Stop Restarting- Tweak These 5 Windows Settings Instead!

Howdy folks, Brett here, with a quick tutorial for both Windows 11 and Windows 10. For many people, when their PC becomes slow, they tend to do the old restart fix. It may help temporarily, but the slowdown often returns within days. Instead, I'll show you some of the key settings you can change so you're not having to reboot all the time. For this first one, we'll go in and disable Fast Startup. I'll explain why when we get there. To do this, open the control panel by doing a search for it. Select it. To follow along easier, here in the upper right corner, select Large Icons. Then select Power Options. Here on the left, select Choose what the power buttons do. In the shutdown settings, you'll see the option to turn on Fast Startup. While Microsoft recommends turning it on, most experts do not. This feature introduced with Windows 8 is supposed to make your PC boot faster. When you shut down your computer, with it enabled, it doesn't shut down your PC completely. It keeps it in a hibernation state. This has real downsides, so any hardware conflicts, driver issues, memory leaks, and other issues don't get fixed. So over time, your PC will get slower because of this. It's best to disable it. Click on Change settings that are currently unavailable. Untick the box next to Turn on Fast Startup. Then select Save Changes. Now when you shut down your computer, it will actually shut down completely. For this next one, we'll disable the permissions that allows apps to run in the background even when you're not using them. This adds up over time, staying loaded in your RAM the whole time, slowing down your PC unless you do an actual reboot, which is what we're trying to avoid. To do this, open the Settings app by right-clicking on the Start menu and selecting Settings. Using the keyboard shortcut, the Windows key plus I also opens this up. In the left pane, select Apps. Then here on the right, select Installed apps. I'll go through the list of apps built into Windows and find those that you rarely use and click the three-dot menu here on the right and select Advanced options. In Background app permissions, in the drop-down menu, select Never. You will encounter that some of the built-in apps won't let you do this. Conversely, there are some third-party apps that will let you disable background app permissions. Delivery optimization is a feature that is used to download updates from Microsoft that is stored in a dedicated cache on your PC that can be uploaded to other computers on your local network to save time updating Windows. This cache can build up over time, slowing down your PC. Even doing a restart won't fix this. So staying in Settings, let's go to System here on the left and select Storage on the right. Select Temporary files. All of these here can be checked, but for the purposes of this video, look for Delivery optimization files and put a check next to it. I just cleared this recently, so it's not too bad. If not managed, this could be multiple gigabytes of data. Go back to the top and select Remove files. Click on Continue. And that's it. Windows uses animated transitions, frosted glass effects, and other effects to make the visuals look better. This comes at the expense of your GPU and CPU to maintain all of them in the background, slowing things down, especially over a long session. To entirely disable the visual effects, go to Search in the taskbar and type View Advanced System Settings. When it shows up, select it. With the Advanced tab selected, in Performance, click on Settings. Select Adjust for Best Performance, then click on Apply. For most of you, this won't cause any issues, but if you do have any issues, these can be turned on one by one if you want. For example, with certain monitors, the screen fonts can get kind of blurry. Checking the box next to Smooth edges of screen fonts fixes this. Apps that start up immediately when you turn on your PC not only slow down boot times, but because they're using system memory, can make your computer slower and sluggish. To disable those you don't need at startup, instead of using the Task Manager, I'll show you how to do this in Settings. Select Apps here on the left, then select Startup here on the right. In the drop-down menu here at the top, for Sort By, select Status. This will show all that are enabled at the top. For all of the apps enabled at startup that you don't need immediately when you boot up your PC, click on the toggles to turn them off. In my case, I'll turn off Microsoft Edge, Teams, ShareX, and Spotify. Thanks for watching. Hopefully this video was useful for you. If it was, let us know in the comments, give it a thumbs up, and share it with others. Also let us know if you have any additional tips not mentioned. And if you're new to our channel, subscribe and hit that bell to not miss out on our latest videos for Windows and other tech-related stuff, right here on Brett in Tech.