps running silently in the background and wrong system settings are the real reasons for its slowness. If you customize the inbuilt settings of Windows in the right way, then without spending a single rupee, your old laptop will also start running as smooth and fast as new.
Stop arbitrary startup apps: Free up RAM as soon as you boot As soon as you press the power button of the laptop, along with Windows, dozens of such software become active in the background which you do not need at all at that time. Spotify, Skype, Steam, Adobe Updater, and many third-party cloud drives take up RAM and CPU in the background as soon as the system starts up. To fix this, first open Task Manager by pressing Ctrl + Shift + Esc simultaneously on the keyboard. After this go to the ‘Startup Apps’ tab given above. Here you will see all the apps that start as soon as the system turns on. Right-click on apps that are not needed immediately and select ‘Disable’. This will reduce the boot time of the laptop to half and will reduce the load on the system.
Digital cleaning of the system: completely wipe out cache and temporary files Weeks and months of Internet browsing and software use accumulate thousands of temporary files in Windows, which slow down the hard drive’s indexing and read-write speeds. Use easy shortcuts to delete these files. Open the Run box by pressing Windows + R on the keyboard, type temp in it and press Enter. Delete all the files in the opened folder by selecting them with Ctrl + A. Repeat the same process again and enter %temp% in the run box and delete all the junk files present there. Finally, by typing prefetch in the run box, clean the files of the folder that opens. ‘Skip’ the files which are running in the background at that time and are not deleted.
Storage Sense and Disk Cleanup: Give C: drive some breathing space Windows operating system needs at least 15 to 20 percent free space in its primary C drive (C: Drive) for smooth functioning and virtual caching. When C drive turns completely red, the system starts freezing. Type ‘Disk Cleanup’ in the Windows search bar, select C drive and click on ‘Clean up system files’. Here, tick the old Windows Update files, Recycle Bin and heavy files like thumbnails to permanently erase them. Apart from this, go to laptop settings and click on ‘Storage’ under ‘System’ and turn on ‘Storage Sense’. This feature will automatically remove unnecessary junk files from time to time in future.
Customize visual effects: do not put load on weak hardware The beautiful animations, window opening transitions, and shadow effects that appear in Windows 10 and Windows 11 look nice, but if your laptop has 4GB or 8GB of RAM and no dedicated graphics card, these effects are heavy on the processor. To increase speed, press Windows + R and type sysdm.cpl and enter. In the window that opens, go to the ‘Advanced’ tab and click on the ‘Settings’ button below ‘Performance’. Here select the option ‘Adjust for best performance’. If you don’t want the text to look blurry, leave ‘Smooth edges of screen fonts’ and ‘Show thumbnails instead of icons’ ticked from the list below and turn off all the other fancy animations and hit ‘Apply’.
Optimize virtual memory and pagefile size yourself In a laptop with low RAM, when many tabs or apps are opened simultaneously, the RAM becomes full and the system starts hanging. In such a situation, Windows uses a part of the hard disk or SSD as virtual RAM. To optimize it, go to the ‘Advanced’ tab of System Properties (sysdm.cpl), open Performance Settings and click on the ‘Advanced’ tab again. Click on ‘Change’ in front of ‘Virtual memory’ below. Untick ‘Automatically manage paging file size’, select ‘Custom size’ and set the initial size (1.5 times the RAM) and maximum size (3 times the RAM) in MB based on your existing physical RAM. This trick prevents the laptop from suddenly getting stuck during multitasking.
Make these important changes in power mode and background privacy settings Often laptops are unable to utilize the full capacity of their processor in order to save battery. To always run the laptop at high performance, go to the ‘Power & battery’ section in Settings and change the ‘Power mode’ from ‘Balanced’ or ‘Battery saver’ to ‘Best performance’. Apart from this, go to the ‘Apps’ and ‘Privacy & security’ menu of the settings and immediately uninstall those unnecessary bloatware apps which came pre-installed when you bought the laptop and which you never use.
Delete heavy browser files and give the system a fresh restart If your laptop gets stuck while accessing the internet mainly on Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge, then the problem may be with the browser. Go to the browser’s three-dot menu, open ‘Extensions’ and remove any add-ons you don’t need. Clear cache and cookies by going to ‘Clear browsing data’ in browser settings and keep ‘Memory Saver’ feature enabled in settings. After applying all these settings correctly, restart the laptop completely once instead of putting it in sleep mode. This entire process will refresh your laptop’s operating system and you will see a significant improvement in its speed without any additional hardware.