We all have expectations from our laptops. We want them to work snappily and let us get through whatever it is we’re trying to get through, be it a big work projector or the next level of our favorite video game. Sadly, there’s plenty of occasion for our laptops to let us down, running slowly and bringing all the smooth productivity to a grinding halt. Wrestling that performance back doesn’t have to be hard, and there are quite a few things you can attempt to boost your speeds for free.
If you’re trying to get your laptop to run smoother and feel a little bit more like the day you first bought it (or you just bought one and don’t think it’s running as fast as it could), here are some free things to try in order to give it a boost.
Looking to pick up a new laptop? Check out PCWorld’s roundup of the best laptops available right now.
Ensure you’re on the optimal power profile
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This is a big one. Having the wrong power profile selected can leave tons of performance on the table. If your laptop thinks you want it running quiet or cool, it might not let the CPU and GPU reach their full potential.
With a lot of laptops, it’s become common to find both Windows’ power plans as well as special manufacturer plans. Just about any gaming laptop you find will have a pre-installed system management software that packs in all the power profile management you could need, and the same is becoming more and more common of general-purpose laptops as well, but unless you know to look for it, you’ll be leaving it at whatever setting the laptop shipped in.
On a Windows 11 machine, open Settings, select System, and then Power & Battery. On this page, look for Power Mode and set it to Best Performance. Then look for any tools your laptops’ manufacturer pre-installed. Some examples are Lenovo Legion Arena, Alienware Command Center, Razer Synapse, Acer Predator Sense. In these tools, you should be able to find different power profiles (be sure your computer is plugged in to see all the options) that will let you push the system to its full potential.
If you want to try to push even further, you could try your hand at undervolting .
Download the latest GPU drivers
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Whether you have a gaming laptop or a workstation, if your system has a discrete GPU and it’s not running on the latest appropriate drivers, you could be leaving a lot of performance on the table. Drivers help optimize the GPUs handling of select applications, and it can make a load of difference. In recent years, Intel’s Arc graphics have been a perfect example of this, seeing huge performance boosts with drive updates . AMD, Nvidia, and Intel all have different tools for updating their drivers, so research what components you have in your computer to find the appropriate method for updating.
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Your laptop runs on Windows, but also Windows runs on your laptop, and that means it has its own overhead. It hogs resources, it takes up clock cycles, and it does unnecessary things in the name of looking pretty that you can give the axe in order to spend that horsepower elsewhere.
Getting to this settings menu can be a little tricky. You can open the Start Menu and start typing “adjust the appearance and performance of Windows” until that same text shows up for you to select, but Windows search can be finicky. Alternatively you can open Command Prompt, type “systempropertiesperformance.exe” and launch the tool that way. It can also be found in C: > Windows > System32 > SystemPropertiesPerformance.
In the Performance Options tool, select the Visual Effects tab, and uncheck any of the options you don’t want. The more you uncheck, the less extra processing your system is going to do in the name of making Windows look pretty. Some of these are admittedly pretty useful, and they aren’t likely to bog down a moderately powerful laptop, but if your system is suffering from considerable slowdowns at every turn, it may be worth the little bit of extra performance you can steal back by disabling these effects.
Stop any unnecessary startup applications