Speed up Windows 11: 10 performance tricks that actually work

Every app that launches at boot steals CPU and RAM before you've even opened a browser tab. Cutting that list down is the single fastest free win you can make today, often shaving 30 to 60 seconds off boot time and freeing memory for actual work.

1. Right-click the Taskbar and open Task Manager, then click the Startup Apps tab.
2. Look at the Startup Impact column. Anything rated High that you don't need immediately at login is a candidate for disabling.
3. Right-click an entry and select Disable. Spotify, Discord, Teams, OneDrive, gaming launchers: all fair game unless you use them constantly.
4. Alternatively, go to Settings > Apps > Startup and use the toggles there.
5. Restart and notice the difference.

Windows 11 sometimes defaults to a power-saving plan that deliberately throttles your CPU, which is fine on battery but maddening when your laptop is plugged in. Switching to Balanced or High Performance gives the processor permission to run at full speed.

1. Open Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Power Options.
2. Select Balanced or High Performance. On a desktop, High Performance is the obvious choice.
3. On a laptop, also click the battery icon in the taskbar and drag the slider to Best Performance when plugged in.
4. For the maximum boost on a desktop, open PowerShell as administrator and run: powercfg -duplicatescheme e9a42b02-d5df-448d-aa00-03f14749eb61, then select Ultimate Performance in Power Options.

Animations, shadows, transparency, and Mica effects look great in screenshots. In practice they eat GPU and CPU resources, and on older or lower-spec machines the UI can feel genuinely laggy as a result. Killing them makes Windows feel snappier immediately.

1. Press Win+R, type sysdm.cpl, press Enter, then go to Advanced > Performance > Settings.
2. Choose Adjust for best performance to disable everything at once, or pick Custom and manually uncheck animations and shadow effects while keeping font smoothing.
3. Click Apply.
4. Go to Settings > Personalization > Colours and turn off Transparency Effects.
5. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Visual Effects and disable Animation Effects there too.

Accumulated temporary files and cached app data force Windows to sift through gigabytes of outdated rubbish every time it looks for something. Clearing them out frees disk space and can meaningfully improve responsiveness, especially on machines with smaller drives.

1. Press Win+R, type %temp%, and delete everything in the folder that opens. Skip any files that say they're in use.
2. Press Win+R again, type temp, and clear that folder too.
3. Open Settings > System > Storage > Temporary Files. Check all the categories listed and click Remove Files.
4. For individual apps, go to Settings > Apps > Installed Apps, click an app, then Advanced Options. If a Clear Cache button appears, use it.

Storage Sense quietly removes temp files, old Recycle Bin contents, and stale Downloads on a schedule you set. It's the low-effort version of manual cleanup and stops disk bloat from creeping back between your occasional tidy-up sessions.

1. Go to Settings > System > Storage and toggle Storage Sense on.
2. Click Storage Sense to expand the options. Set the run frequency to weekly if you want a sensible default.
3. Configure how long files sit in the Recycle Bin and Downloads folder before automatic deletion. Thirty days is a reasonable middle ground.
4. Optionally enable the OneDrive option to free up space from locally cached cloud files.

Outdated GPU and chipset drivers are a quietly common cause of slowdowns. Microsoft also ships performance patches through Windows Update regularly, and skipping them means you're running on an unoptimised base. Five minutes of updates can fix sluggishness that's been annoying you for months.

1. Go to Settings > Windows Update and click Check for Updates. Install everything available and restart.
2. Open Device Manager, right-click your GPU, network adapter, and chipset, and choose Update Driver.
3. For the freshest driver versions, go to your GPU manufacturer's website directly (NVIDIA, AMD, or Intel) rather than relying on Windows Update alone.
4. Check your PC or motherboard manufacturer's support page for chipset and firmware updates too.

Pre-installed trial software and manufacturer bundles don't just take up space. They run background processes, schedule update tasks, and periodically spike your CPU when you least want it. Removing what you don't use is a clean, permanent speed gain.

1. Go to Settings > Apps > Installed Apps and sort by Size or Last Used.
2. Uninstall anything you haven't touched in months: trial antivirus suites, promotional apps, and OEM utilities you don't rely on.
3. For faster batch removal, open Terminal and use: winget uninstall <AppName>.
4. After uninstalling, clear the temp folder again to catch leftover files.

Malware and rogue background services silently eat CPU, RAM, and bandwidth. A full scan plus a quick audit of what's running at startup can recover a surprising amount of performance on a machine that's felt inexplicably slow for a while.

1. Open Windows Security > Virus & Threat Protection and run a Full Scan.
2. If you want a second opinion, run the free Microsoft Safety Scanner separately.
3. Press Win+R, type services.msc, and look through services set to Automatic. Disable non-essential third-party services you recognise but don't need running constantly.
4. In Task Manager > Processes, sort by CPU and Memory to spot unexpected consumers and end any processes you can confidently identify as unnecessary.

If Windows takes ages to reach the desktop, the culprit is often Fast Startup being off, the BIOS trying to boot from the wrong drive first, or RAM running below its rated speed. Each fix takes under five minutes and boot times can improve dramatically.

1. Open Control Panel > Power Options > Choose what the power buttons do, and tick Turn on fast startup. Save changes.
2. Restart into BIOS (press Delete or F2 at startup, depending on your board) and confirm your SSD is set as the first boot device.
3. While in BIOS, enable the XMP or EXPO profile for your RAM so it runs at its advertised speed rather than the default 2133 MHz.
4. Check your motherboard or laptop manufacturer's support page for a BIOS/UEFI firmware update and apply it if available.

Software tweaks have a ceiling. If your machine has less than 16 GB of RAM or still boots from a mechanical hard drive, no amount of settings changes will make it feel truly fast. An SSD upgrade in particular is transformative: boot times drop from minutes to seconds.

1. Open Task Manager > Performance > Memory. If usage sits consistently above 80% during normal work, more RAM is the answer. Sixteen gigabytes is the practical minimum for Windows 11 today.
2. Check Task Manager > Performance > Disk. If it shows a hard disk drive rather than SSD, that's your biggest bottleneck.
3. Clone your existing drive to an SSD using free tools (Macrium Reflect is a solid option). Then swap the drive and verify the SSD appears as the boot device in BIOS.
4. After installation, open Defragment and Optimize Drives and confirm your SSD shows TRIM as the scheduled operation, not defrag.
5. For laptops, check iFixit for your specific model before buying RAM or an SSD. Many ultrabooks have soldered RAM that can't be changed.