How To Speed Up Your PC For Free – Faster PC in 30 Minutes

Is your computer or laptop running slow? Is it way slower than it was when you first bought it? Do you think it would be better to buy a new one or upgrade it, but you don’t want to spend money on it? Are you wondering how to speed up your PC for free?

If so, you are at the right place.

Unfortunately, aging is the nature of the tech industry – It is normal and it happens to everyone. Just imagine if your PC could perform the same way you bought it for 100 years, how the heck would all the tech companies make money?!

But fortunately there is a couple of simple things you can do TODAY to speed up your PC or laptop.

The first one is don’t spill your coffee on your keyboard – It has been scientifically proven that spilling a coffee onto you keyboard can cause severe malfunctions to your hardware.

That was a joke.

But seriously, don’t.

We have actual advice for you, don’t worry.

Alright, lets get serious. We put together some useful tips that will actually help you to speed up your computer a lot and FOR FREE.

1. Disable Start-up Programs & Services

Over the course of the time you’ve probably installed various programs in your PC. Some of them are enabled to start themselves up with windows. If you don’t shut them down manually, they will keep using memory and therefore keep slowing you computer down.

To disable start-up programs simply press ‘Ctrl + Alt + Delete’ and click on ‘Task Manager’. Then click the ‘Startup’ button:

Then simply disable all programs that you think might be slowing your PC down. For me it would be Discord, Skype, Steam, etc.:

And don’t worry, you can still use the programs whenever you want, you will just need to start them up manually. Remember, you don’t need all of them running at the same time.

Once you are done with the startup programs, go ahead and search ‘Services’ in your windows search bar and then click on it. That will bring you here:

These are also programs which have been installed as services and are also starting up with windows. To disable them from starting up, right click on those that say ‘Automatic’ in the ‘Startup Type’ Column, then click on ‘Properties’ and then change the startup type to ‘Manual’ :

Keep in mind, you should be more careful when disabling these programs (services), as a lot of them have their purpose in your system. So don’t be mindlessly disabling every program on the list, only disable the ones you are 100% sure you don’t need to be running in the background.

2. Disable Windows Animations

To disable windows animations simply go to ‘Control Panel’, click on ‘System’ and then ‘advanced system settings’, that will bring you here:

Simply click on ‘Settings’ in the performance section and select the ‘Adjust for best performance’ option:

This isn’t something that’s going to improve the speed of your computer drastically, but every little bit helps!

3. Run a Disk Cleanup

To run a disk cleanup simply search ‘Disk Cleanup’ in your search bar and press enter. That will open up a little window and lets you select a disk you want to run the cleanup on. For the sake of this article lets choose the C: disk. That will bring you here:

I highlighted the ones that are safe on my PC, but you are gonna get different options. You always want to delete the ‘temporary files’ on your disk. As for the others, I am not gonna go over every single one, but the safe thing to do is to google the ones you are not sure about.

As for the one I didn’t highlight – Downloads – perhaps you might put all your downloads on flash disk and don’t need them in your PC, so you can delete them all and free up a lot of space (4.5 GB in my case).

4. Scan For Viruses

If your PC is constantly running slower than usual and you can’t find out why, there possibly may be some hidden viruses and malware which are using your computer resources.

To get rid of them, open up your antivirus software and run a scan for viruses. It shouldn’t be a problem for you to find out how to do that. After the scan is over, you should be good to go.

If you don’t have an antivirus software however, there is a plenty of good antivirus softwares out there, both paid and free. You can also get a free version of a paid one.

Some of the good ones are: Bitdefender, Avast, Eset,

Keep in mind, you should run these kinds of scans every once in a while as a prevention and always have your antivirus software running whenever you go online. There are thousands of ways to get you PC infected. Better safe than sorry!

You may also like: How Much RAM Do You Need For Gaming – 4GB, 8GB, 16GB or 32GB?

5. Uninstall Programs You Don’t Use

Everybody has programs in their PC they don’t use. These can easily pile up and occupy a huge amount of space on your hard disk. For that reason you should take some time and go through all of your programs and delete the ones you are not going to use anymore.

it is very easy to do and won’t take you that long.

Go to Control Panel > Programs and Features, and then go ahead and uninstall all unnecessary programs:

6. Keep Your Computer’s Software Updated

Windows and other software companies are constantly innovating and releasing new updates that are supposed to improve the overall performance of your system.

By not updating your windows or graphic drivers you might be indirectly causing your system to run slower.

To check if your windows is up to date, simply type in your search bar ‘Check for Updates’ and press enter. Doing so will bring you here:

If you update your system regularly, you will get the ‘you’re up to date’ note at the top and if you want to check for any recent updates click on the ‘Check for Updates’ button. Who would have guessed, right?

7. Check Your Power Plan

To make another step to achieve maximum possible speed of your PC, you need to switch your power plan to high performance. To do that, you need to go to Control panel > All control panel items > Power options. There, you will have three options to choose from:

• Balanced
• High Performance
• Power Saver

Select ‘High Performance’ and you should be good to go.

If you’re using laptop, only switch to a high performance mode when you have it connected to a charger. Otherwise, it will quickly drain your battery.

There you go. This shouldn’t take you more than 30 minutes to complete and you will be surprised how much can these simple things help. If you have any questions just drop them in the comment section below and I will be happy to help you out.

Oh, I almost forgot…Careful with the coffee!

Richard