How speed up your old Windows 10 laptop

Windows 10 is now officially an end-of-life product per Microsoft. However, it still remains very popular owing to better support for older hardware, much less bloat than Windows 11, and it’s also perceived as being less intrusive thanks to the lack of built-in AI features like CoPilot.

If you are on an old machine and are looking for means to speed up your Windows 10 install, here are some tips that can help!

Clear unnecessary startup programs

Open Task Manager by either hitting Ctrl+Alt+Del or by right-clicking on the TaskBar and selecting Task Manager. In this app, open the Startup tab and sort apps by whether they’re enabled or disabled.

The first thing you need to do here is disable all apps that don’t need to start up with your PC. Do this by right-clicking on each app and then disabling it. If you don’t know what an app does, you can search for the app name for more information.

Beside each entry you’ll also see a ‘Startup Impact’ indicator, which will also help you quickly determine which apps you want to prune.

This step should dramatically speed up your boot process and overall Windows performance if a bunch of startup apps were slowing your system down.

Making space

Windows, or any operating system for that matter, works best with some free space to use as a buffer. If your HDD (replace it at once) or SSD is full, clearing up some space will speed up your system a bit.

First use Disk Cleanup by right-clicking on a drive and selecting Clean My Disk or Disk Cleanup. This will open a new list where you then select temporary files, temporary internet files, and Windows update cleanup for purging. If you haven’t done this in a while, you should get 20-30 GB of additional space to play around with.

You can also just uninstall apps that you’re not using or free up some space by deleting old downloads and data.

ALSO READ: Evolution of Windows operating system: How Microsoft created the world’s most popular OS

SSD and RAM upgrades

If you’re not using an SSD, get one immediately and install Windows on it for a massive performance boost. An SSD is basically a requirement for modern operating systems as they move a lot more data around than they used to. Installing Windows 10 on an HDD is a sure way of slowing your system down terribly.

While you’re at it, we’d also recommend upgrading your RAM if you have 8 GB or less. The PC will run fine on 8 GB RAM, but it’ll start slowing down if you play games or have a lot of open tabs.

Uninstall antivirus software

Windows 10 comes with a built-in and very effective antivirus program called Windows Defender. It’s far superior to most third-party anti-virus programs and will not slow your system down. While Windows 10 is marked as an end-of-life product, Defender will continue to get security updates till 2028, at which point you’re better off switching to Linux or a newer version of Windows anyway.

Third-party anti-virus suites like McAfee and Norton can negatively impact system performance while also being intrusive and less secure than the built-in option.

While you will be able to keep your Windows 10 system running for quite some time yet, we’d recommend switching operating systems if you’re not particularly tech savvy or are working with sensitive data. The OS is a decade old at this point and will no longer receive critical patches from Microsoft.