Three PC Performance Tips

There are numerous books, eBooks, social media, online and printed magazine articles, and posts on how to improve the performance of your PC desktop, laptop or tablet running Windows. Out of hundreds of examples, we are going to explore three little know tips on how to speed up your device.

These enhancements involve a couple of Settings examples and one Control Panel tip. There are no Yes or Okay buttons to click, simple make the change and its automatically saved. So, lets get started.

This is for PCs and similar devices running Windows. Screenshots are for Windows 10.

Adjusting Your Restart Settings

First, we are going to open the Settings dialog for changing our Sign-in Privacy option to improve performance. There are three ways to open Settings on your device:

1. Navigate to the Settings app by clicking the Start button and then select the Settings option (the cog wheel) in lower left of the Start menu
2. Type in Settings in the Cortana search bar, located in lower left hand of your screen, then click on the Settings app in upper left hand of the screen
3. Click the Start button, then click on the Settings tile (the cog wheel) on your display

Now, select the Accounts option. Refer to below image:

Next, select the Sign-in options. See below image:

Then, under the Privacy group, turn off the slider for Use my sign-in info to automatically finish setting up my device and reopen my apps after an update or restart. See following image:

Tweaking Your Power Plan

By default, Windows 10 uses the Balanced power usage plan that can sometimes hamper performance. We can increase the CPU speed by choosing another plan through the Control Panel.

First, type in Control Panel in the Cortana search bar, located in lower left hand of your screen.

Next, click on the app in the upper left hand of your screen. You will see a similar screen as displayed below.

Note! Your screen may be different depending on how the Control Panel is configured.

Now, select the Power Options. Refer to below image:

Then, select the High Performance option. We are not overclocking the CPU, that is a different option outside of Windows. See following image:

Recovering From a Sudden Slowdown

If your PC is suddenly slowing down, there are two culprits to look at, Microsoft updates and Malware.

First culprit may be Microsoft updates. Open the Settings app by one of the three methods listed under Adjusting Your Restart Settings at the beginning of this post.

Now, select the Update & Security option. Refer to below image:

Next, select View update history. See below image:

Your Microsoft updates will be displayed. Now, search online by the update’s Knowledge Base (KB) number (it’s in brackets at the end of each update title) to see if anyone else is having problems about the update from your browser results, PC news sites, forums or social media posts. To view infomation abou the update, just click the blue link for that KB number.

If lots of people are having trouble since that update, then you may need to uninstall it (click on Uninstall updates blue link at top of the screen and find the KB number) or wait for Microsoft to send a fix. See following image:

Second culprit may be Malware. You can run a free Malware scan using Malwarebytes. Click here to install and scan your device using Malwarebytes.

I Would Like to Hear From You

Please feel free to leave a comment. I would love hearing from you. Do you have a computer or smart device tech question? I will do my best to answer your inquiry. Please mention the device, app and version that you are using. To help us out, you can send screenshots of your data related to your question.