Speeding up Windows 10

Windows 10 can feel a little sluggish if you have been using a fairly peppy system under Win 7 or 8.1

Here are a few things you can do to make it feel less sluggish.

first click on the notifications icon in the taskbar

Now click the "All Settings" button

I know, it's not the most intuitive place to look, but click on "Ease of Access"

Now click "Other Options"

At the top you will see this switch for play animations in Windows... turn it off.

Your start menu will come up as soon as you click it now, instead of feeling like the computer needs to wake up from it's nap first.


Now there is another place where animations that are not really necessary can be switched off. This is pretty much mandatory for old systems that have been upgraded to Win 10.

open up the System Control Panel (from the old control panel, not the new metro/modern system)

Click on "Advanced System Settings"

Click the first "Settings" button under Performance

Uncheck any animation features you don't care about.

Now this one is something I've done for every Windows install for ages, but not everyone knows it:

While you are in here, click the "Advanced" tab and click the "Change" button

Windows by default will have Automatically manage paging file checked, uncheck that box.

Now look at the recommended size near the bottom of this window, that will be different for your computer than it is for mine, but highlight one of your drives and enter the recommended amount of virtual memory (AKA page file, swap) space in both the initial size and maximum size.

Here you can see that I had a largish virtual memory space on my F: drive previously, but I have also added some space in the recommended amount to my C: drive. C: is only a 128GB SSD, so I had put this swap space on F: (a standard laptop HDD) initially, and that was fine, but putting some swap on the SSD really perked it up. I had to move the C:/Windows/Installer folder to one of my other drives to make some room (a lot of room) on C: to make this even possible.

If you have additional tips add them to the comments.