How to Speed Up a Slow Windows 11 PC (12 Real Fixes)

If you want to know how to speed up Windows 11, start by finding out what is actually slow, then work through the fixes that address real causes: too many startup apps, low free disk space, outdated graphics and chipset drivers, malware, background Windows Update or indexing activity, visual effects on weak hardware, a power plan set to balanced or power-saving, heavy browser extensions, and a drive that is failing or simply too full. Those are the genuine reasons a Windows 11 PC runs slow, and every fix below targets one of them.

What this guide will not do is promise you a specific percentage improvement. Nobody can, because the cause differs on every machine - and anyone who does promise a number is selling something. What it will do is give you twelve concrete steps in a sensible order, tell you honestly when the answer is hardware rather than software, and name the "optimisations" that do nothing at all so you stop wasting time on them.

First, find out what is actually slow

Guessing is the slowest way to fix a slow PC. Spend five minutes measuring instead.

Open Task Manager with Ctrl plus Shift plus Escape and go to the Performance tab. Watch four readings while you use the machine normally:

• CPU - if it sits high while you are doing nothing, a background process is eating the machine. Switch to the Processes tab and sort by CPU to name it.
• Memory - if it is near full during ordinary work, you are short of RAM and the system is constantly shuffling data to disk.
• Disk - sustained high disk activity with nothing obvious running usually means indexing, an update, a backup, or a drive that is struggling.
• GPU - relevant if the complaint is stutter in video, games or window animations rather than general sluggishness.

For more detail, open Resource Monitor from the Performance tab. It breaks activity down per process, so you can see exactly which program is reading and writing to the disk or holding the network open. If one process is clearly responsible, you have your answer and can skip straight to the relevant fix.

Also note when the slowness happens. Slow only at login points at startup apps. Slow only in the browser points at extensions. Slow all the time, on everything, points at hardware, disk space or malware. That distinction alone saves most of the work.

1. Disable unnecessary startup apps

This is the single most reliable fix for a Windows 11 slow boot and for a machine that feels heavy for the first few minutes after login. Every program that launches itself at startup costs processor time, memory and disk reads before you have done anything.

Open Task Manager, go to the Startup apps tab and sort by Startup impact. Disable anything you do not need the moment you log in: updater helpers, chat clients, cloud sync tools you open manually anyway, hardware utilities for peripherals you rarely configure, game launchers.

Leave alone your security software, audio drivers, trackpad and graphics utilities. Disabling an item here does not uninstall it - the program still runs when you open it, it just stops starting on its own. If you disable something and miss it, turn it back on.

2. Free up disk space

A drive running close to full genuinely slows Windows 11 down. The system needs headroom for paging, temporary files, update staging and the working files applications create as they run. Take that headroom away and everything gets slower.

Go to Settings > System > Storage to see what is consuming the drive. Windows breaks it down by category, which usually makes the culprit obvious - temporary files, downloads nobody cleared, or old Windows update files that can be several gigabytes on their own.

Run Disk Cleanup (including the "Clean up system files" option) or let Storage Sense do it. Empty the recycle bin. Move large media libraries to an external drive if the system drive is small. Aim to leave a comfortable margin of free space rather than squeezing the last gigabyte out of the disk.

3. Uninstall software you no longer use

Unused software is not harmless just because you never open it. Many programs install background services, scheduled tasks, shell extensions that hook into File Explorer, and updaters that wake up on their own schedule. All of that costs resources on a machine that never benefits from it.

Go to Settings > Apps > Installed apps, sort by size or by install date, and work down the list. Be ruthless about trial software that came with the PC, toolbars and "PC optimiser" utilities, duplicate media players and PDF readers, and anything you installed once for a single task two years ago.

Restart afterwards. Uninstallers often leave services running until the next boot, so judge the result after a restart rather than immediately.

4. Update your GPU and chipset drivers

Outdated graphics and chipset drivers are a common and badly underrated cause of a sluggish Windows 11 machine. The symptoms are specific: stuttering animations, jerky video playback, slow window dragging, poor performance in anything that touches the GPU.

Get drivers from the right place. For a laptop or prebuilt desktop, that means the manufacturer's support page for your exact model. For a self-built PC, it means the motherboard manufacturer for chipset and storage drivers, and the GPU vendor for graphics. Windows Update supplies generic drivers that keep the machine working, but the manufacturer's own packages are the ones tuned for your hardware.

Chipset and storage drivers matter more than people expect - they govern how the processor talks to memory and to your drives, which affects everything.

5. Run a full malware scan

Malware steals exactly the resources you are trying to reclaim: processor time, memory, disk throughput and network bandwidth. A machine that became slow suddenly, runs hot with nothing open, or shows unexplained network activity deserves a scan before you tune anything else.

Run a full scan, not a quick one, with Microsoft Defender or a reputable third-party suite. Let it finish even though it takes a while. If you want help choosing protection, our best antivirus for Windows 11 guide compares the main options on protection and system impact.

One caution worth stating: a scan running in the background will itself slow the machine down. Judge your PC's speed after the scan completes, not during it.

6. Reduce visual effects

Windows 11 leans on animations, shadows and transparency to look good. On a capable machine the cost is invisible. On older or low-powered hardware - integrated graphics, modest RAM, an entry-level laptop - turning them off makes the interface feel meaningfully more responsive.

Search the Start menu for "adjust the appearance and performance of Windows" to open Performance Options. You can select "Adjust for best performance" to switch everything off, or go through the list and disable the heavy items individually while keeping font smoothing, which most people want to keep.

Transparency effects can also be switched off separately under Settings > Personalisation > Colours. This fix changes how the system feels rather than what it computes, but on weak hardware that perceived difference is the whole point.

7. Set power mode to Best Performance

This one is quick and catches a surprising number of machines. A balanced or power-saving profile deliberately holds the processor back to save energy. On a desktop that is pure loss, and on a plugged-in laptop it usually is too.

Go to Settings > System > Power & battery and set the power mode to Best Performance. On laptops you can set different modes for battery and mains power, so you are not forced to choose between runtime and responsiveness.

Check your manufacturer's own power utility too, if the machine has one. Some laptops ship with a vendor performance profile that overrides the Windows setting, and a machine left in its quiet or eco mode will feel slow no matter what Windows says.

8. Check drive health with chkdsk and SMART

If Windows 11 is freezing for seconds at a time, hanging on file operations or pausing mid-task, suspect the drive. A failing or badly fragmented drive produces exactly that pattern, and no software tuning will fix it.

Open Command Prompt or Terminal as administrator and run chkdsk C: /f. Windows will usually ask to schedule the check for the next restart, which is normal - agree, restart, and let it run.

Then check the drive's SMART data, which is the health reporting built into the drive itself. Most SSD and hard drive manufacturers publish a free toolkit for their own drives that reads it. Reallocated sectors, pending sectors or warning states mean the drive is on its way out. Back up immediately and plan a replacement - that is a hardware problem wearing a software problem's clothing.

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9. Prune your browser extensions

Very often the "slow PC" is actually a slow browser, and the browser is slow because of extensions. Each one runs in every tab you open, and a collection built up over years can cost far more memory and processor time than the pages themselves.

Open your browser's extensions page and remove anything you do not actively use. Be especially suspicious of coupon finders, shopping helpers, page translators you never asked for and anything that arrived bundled with other software. Keep the handful you genuinely rely on.

While you are there, close tabs. Dozens of open tabs is a real memory cost, and on a machine already short of RAM it is often the difference between smooth and sluggish. If you want to test the theory, open a fresh browser window with extensions disabled and compare.

10. Let Windows Update and indexing finish

Sometimes the machine is not broken, it is busy. Windows Update downloading in the background and the search indexer processing a large set of new files both consume genuine processor and disk time, and both are temporary.

Go to Settings > Windows Update, install everything pending, restart, and then leave the machine on for a while. After a big update or a large file import, indexing can run for a considerable time before it settles.

Keeping up to date matters for performance in its own right, because updates carry driver and platform fixes. If the PC is still on the previous release, our Windows 10 vs Windows 11 comparison covers what changes when you move across.

11. Turn on Storage Sense

Fixing disk space once is good. Keeping it fixed is better, because temporary files, downloads and recycle bin contents rebuild themselves within months.

Go to Settings > System > Storage and switch on Storage Sense. Open its settings and choose how often it runs, how long to keep files in the recycle bin, and whether to clear the Downloads folder. Cleanup recommendations in the same screen will also flag large unused files and old installation leftovers.

This is maintenance rather than a one-off speed fix, but it is the reason a tuned machine still feels good a year later instead of sliding back to where it was.

12. Reset or reinstall Windows as a last resort

If you have worked through everything above and the machine is still slow, and the hardware checks out, the problem may simply be years of accumulated software sediment. A reset clears it.

Settings > System > Recovery > Reset this PC lets you reinstall Windows while keeping your personal files, which removes installed applications and the startup entries, services and shell hooks that came with them. A full clean install from installation media goes further and gives you the cleanest possible result.

Back up first, either way. And keep a genuine licence key to hand so activation is painless afterwards - a Windows 11 Pro key at €58.99 or Windows 11 Home at €49.99 covers that. Not sure which edition you need? Our Windows 11 Home vs Pro guide settles it in a few minutes.

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When it is the hardware, not the software

There is a point past which software tuning cannot help, and recognising it saves you an afternoon. Task Manager tells you where that point is.

Memory sitting near full during ordinary work - a few browser tabs, an office document, a chat app - means you are short of RAM. The system compensates by moving data to disk constantly, which is why everything feels sticky. Adding RAM addresses a real constraint here; no amount of cleanup will.

A mechanical hard drive as the system disk is the biggest single limitation on an older PC. If the machine still boots from a spinning drive, moving Windows to an SSD changes how the whole system feels - boot, app launches, file operations, everything. If you only do one hardware thing, do this one.

A drive reporting SMART warnings is not a performance problem to tune, it is a failure to get ahead of. Back up and replace it.

What we will not do is quote you a number for any of that. The honest version is: these changes remove real bottlenecks, and how much difference you notice depends on which bottleneck was holding your particular machine back.

What does not work

Plenty of advice about making Windows 11 faster is simply wrong. Being blunt about it:

Registry cleaners do not meaningfully speed up modern Windows. The registry is not a performance bottleneck, and deleting orphaned entries from it does not make your PC faster. This has been true for many versions of Windows and it is still true in Windows 11. We sell CCleaner Professional and we will still tell you plainly: buy it for disk cleanup and startup management, which it does well, not for registry cleaning.

"Speed booster" and "PC optimiser" utilities that promise a faster machine at the press of a button generally do one of two things - the cleanup you could do yourself in Settings, or nothing at all. Several add their own background processes, making them a net negative. A tool that helps you see and manage what is running is useful. A tool that claims to make the hardware faster is not.

RAM cleaners and memory optimisers force applications to release memory that Windows was using perfectly well as cache. Empty RAM is not fast RAM - it is wasted RAM. These tools usually make things slightly worse.

Aggressively disabling Windows services from a list found online is a good way to break printing, networking or updates for an unmeasurable gain. Leave them alone.

If you want genuinely useful maintenance software, our utility software keys range covers the cleanup, repair and recovery tools that do real work. One worth knowing about: if your slowness comes with corrupted documents, spreadsheets or videos after a bad shutdown or a dying drive, Stellar Toolkit for File Repair is built to recover those files. It is a repair tool, not a performance tool, and we would rather be clear about the difference.

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Symptom-to-fix table

Match what you are seeing to where to start. Work down from the most likely cause rather than trying everything at once.

Whatever you end up needing - a cleanup licence, a fresh Windows key for a clean install, a repair toolkit, or a server licence from our Windows Server keys range if the slow machine turns out to be a server - every key we sell is genuine and EU-sourced, delivered to your inbox in seconds with an invoice, an activation guarantee and human support behind it. Browse the full Windows keys range for client licences.

Frequently asked questions