Tip of the Week: 3 Ways to a Faster Boot Time

Your time is valuable, so you don’t have time to waste on waiting for your Windows operating system to boot up. In the interest of saving time, today’s tip will go over three ways to speed up your Windows 10 boot time.

Of course, you should always check with IT to make sure it is okay before you make any changes to your system, or ideally, have IT handle it on your behalf.

1. Use Fast Start-up
Windows 10 comes equipped with a special function expressly intended to speed up the time it takes Windows to boot. Fast Start-up saves your boot information in a special file system, which makes the startup process faster the next time. Instead of going to sleep or turning off completely, your device hovers somewhere in between.

To activate Fast Start-up, open your Control Panel and navigate to Power Options (you may need to search for it). From there, select Choose what the power buttons do. One of your checkbox options will be Turn on fast start-up. Don’t forget to save your changes once you’re done.

2. Edit Your Start-up Programs
Windows has a list of programs that start up along with the operating system. While this list is meant to improve the user experience, it can easily become overcrowded and bloated, ultimately bogging down your system. Trimming some unnecessary programs from this process can help speed things back up.

Pressing Ctrl + Shift + Esc will open the Task Manager and clicking the Start-up tab will bring up this list, where you can disable any unwanted applications. It is especially important that you check with IT to make sure this isn’t a task they want to have a hand in, as disabling the wrong program could cause you quite a few problems.

3. Simple Hardware Updates
Finally, giving your equipment a few component upgrades can improve your performance considerably. For example, if you aren’t using an SSD drive to hold your Windows 10 installation, you are missing out on some speed benefits there alone. Adding a small SSD drive to run the operating system, and some additional RAM as well, can likely give you the performance boost you are looking for.

Is your computer running slow? We can help you! Give us a call at (217) 428-6449 today.