Top tips and tricks to keep Windows 10 running smoothly

Tired of Windows 10 bossing you around? Want to master it instead of it letting it be the master of you? If so, you’re in luck, because I’ve got plenty of tips to help you get the most out of it. Whether you want to speed up the way Windows 10 works, fix its biggest headaches, protect your privacy, teach Cortana new tricks, or more, this article has what you need. Within minutes, you’ll be gleefully asking the operating system, “Who’s your daddy?”

Speed up Windows 10

No matter how fast your PC runs Windows 10, you want to run it faster. But there’s no need to upgrade to a new PC. Follow these tips to speed up Windows 10.

Change your power settings

If you’re using Windows 10’s power-saver plan, you’re slowing down your PC. That plan reduces your PC’s performance in order to save energy. (Even desktop PCs typically have a power-saver plan.) Changing your power plan from power saver to high-performance or balanced will give you an instant performance boost.

To do it, launch Control Panel, then select Hardware and Sound > Power Options. You’ll typically see two options: balanced (recommended) and power saver. (Depending on your make and model, you might see other plans here as well, including some branded by the manufacturer.) To see the high-performance setting, click the down arrow next to Show Additional Plans.

To change your power setting, simply choose the one you want, then exit Control Panel. High-performance gives you the most oomph but uses the most power; balanced finds a median between power use and better performance; and power saver does everything it can to give you as much battery life as possible. Desktop users have no reason to choose power saver, and even laptop users should consider the balanced option when unplugged — and high-performance when connected to a power source.

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Change your power settings in Control Panel to give your PC a performance boost.

Disable programs that run on startup

One reason your Windows 10 PC may feel sluggish is you’ve got too many programs running in the background — programs that you may never use, or only rarely. Stop them from running, and your PC will run more smoothly.

Start by launching the Task Manager: Press Ctrl-Shift-Esc or right-click the lower-right corner of your screen and select Task Manager. If the Task Manager launches as a compact app with no tabs, click “More details” at the bottom of your screen. The Task Manager will then appear in all of its full-tabbed glory. There’s plenty you can do with it, but we’re going to focus only on killing unnecessary programs that run at startup.

Click the Startup tab. You’ll see a list of the programs and services that launch when you start Windows. Included on the list is each program’s name as well as its publisher, whether it’s enabled to run on startup, and its “Startup impact,” which is how much it slows down Windows 10 when the system starts up.

To stop a program or service from launching at startup, right-click it and select “Disable.” This doesn’t disable the program entirely; it only prevents it from launching at startup — you can always run the application after launch. Also, if you later decide you want it to launch at startup, you can just return to this area of the Task Manager, right-click the application and select “Enable.”

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You can use the Task Manager to help get information about programs that launch at startup and disable any you don’t need.

Many of the programs and services that run on startup, such as OneDrive or Evernote Clipper, may be familiar to you. But you may not recognize many of them. (Anyone who immediately knows what “bzbui.exe” is, please raise your hand. No fair Googling it first.)

The Task Manager helps you get information about unfamiliar programs. Right-click an item and select Properties for more information about it, including its location on your hard disk, whether it has a digital signature, the version number, the file size and the last time it was modified.

You can also right-click the item and select “Open file location.” That opens File Explorer and takes it to the folder where the file is located, which may give you another clue about the program’s purpose.

Finally, and most helpfully, you can select “Search online” after you right-click. Bing will then launch with links to sites with information about the program or service.

If you’re really nervous about one of the listed applications, you can go to a site run by Reason Software called Should I Block It? and search for the file name. You’ll usually find very solid information about the program or service.

Now that you’ve selected all the programs that you want to disable at startup, the next time you restart your computer, the system will be a lot less concerned with unnecessary programs.

Get help from the Performance Monitor

There’s a great tool in Windows 10 called the Performance Monitor that can, among other things, create a detailed performance report about your PC, detail any system and performance issues, and suggest fixes.

To get the report, type perfmon /report into your search box and press Enter. (Make sure there’s a space between “perfmon” and the slash mark.) The Resource and Performance Monitor launches and gathers information about your system. It will say that it will take 60 seconds, but I’ve found that it takes several minutes. When the Monitor finishes, it will launch an interactive report.

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You can use the Task Manager to help get information about programs that launch at startup and disable any you don’t need.

Fix Windows 10 headaches

Microsoft Windows 10 has gone a long way toward fixing the problems that were endemic with earlier versions of Windows, notably Windows 8. But it’s still far from a perfect operating system and has its share of headaches. Take the following advice for fixing three of its biggest headaches.

Fix Start menu woes

When it was first announced that Windows 10 would reinstate the Start menu, many users welcomed it. But after Windows 10 was released, some people began complaining about problems with the Start menu — it didn’t run when they clicked the Start button, or it froze, or random entries appeared or disappeared. If you’ve got Start menu problems, fear not; there are several ways to try to fix them.

Note: Before trying any of these, first restart your computer. Sometimes a mere reboot will fix things.

Run Microsoft’s Start menu troubleshooter tool

Before trying to fix any Start menu problems yourself, download Microsoft’s Start menu troubleshooter and run it.

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The Start menu troubleshooter can help fix a variety of woes.

The troubleshooter looks for Start menu problems and checks whether the problem is being caused by improperly installed applications, problems with the Registry, the database of Start menu tiles being corrupted, or difficulties with something called the application manifest. (The application manifest has settings that tell Windows how to handle a program when it starts.) After it checks for the problems, it does its best to fix them. If you want to see the results of what the troubleshooter finds, click “View Detailed Information” on the screen after the troubleshooter does its work.

Note that the troubleshooter won’t fix all problems. If it doesn’t solve yours, you’ll have to resort to other means.

Check for updates

There’s a chance that a Windows update will solve the problem — Microsoft continually squashes bugs in its updates. To make sure you’ve got all the latest Windows updates, go to Settings > Updates & security > Windows Update and click Check for updates. If it finds any, install them. You may need to restart your PC for the update to go into effect.

Use PowerShell to fix corrupted files

If the Start menu still has problems, the issue may be corrupted files. You can use a command-line tool called PowerShell that is built into Windows to find and fix them. Search for PowerShell in the Windows search box, right-click Windows PowerShell in the search results, and select “Run as administrator.” That will launch PowerShell.

If for some reason the search box isn’t working, press the Windows key + R on your keyboard, type “PowerShell” and press Enter. That runs PowerShell, but not the administrator account, which you need to be using. That takes a few more steps: Right-click the PowerShell icon on the taskbar and select “Pin to taskbar.” Then close PowerShell. Now right-click the PowerShell icon on the taskbar and select “Run as administrator.”

Once you’re running PowerShell as an administrator, type sfc /scannow and press Enter (note the space before the slash). PowerShell will scan your system for corrupt files. This can take some time.

When PowerShell finishes scanning your system, it will tell you that it found and fixed corrupt files, found corrupt files but couldn’t fix them, or found no corrupt files. If it found corrupt files but couldn’t fix them, type this command and press Enter: dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth. That should fix the problem.

Recover lost storage space

Windows 10 can be a hard-drive hog, especially if you’ve upgraded to it from a previous version of Windows, or after a major Windows 10 update. That’s because when you upgrade or install a major update, Windows 10 keeps the earlier version of the operating system, just in case you want to revert to it.

But that old operating system version is taking up several gigabytes of storage space. If you’ve got a PC with plenty of storage, no worries. But if you’re stretched for storage, it can be a serious problem.

For example, I have an HP Stream laptop with 32GB of storage, and when I tried to upgrade to the newest version of Windows 10 I couldn’t do it — my old Windows version took up so much space, the new version of Windows couldn’t install.

If you’re sure you’re not going to want to revert to your old version of Windows, you can easily delete it. It’s stored in a folder called Windows.old that you’ll find in the /Windows folder. Rather than deleting it manually, though, use the Disk Cleanup tool:

1.     Run the tool by typing Disk Cleanup in the search bar and clicking the Disk Cleanup search result that appears. The tool will take a few minutes to look through your system.

2.     When Disk Cleanup has finished, scroll down the list of files you can clean up and check the box next to Previous Windows installation(s). This entry will only appear if you’ve got a previous Windows installation on your hard disk.

3.     Click OK. The old version of Windows will be deleted, and you’ll get your hard disk space back.

Enable Fast Startup

From the moment that Windows 10 was released, people started complaining that their bootup times were more sluggish than with previous versions of Windows. If you’re plagued by a lethargic Windows 10 startup, there’s a simple fix: use a feature called Fast Startup.

With Fast Startup, when you shut down your PC, it closes your applications and logs off all users, but loads the Windows kernel and drivers to a hibernation file on your hard disk. Then, when you restart your PC, Windows loads the kernel and drivers from the hibernation file, speeding up startup.

Here’s how to turn it on:

1.     Right-click the Start button and select Power Options from the menu that appears.

2.     Click “Additional power settings” on the right side of the screen.

3.     Click “Choose what the Power buttons do.”

4.     From the screen that appears, click “Change Settings that are currently unavailable.”

5.     On the screen that appears, check the box next to “Turn on fast startup (recommended).”

6.     Click “Save changes.”

That’s all it takes. Note that on some machines Fast Startup isn’t enabled. If that’s the case with yours, you won’t see the “Turn on Fast Startup (recommended)” entry.

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It’s easy to turn up Fast Startup in order to speed up your bootup time.

Protect your privacy

There has been some concern that Windows 10 gathers far too much private information from users. Whether you think Microsoft’s operating system crosses the privacy line or just want to make sure you protect as much of your personal life as possible, we’re here to help. Here’s how to protect your privacy in just a few minutes.

Turn off ad tracking

At the top of many people’s privacy concerns is what data is being gathered about them as they browse the web. That information creates a profile of a person’s interests that is used by a variety of companies to target ads (resulting in the current popularity of ad blockers). Windows 10 does this with the use of an advertising ID. The ID doesn’t just gather information about you when you browse the web, but also when you use Windows 10 apps.

You can turn that advertising ID off if you want. Launch the Windows 10 Settings app (by clicking on the Start button at the lower-left corner of your screen) and go to Privacy > General. There you’ll see a list of choices under the title “Change privacy options”; the first controls the advertising ID. Move the slider from On to Off. You’ll still get ads delivered to you, but they’ll be generic ones rather than targeted ones, and your interests won’t be tracked.

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You can turn off Windows 10’s advertising ID if you want; you’ll still get ads, but they’ll be generic ones.