Quick Steps to Speed up Your Computer

Created by Travis Knight, Modified on Thu, 16 Feb, 2023 at 12:37 PM by Travis Knight

Disable Game Mode
1. Right click on Start, select Settings, go to Gaming, disable the Xbox Game bar, the go to Game Mode on the left, also disable Game mode.
Disable Transparency
1. Right click on Start, select Settings, go to Personalization, click on Colors on the left, then disable Transparency Effects
Disable Shadows, animations, and visual effects.
1. Open the Start menu and search for “Adjust the appearance and Performance of Windows”. For the extreme effects, just select “Adjust for best performance”. For better performance with some useful feature enabled, select “Custom:” and I usually allow “Enable Peek”, “Save taskbar thumbnail previews”, “Show thumbnails instead of icons”, and “Smooth edges of screen fonts”. Then click Apply.
Change power settings to High Performance
1. Search for Control Panel in the start menu, open that up, and then select Power Options. If there isn’t a High Performance option, click on “Create a Power Plan” on the left-hand menu and then select High Performance and name it what you want.
Shut off Windows Tips and Tricks
1. Right click on Start, select Settings, then go to System, and then on the left-hand menu, select Notifications and Actions. Disable the notifications that you don’t need. Recommend disabling “Get tips, tricks, and suggestions as you use Windows”
Use OneDrive Files On-Demand.
1. Instead of letting OneDrive continually attempt to sync your files across devices, and set OneDrive to download files as you use them. Right click on the OneDrive icon in your system tray (bottom right corner of your screen usually, by the clock) then click on the gear at the top of the little window that opens and select Settings. In the Sync and backup section, click on Advanced Settings and then turn on Files On-Demand.
Turn off Search Indexing.
1. To get the maximum benefit in Windows 10, you need to turn indexing off completely, though it may show some improvement if you turn off indexing on specific folders. To do so, type services.msc in the Windows 10 search box and press Enter. The Services app appears. Scroll down to either Indexing Service or Windows Search in the list of services. Double-click it, and from the screen that appears, click Stop. Then reboot your machine. Your searches may be slightly slower, although you may not notice the difference. But you should get an overall performance boost. (You may need administrative access for this. Contact anyone in Computer Services for assistance with this step.)