Slow Computer? Here are a few steps to take that'll optimize your PC to work faster

The Problem:

Does your PC take a long ass time to boot? does it hang a lot and take a few mins before you can even refresh it. Well, usually, the main cause of this is multiple programs and services set to boot on startup and constantly running in the background, eating up that precious memory of yours. Thing is, you probably don't need most of them to run in background all the time, unless when you use it.

So how do we fix it?

Well it's pretty simple, just follow the following few steps to make sure you don't have any unnecessary stuff running around in your PC and to keep it well maintained.

note: my windows and overall theme is dark because of my theme and so the screenshots may differ from how they'll look on your PC.

Step 1: Disable startup programs

If you're on windows 8/8.1/10 : Right click on the taskbar and open the task manager, there should be a "startup" tab, click on it. Here you'll find a  list of programs that run at startup, in which you need to disable everything that isn't necessary to start when your OS starts up. Note that you will still be able to use these apps, you are simply disabling their functionality to start automatically when windows boots up:

disable apps by right clicking on them and clicking on "disable"

In case you're on windows 7 or earlier, you'll need a different approach to display the startup apps console:

Press win+r to open the run dialog (or you can search "run" search bar), once open the dialog box, type in "msconfig" without quotes and it should open a window in which you'll need to click on the startup tab and follow the same procedure as above to disable the programs, and skip the reboot if prompted.

the startup tab should be present here for windows 7 and below.

Step 2: Stop startup services

once you're done with disabling the useless startup apps, the next step would be to disable the unnecessary startup services. To do that, open the run dialog box by pressing win+r or searching for the run app on your PC. Then type in "services.msc" without quotes and hit enter, that should open a window similar to the screenshot below:

This is the "services" app which allows us to start, stop and configure services. Now we need to prevent certain services from starting up when windows boots up, be careful as we do not want to stop any important system services, so don't go disabling any services that you don't know about.

Carefully browse each name and also look at the description on the left to make sure you know which app uses the service. If you find a service that doesn't have to start at boot or if it belongs to some app that can start the service when the app starts(eg. bluestacks) then you should right click on the service, click on properties, and change the startup type to "manual" (disabling it isn't a good idea), click on apply and close the window. Repeat this with all the services you don't need at startup.

choose "manual" startup type from the dropdown menu and press the apply button

Step 3: Clear temporary files

Next thing we gotta do is delete the temporary files, this should be done often because temporary files tend to pile up and take huge spaces over time. To do that we need to open the run dialog yet again by pressing win+r (or by searching for the run app). Once it is open, we'll need to delete temp files from two locations, to access the first location, type"%temp%" without quotes in the run dialog and press enter. The user's temporary files folder should open up. you need to delete all the files and folders in there. Next, open the run dialog again and this time type in "temp" (without quotes) and hit enter, this should open the windows temp folder, delete all the files and folders here too:

delete everything in the user's %temp% folder

delete everything in the windows temp folder 

Step 4: Uninstall useless/unnecessary programs

The next thing you need to do is make sure that you don't have any malware/bloatware (useless software) installed on your PC. To do that, go to control panel>programs and features>uninstall or change a program. Once there, slowly browse through each of your programs and uninstall anything that is unnecessary or useless.

Step 5: make sure your HDD is working fine

Your PC could also be malfunctioning or slow because of problems in your HDD partitions. To check that, right click on any partition and go to properties:

Once you've opened the properties window, click on the tools tab and click on optimize, this will open a new window where you can see the current status of all your partitions. You need to do 3 things here, first check if the current status of all the partitions is OK, if it's not then go to that partion's properties>tools and click on "check" to check and fix the errors (hopefully they'll be fixed or your HDD's on it's deathbed). The next thing to do is check your partitions' fragmentation status under the current status tab in the "optimize drives window", if it's around 10-15% or higher for any of them, you should defragment the drive manually by selecting it and clicking on optimize. Finally, make sure that scheduled optimization is "on" in the "optimize drives" window.

And we're done

Reboot your PC and it should work faster, cleaner and more efficiently.

If you still face problems, you might wanna make sure you're using good hardware (processor/ram/hdd etc.) and your drivers are up to date. If you're using decent hardware and you did all the above steps but your PC is still lagging and acting extremely slow then you might wanna consider getting a fresh clean install of your OS or resetting windows.

I hope some of this stuff helped you and your computer is working much better now.

Be sure to share your views, ideas and feedback in the comments and feel free to ask any questions whether it is regarding the topic or even if it's totally unrelated. I'll be sure to respond to every query. Also, please do tell me if I made any mistakes or typos so I could fix em.

And that's all for today~