Changing These 5 Settings Will Improve Windows Performance Instantly

Upgrading your hardware isn't the only solution to slow startup, poor performance, and a poor Windows experience. You can improve your computer's performance and responsiveness by making a few simple adjustments to your system settings.

Table of Contents

• 1. Optimize visual effects
• 2. Startup program management
• 3. Turn off background apps
• 4. Adjust power settings
• 5. Force the application to use the dedicated GPU

1. Optimize visual effects

Windows primarily offers two options for managing visual effects: Best performance and Best look.

As the name suggests, choosing the best skin option will enable attractive animations, effects, shadows, and transparencies, improving the visual appeal of the system. However, these effects can affect the performance of your PC, especially on low-end computers.

To improve the responsiveness of your Windows PC, you should optimize or disable these additional animation effects. To adjust them, follow these steps:

• Type "Performance" in Windows search and click Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows .
• Select Adjust for best performance if another option is selected there.

This will turn off additional effects but may reduce the visual appeal of the display. To balance appearance and performance, select Custom and manually enable or disable specific effects.

2. Startup program management

Many applications are automatically allowed to run at startup, during installation, or the first time you launch them.

As the number of these startup applications increases, your boot time will slow down, causing Windows to take longer to be ready to use. To improve performance, you should disable unnecessary applications from launching at startup.

To disable startup programs, follow these steps:

• Right-click the Start button and select Task Manager .
• Go to the Startup apps tab , where you will see a list of programs that run at startup.
• Right-click on any unnecessary program and select Disable .

3. Turn off background apps

Many applications, especially third-party antivirus programs and password managers, are allowed to run in the background even when you're not using them. While this can sometimes be helpful, having too many unnecessary applications running in the background can drain system resources, slowing down your computer's performance.

To increase system performance, you should turn off unnecessary background applications. Here's how to do it:

• Right-click the Start button and open Task Manager .
• Go to the Processes tab .
• Identify the resource-intensive processes in the Background processes column , right-click them and select End task .

By freeing up resources from background applications, your system will have more power to focus on essential tasks, ultimately improving performance.

4. Adjust power settings

By default, Windows power settings are set to a balanced profile, which provides a good mix of performance and energy efficiency.

This can help extend your laptop's battery life . However, it also limits the amount of power Windows uses, which affects performance. To remove this limitation, switch to high-performance power mode, which allows your hardware to operate at maximum capacity.

To adjust power mode settings in Windows, follow these steps:

• Type "Control Panel" in Windows search and open the Control Panel application .
• Go to Hardware and Sound > Power Options .
• Select High Performance if Balanced is currently selected.
• You can also click Change plan settings next to your selected plan for further customization.

Enabling High Performance will consume more battery, so keep your laptop plugged in while performing resource-intensive tasks.

5. Force the application to use the dedicated GPU

Even if you have a dedicated graphics card, some applications may still default to using the integrated GPU because they don't have access to the dedicated GPU. As a result, you may experience poor performance because the more powerful GPU is not being used.

For better performance, reserve your dedicated GPU for specific applications that require more resources.

• Open Settings and go to System > Display .
• Scroll down and click Graphics .
• Select an app by clicking Browse (for desktop apps) or selecting a Microsoft Store app.
• After adding the application, click on it in the list, select Options and select High performance to specify the dedicated GPU.

If you haven't done any of the tweaks mentioned above, try them out and you should notice an immediate performance improvement.

Keep in mind, though, that this isn't a one-time fix. You'll need to assign apps to your dedicated GPU when you install them, regularly remove unnecessary apps from your startup list, and regularly kill new background processes as needed.