Microsoft Windows 10 or Windows 11 slow to start or slow running how to solve

How to speed up windows 10 & 11

Introduction

This is my view on speeding up windows, there are many websites with various lists on what to do, Here I plan to list the ones I have used, explain how they work and attempt to describe what is happening.

Why me

The real world experience comes from running my own company https://optimisedcomputing.co.uk/.

Which is a local computer repair service in Hereford, many a call is about speeding up a slow PC and being an affordable and able to come to small business or home user and do the work in person has enable me to gather these tips.

Fast Startup and PreFetch (SuperFetch).

These are terms given to features to speed up Windows but are designed for computers with mechanical hard drives (HDD) and are not needed if you're using anything like solid state storage (SSDS) or Non-Volatile Memory Express.

What is it ?

Fast Startup, Is ment to speed up your PC by changing your PC to not really fully shutdown, the current state is saved so it can be reload from that point, rather than loading each individual item needed at startup as the old mechanical hard drive (HDD) would have some time saved of not jumping around to find all the files required. This problem does not exist on modern drives, and this solution comes with side effects, which problems can be cleared by restarting your PC, as it's never a fresh startup.. In the face of the modern drives (SSD/NVME), this overhead slows the PC down as there is no lost time seeking files, so you can have a fresh computer on startup every time by turning this off.

PreFetch (Windows name Super Fetch or Sys Main) is precisely what it says. Windows decides the most commonly used programs and starts loading them up in the background, so when you need them, they are already loaded, but now you're waiting for all these programs to load up and take resources, and you don't need them. A modern storage drive (SSD/NVME) is so much quicker to respond to; you can turn this off and not lose time and resources of the program windows deciding what you might use.

How do you turn it OFF (or ON if you want to try it)?

Fast Startup Switch off how to, open Control Panel > All Control Panel Items > Power Options > System Settings

Screeshot of the control panel on how to disable fast startup

There is a administartor control needed at the top of the page called "Change Setting that are currently unavailable" if you don't have administrator access you can't change.

The option needs to be unticked called "Turn on fast startup(recommended)" then "Save Changes", best to restart your PC and now the change is active.

How to Switch off PreFetch ,

open Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services

or

open Control Panel > Windows Tools > Services

This option is only available if you have administrator access, so it's best to right-click and run as an administrator. A list of services will appear. The service name is "Superfetch" or "Sysman." Open this and set it to "Disabled." A PC restart is best to check that this change has taken effect.

Quick Note:

Microsoft renamed Superfetch to Sysman so depending on your window version you may have either.

e.g. SuperFetch

Screenshot for how to speed up windows disable SuperFetch

e.g. Sysman 

Screen shot how to speed up windows disable SysMain.

Setting PreFetch service to disabled

Deep dive into prefetch.

If you want to see the files that Windows was prefetching for you on each PC start-up, you can spy on the Windows prefetch directory.

The location is known as: %windir%\Prefetch.

If you don't have access, which is normal you can open up a command prompt as administrator and run the follow 2 commands.

icacls %windir%\Prefetch /setowner "%username%" /T

icacls %windir%\Prefetch /grant %username%:R  /T

The first command sets this location's owner to your username, and the second gives you read permissions.

If you need computer repair by a pc repairman near you in Herefordshire, always consider reaching out to us to answer that question How do I speed up Windows. https://optimisedcomputing.co.uk/support

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