Read this all before you run my code at the bottom. This is a long answer, and probably rambling too. But it works well.
The fact of the matter that a huge amount of crap on your computer is just that --- crap: totally useless and hardly ever used. Disabling most of it is viable and useful: start your computer in safe mode and note how fast it loads: safe mode simply disables most Windows services (the equivalent of Unix daemons) and all programs which run at start-up.
There are a few things you want to be aware of:
a.) bloatware -- get rid of it, all of it. Delete it, don't just uninstall, but uninstall first. Delete with careful and prodigious use of the global search tool.
b.) The registry (a big blob of global state) needs to be cleaned by the uninstall. CCleaner does this for you since often uninstallers fail to remove their corresponding registry keys. That just slows look-up times and is generally bad.
c.) Programs which run on computer start-up aren't necessary. You don't need them except in very rare cases.
d.) Windows and third party shell extensions and services (daemons) are often unneeded.
A lot of people are unsure as to what a "Service" actually is: it provides some latent functionality to one or more programs and does stuff in the background that ideally you never hear about. But when there's about a thousand of them running and they all take up a little bit of processor time, stuff starts slowing down. Many of them are necessary for stuff like the internet, error reporting, event logging, the "pretty" Windows UI, etc. I figured I would explain before you referring to them further.
There are tools built into Windows (hidden, yes), but present, which allow you to configure all of this. If you feel technically comfortable enough to mess around a lot, you can, with the knowledge that it is _difficult_ (but not impossible) to break stuff.
I refer to
msconfig and services.msc
.
I'll walk you through the stuff you must do to get any speedup at all:
Open a CLI (the black box "Command Prompt") as an administrator. Press Windows + R, type exactly
cmd
, and press Ctrl + Shift + Enter, then Alt + C to confirm. Enter a password/get superuser if required.
In the new window,
Type exactly
msconfig &
and then press enter.
When the new window comes up, click the Boot tab and select "selective startup". Make all settings permanent with the box in the corner.
If you are comfortable, go to the startup tab and disable everything you don't need (should be most). This is safe to do.
If you are comfortable, go to the services tab and disable everything you are sure you don't need (depends on your PC).
Click okay/apply. Close the window out (exit msconfig). Type
exit
at the command line and press enter.
If you were to restart your computer now, you should note a speedup. Your computer should boot noticeably faster. (Assuming you made changes.)
This is not all you can do. Download
CCleaner from https://www.piriform.com/CCLEANER
Let it do it's thing.
There is also the matter of setting services to delay-start so they don't always get loaded immediately.
The GUI method of doing this through "services.msc" started through the command line is terribly slow and tedious.
Setting some of the hundreds of services to delay-start is the safest method to speed up your computer without causing any trouble.
I hacked together a tiny script which delay-starts all services allowing it on your computer: at the cost of application loading times (not a huge difference), I managed to get a old vista laptop about a 2x-3x speedup when I coupled this with some fiddling with the services and startup programs, CCleaner, and a full defrag.
Now I don't run Windows at home, and after writing a lot of software for Windows I have learned to hate the Windows shell. I've returned to Linux and am quite familiar with the Unix shell which is far superior in every way.
So I wrote a script using the BASH syntax which is meant to interface with Windows, to save myself the pain. I hacked this together and it is no means "clean" or anything. But it should get the job done.
So you need to go to
https://www.cygwin.com/
And download, install the default package to the default directory. Make sure you install `wget'.
Open the cygwin terminal as admin (with Ctrl + Shift + Enter) and type, ending each line with the enter key. Type this exactly, else it won't work.
cd ~ && wget https://db.tt/sjADJzIk -O delaystartsvc.sh
# examine the script if you want by typing 'vi delaystartsvc.sh', no quotes
chmod +x delaystartsvc.sh
./delaystartsvc.sh
Other stuff you can do:
Clear the event logs.
Uninstall all unnecssary programs.
Restart relatively often (daily/weekly), which keeps the number of started services down
Defrag occasionally
Tweak the registry to force-unload dynamic libraries (code) whose reference count is 0.
Tweak the registry or BIOS to keep the fan on & temps lower
And there's a bunch more I'm missing too. Restart your computer.
To undo all of this, get msconfig open and select normal startup. All problems you might be having are now removed.