It almost seems inevitable that after you buy
a new computer, at some point it's going to slow down, start having weird issues, and just
generally not perform as well as it used to, but that doesn't have to be the case. So in this
video, I'm going to go over seven different ways you can potentially speed up your computer again
that are not ways that usually you hear about, like the typical, "oh, disable starting up
programs and uninstalling programs you don't use." We already know that. What about ways that not
many people think of at first? So starting off with number one, this one is probably going to
be surprising to a lot of people, and that is how to do a true restart of your computer. You
see, there's a feature in Windows called Fast Startup that I have mentioned in other videos,
where basically if you go and hit Shut Down your computer, thinking that's how to restart it,
and when you start it up, it'll just be fresh, that's not actually the case. When
you do a regular shutdown of Windows, as opposed to hitting a restart, it
actually does more of a hibernation, where it keeps things running by storing them
on the drive and then loading them back into memory once it boots up, so that it doesn't
have to restart everything from scratch. But if you're having weird issues with the
computer and you want to turn it off and on again to hopefully fix it, then just
shutting down will not actually restart everything potentially. So what you want
to do is instead hit actually restart, and that will completely clear out all the
stuff running and truly restart everything. And this actually means if you shut
down your computer every single night, it may not have actually done an actual shutdown
in a very long time. You can actually go into the Task manager and look at the uptime, and it will
tell you the last time you did a true restart. And for some people, it's a very long time, despite
thinking they were restarting it by shutting down. So anyway, to sum things up for this tip, if
your computer usually runs okay, but occasionally randomly slows down and kind of stays that way,
the first thing to try is to just go to the power button and actually click on restart, sometimes
that's all it takes. All right next up, number two is more of a way to identify a potential
issue, and that is to look in the Event Viewer. If your issue is that somewhat regularly, or maybe
even randomly, you start to have the same issue, whether it's some kind of crash, or Windows
freezes or goes to a black screen for a second, something like that, it may be that
something is crashing in the background. But a lot of times there might not be
any kind of error message that pops up, so it'll just seem like Windows is being weird.
But what you can actually do is look in the event Viewer by just searching for event viewer in
the start menu, and then going to Windows Logs, and then System is where most of this will
be, and just looking through for errors most of the time. So what you want to do is if
you are having an issue like this, where it keeps happening recurringly, the next time
it happens, immediately go to the Event Viewer and check the latest entries and see if there is
something that is showing up, and keep checking. And you might notice a pattern,
if it's the same thing every time, that could be an issue. Now you can
totally ignore the information entries, and even the yellow exclamation mark warning
ones aren't a problem in themselves. So you can usually ignore those too, unless
you do notice that it's the same warning that happens the same time as these weird
issues all the time, then it could be related. But if you aren't noticing any specific
issues, don't worry about these warnings. Every computer is going to have these,
even if everything is fine. But those error ones with the red symbol are
the main ones you want to look for, and usually that means something has crashed.
Now again, this is not necessarily a huge deal. It's possible that you'll see a couple
random errors that occur, I don't know, every couple days, and you didn't even really
notice because it just happened in the background, Windows restarted it, and it was fine again.
But if you do notice a recurring freezing or something, and you go and every time you look
in the event viewer, it's the same error that keeps coming up, then you can look in the info
about that error in the box below, and basically just copy and paste it into Google and see what
this thing is that could be causing the issue. So while this isn't a way to in itself
speed up the computer, this should hopefully point you in the right direction, or
potentially tell you exactly what is crashing, and lead you to the solution that will. So to
summarize this one, if you notice any recurring issues that keeps happening, that's probably
the best case to look in the Event Viewer. If it's just some random crash that happens every
once in a blue moon and never happens again, well things just crash sometimes, so
it's not necessarily going to help you if it never happens again anyway.
But it's still good to know about, should be really helpful with
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all that being said, let's continue. All right next up, this is a tip that can directly speed up
your computer potentially. And that is if you have an SSD, which I think most people do these days,
if that drive is starting to get full, especially if it's very close to being full, then you could
speed it up by clearing out some space on it. And the reason for this is how SSDs write data,
and I'll give you a super quick crash course. Basically, when an SSD goes to write data,
even if it has to write a very small amount, there is a minimum amount that can be
written at once. And it is written to a set of storage cells called a block. So even
if you're only saving a text file with one single character in it, it still is going
to write a block's worth of data minimum. If the SSD has a lot of free space, then it's
not a problem, it has plenty of choices for where it could write this data. But if the SSD is
starting to get kind of full, there might not be any completely empty blocks left, and they might
all have some amount of data that are partially filled. So in this case, if the SSD wants to add
data to one of these partially filled blocks, what it has to first do is copy all the existing data
out of there onto a cache, then erase the whole thing, and then write the new data along with
the cache data it just copied out, back into it. So it's not like it can just add data onto a
partially filled block, it has to copy it out, erase it, and then put it all back in. So
obviously this takes a lot longer than if there's plenty of completely empty blocks, and it could
just write to it without having to copy it all out first. Now sometimes it can be tough to figure
out exactly what is taking up space on your drive. So I would recommend a free program, it's
free for personal use, called WizTree, it's my personal favorite at the moment. And
basically it will show you what percentage of the drive is taken up by different
directories, and you can actually have this tree view map thing, where it'll
show every file as a block basically, so you can visually see what types of
files in what location are what size. So if you see some massive block somewhere,
you might look at that and say, "Oh my gosh, there's this random video file for a movie I
downloaded one time, never watched it, and I don't need this. I can delete it and free up how
many gigabytes," something like that. So a disk analyzer like that is definitely one of the best
ways to figure out what's taking up all the space. Just be aware that there are some system
files that might potentially look really big, like the "hiberfil", it's like the hibernation
file. If you don't know what a file is, maybe look it up first and don't just go
and delete it without knowing what it is, that usually is not the best idea. But
still, this tool should come in handy. All right next up number four, this is a quick
and simple one. And that is if your computer has a lot of dust in it, then dust it out. You
see, if there's a lot of dust in your computer, like a visible layer especially, it's
going to get on stuff like the heat sink for your CPU that is meant to cool it
and impede that cooling performance. Which could lead to the CPU getting to its maximum
temperature without getting to its maximum performance and having to throttle down,
which could really slow down the computer. If it's a desktop, it's probably easier to
clean out, make sure you unplug the computer, and then you can just dust it out
by opening the case. On a laptop, it might be a little bit more difficult,
usually there's not really a easy way to open these up. So probably the best thing
is just take out the battery and then blow some canned air into whatever vents you see,
and hopefully that'll clear some stuff out. So yeah, if you've had a computer for
a while and you've never looked inside, that could potentially be an issue. Okay next
up is a potentially more extreme measure, but that is to reset the PC. Now this is
totally different from restarting the PC. Windows has a feature called resetting
that basically is a factory reset. If you go into the start menu and just search
reset, you should see a thing comes up that says, reset this PC. And you'll be presented with
two different ways for how you might want to do this. You can keep all your current
files, which will basically keep anything in your documents folder, your other libraries
like videos, whatever, should keep all those. Or the other option is to just wipe the
whole computer clean. I think in most cases, keeping the files is fine. Though keep in
mind, if you have program settings and stuff, I believe it might still delete those. So it'll
keep your documents and stuff, but any programs you have installed will be erased. So if you
are going to do this, even if you select to keep all your files, definitely do a backup
of anything you care about first, either way. I would say doing a reset is almost as good as
just doing a complete reformat of the drive, which wipes literally everything and you
reinstall from scratch. Though that is a lot more complicated. Now there is one
situation where I definitely recommend reformatting instead. And that's if you have a
really bad virus on the computer, that's like a deep-seated Trojan or rootkit or something
that you're really having trouble removing. In that case, I don't know if resetting
would be the best option. In that case, I probably would do a complete reformat. And
in that case, you might have to ask someone who knows their way around computers, or ask a
professional. Because potentially if there is a really nasty virus, it could survive
a reset if it's really sophisticated. So reformatting would probably be the
best way to be sure. But if the issue is not a virus and it's just slowing down in
general, resetting could be potentially really useful. Just keep in mind, you will need to
reinstall any programs, which might be kind of a pain. All right onto number six, this
is another really simple one, thankfully. And that is to disable visual effects. This
could potentially make a big difference depending on the power of your computer.
The easiest way to get to this is to search the start menu for this: sysdm.cpl.
Then in this window that comes up, look in the Advanced tab, and then under
Performance, click the Settings button. And then you'll have a few different
options. You can optimize for visual quality, but in this case, the one you probably want
to select is Adjust For Performance. And this will basically just disable any
visual effects in here. Now you could also ask it to automatically adjust what
settings based on the computer's power. It might do a good job, but if you still find
that it's slow, maybe try adjusting it for performance. And then if you notice it really
speeds up, just keep it on that. Or you could just try randomly disabling some effects and
see what makes a difference there. Though just keep in mind, this is probably going to make
the biggest difference on lower end computers. If you have a computer that's really fast already,
this probably isn't going to make it any faster. All right finally, onto number seven, which is
check your computer's power plan. By default, Windows will have it set to balanced, which is
fine for most people. It won't limit the power of your computer, but if there's nothing
really going on, then it will lower the frequency of your processor because it's not
really in use and that'll use less power. However, if you do want to ensure that you
have the maximum performance all the time, then you can set it to high performance, which
keeps the CPU at its max frequency all the time, which means that it could potentially increase
some of the response time for running programs and that stuff, because it doesn't have
to take the CPU out of a sleep state, even though it's not really going to make
a huge difference, might make a little bit. But also check to make sure that your
computer isn't in low power mode if you don't want it there. If you're using a laptop
and you want to maximize the battery life, then yeah, you could keep it on
that. But just keep in mind that the battery saver mode will lower the maximum
performance of the computer to save battery. So it likely will be noticeably slower than if you
had it on one of the other ones. Just keep in mind of course, that the trade-off if you have it on
high performance is that it will use more power, more battery if you're on that. But if
it's a plugged in desktop or something, and you're not super concerned with power
consumption, I just keep mine on High performance. So those are the seven tips, but I do want
to mention a couple of myths that are out there that are not going to help you speed
up the computer. The first are these registry cleaner programs. The registry is not going
to slow down your computer, even if there's these unused entries that these programs claim to
clear out, that's not going to make a difference. And the other one is defragmenting your hard
drive, which is really old advice. Windows, for the past several versions, will
defragment any hard drives in the background automatically, so you don't
have to do it. And if you have an SSD, then you don't want to defragment it at
all, because it won't make a difference, and it could potentially lower the life of
your SSD just because of the way they work. So cleaning the registry, defragmenting any
drives, don't worry about that. Now finally though, even though those were some tips
that are unexpected, still probably the best way to speed up your computer is to
reduce any programs that are running in the background and starting up with Windows.
Usually that probably is the biggest culprit. So I did make another video that I'll have
pop out, that shows you how to find all the different ways that hidden startup programs
might be hiding. Because sometimes they're just like running in the background and
they might not even have a user interface, but they're still running, slowing things down, so I'll have that video pop out.
Anyway, if you enjoyed this video, definitely give it a big thumbs up and let me
know down in the comments if any of these worked, if you knew all of these, or maybe
if there's a tip that you think would also be helpful to people. And thanks
again to Mine for sponsoring the video. Be sure to visit SayMine.com now so you
can start reclaiming your own data too, the link is also in the description. If you
want to keep watching, I'll put links to two different videos. One is the one for how to
find all the startup programs and disable them. The other one is how to fix Windows
corruption in a bunch of different ways. If that could potentially be your issue, you can just click on those. So thanks so much
for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.
