How to Speed Up Windows 11 for Faster Performance! (Best Settings) 2026

Hey folks, Brett here. Many users of Windows 11 have commented in our videos that their PCs are suffering from performance issues in many of the programs that they use, along with lag and stuttering problems in the games that they play. So coming up, I'll show you all of the tried and trusted ways that I know of to improve the performance of your Windows 11 PC. Let's dive right in. To improve performance, maybe you just need a power plan that is higher performance than what you're currently using. This can make a big difference when using resource intensive programs or playing AAA quality games. To change it, go to search in the taskbar and type power plan. Select choose a power plan. To see all the plans available for your PC, you may need to click show additional plans. If you're currently using balanced, power saver, or something similar, switch your plan to high performance. After selecting your power plan, click on change plan settings for that plan. Then select change advanced power settings. Scroll down and look for processor power management. Double click on it. Double click on both minimum processor state and the other one maximum processor state. Make sure they're both set to 100%. If not, click on the percentage and then type 100. There's no need to click on apply if you're not doing anything else here. Clicking okay will save the changes and exit the window. Optimizing and defragging your drives can help to speed up your PC's performance. Once again, go to search in the taskbar and begin typing defragment and optimize drives. When it shows up, click on it. If you have a hard disk drive, those can get fragmented over time, slowing down your computer's performance. And if you have a solid state drive, those do not get defragged. Instead, those get trimmed. Optimizing those ensures blocks of data deleted in the past are fully marked as free, which can also speed up performance. This PC has two drives installed. If the current status for the hard disk drive says 0% fragmented, do nothing. Otherwise, selecting the drive and clicking on optimize will defrag that drive. For solid state drive, if it says okay, then of course do nothing. If it says it needs optimization, clicking optimize will clear out blocks of data no longer being used and will help to make sure that drive lasts longer. You'll want to put these on a schedule so you can set it and forget it. In scheduled optimization, select turn on. Check the box next to run on a schedule. In the drop down menu, your choices are daily, weekly, and monthly. I find that weekly is good enough. Make sure the box next to increase task priority. If three consecutive scheduled runs are missed, it's checked. Then select choose. I recommend checking the box next to all of your drives. Also, make sure to check the box next to automatically optimize new drives. Many people still believe that third-party antivirus software is needed in Windows. The truth is it's not and it's well known that those programs can have a major impact on system performance. For most people, the built-in Windows security is all that they would ever need. It's optimized with protection from viruses and other malware with low system impact. If you're a responsible PC user not clicking on suspicious links or visiting sketchy websites, do yourself a favor, save your money, and do not buy and install third-party security software unless you feel you have to. I'm sure many of you have been at a job or called computer support for an issue and the first thing they tell you to do is restart your PC. There's a good reason for that. To restart your PC, select the start menu and then here on the right, select the power button and then restart. In short, doing this on many occasions will fix an issue clearing out the system memory, memory leaks, fixes software glitches, and can clear out stuck processes and temporary files that may be causing your PC to lag. Doing a simple shutdown of your PC will not do those things. For the remainder of these, we'll be going into the settings app. If you're new to Windows 11, to open it, right click on the start menu and select settings. You can also open it with the keyboard shortcut which is the Windows key plus the I key. While the transparency effects do make Windows 11 look better, they do use up system resources. So let's turn off those transparency effects that are used for the taskbar and start menu. In the left pane, select personalization, then go to colors here on the right. If turned on, click the toggle for transparency effects to turn them off. If you have programs taking up space and system resources on your computer, uninstalling these can help to increase performance. In the left pane, select apps, then click installed apps. Now go through the entire list of programs and find the software you want to remove. I just did a purge of my system a few days ago, so I have nothing to uninstall at this time. But for each one you want to get rid of, click the three dot menu and select uninstall. And then you would click uninstall again and wait for it to finish. We'll stay here in installed apps for this one. There's a large number of unnecessary programs that run in the background that can create slowdowns or cause your system to lag. Go through your list of apps that you don't want to run in the background. Let me find one here. There we go. You can do this for some of the programs, but not all. Click the three dot menu icon and select advanced options. In background app permissions, select the dropdown menu and select never. Repeat these steps for each and every program that you don't want tying up resources in the background. The programs that start up when you boot your computer can have a negative impact on performance. To free up resources and improve your boot times, we'll stay here in apps here in the left pane. Then on the right, go to startup. You can now see everything that is enabled or disabled when your computer starts up. To see all that are enabled at the top and sort by, select status. Look for the programs you don't need at startup and click the toggle for those turned on to turn them off. Let's go Xbox. See if there's any others here. Microsoft Edge and Microsoft Teams. Make sure to only disable those you're absolutely sure you don't need when your computer boots up. Removing those needless files taking up space on your drive could also give you a speed boost, especially if your drive is up to 70 percent or more of capacity available. To remove temporary files in settings, select system here on the left and then storage here on the right. Select temporary files. Check the box next to all of those that you want to get rid of. Then back at the top, select clean up system files. When that's done, select remove files. Then select continue. Then just wait for it to finish. If you would like to automate the process of getting rid of the files you no longer need, once again, make sure you're in system here on the left and let's go back to storage. In storage management, click the toggle to turn it on. With it enabled, Windows will automatically check your system and get rid of temporary files and junk you no longer need to free up space. Let's click into it. Here you can set how often storage sense runs, and I have it set to every week. And below that, how often files are deleted from your recycle bin. Mine is set to 30 days, which is the default. You can also set how often files are deleted in your downloads folder. This is something I like to do on my own, so I have it set to never. Your other choices are one day up to 60 days. If you own a PC with more than one graphics card, you can set a specific card for any program that you've been experiencing slowdown issues with. To do this with system selected, click on display, scroll down, and in related settings, select graphics. Let's scroll down a bit. If you don't see the program in the list, you can select add desktop app to find it on your computer. I'll select one here by clicking on it. For this one, for GPU preference, it says let Windows decide. That's not always the best option. Click the drop down menu. The better of these two is the one that says high performance, obviously, so I'll select that one. Do this for all programs that are running slow for you, and you should see a noticeable improvement. A common problem for many people when playing games on their PC is stuttering, sluggishness, low frame rates, and other issues, especially with AAA titles on a low spec computer. To improve the performance when gaming, turn on Xbox mode, formerly known as game mode. In the left pane, select gaming. Go into Xbox mode. If turned off, turn it on. When turned on, this will turn off non-essential processes in Windows, freeing up more resources for your games. On the flip side of things, if you don't play video games on your computer, you'll want to turn off Xbox mode. Doing this will turn off services related to Xbox in the background and stop the game DVR altogether, allowing for more resources for what you do on your computer. Updating Windows, which could include bug fixes, is a good place to start if your PC is running slow. Select Windows update in the left pane. If there's an update available, select download and install. If not, select check for updates, and there might be an update available that could fix your problems. To check if updated drivers are available, in more options, select advanced options. Then in additional options, select optional updates. Click driver updates to see what's available. The most important one here is a firmware update, so if you see that, check the box next to it. Select the others if you want, then click download and install. You may have heard or experienced problems when updating Windows that it can cause performance issues. Sadly, it's been pretty bad this past year, to be honest. Sometimes they release bad updates, so on the flip side of updating Windows, sometimes rolling back an update can help to speed up performance. To do this in settings, go to system here on the left, scroll down, look for recovery, select it. If it's been within 10 days since the last update, you'll have the option to roll it back. Mine has been more than 10 days, so it's all grayed out, but if it's been within 10 days, you would select go back, after which it will revert back to the previous version before the bad update. We'll stay here for the next one in system and recovery. If your computer is still having performance issues after trying the other tips I shared with you, then you might want to consider doing a factory reset to make it like new without losing the personal files that you have on your computer. Above go back in recovery options, you would select reset PC. You'll have the choice to keep your files or remove everything. Just follow the instructions and when completed, hopefully the performance is close to being back to what it used to be. Thank you for watching. Hopefully these tips helped. If they did, give this video a thumbs up, share it with others, and let us know in the comments what tips worked the best for you. And if you're new to our channel, subscribe and ring that bell so you don't miss out on our latest Windows 11 videos and other tech related stuff right here on Brett in Tech.