7 Best Ways to Speed ​​Up Windows 10 Boot

Win­dows Fast Boot. A dream of mil­lions of users, a headache for Microsoft devel­op­ers and a gold­mine for tweak­ers. What actu­al­ly affects the load­ing of the oper­at­ing sys­tem and can it be accel­er­at­ed? Our experts under­stand the issue and are ready to share their opin­ion.

Setting up fast startup

Open the con­trol menu of the Start but­ton using the key­board short­cut “Win + X”. Select the item “Pow­er Man­age­ment” marked in the screen­shot.

In the win­dow that opens, scroll down all the items until we get to the relat­ed para­me­ters sec­tion. Click on the hyper­link marked in the screen­shot.

The old pow­er man­age­ment menu used in ear­li­er ver­sions of Win­dows opens. On the side­bar of the selec­tion we find the item for con­trol­ling the actions of the pow­er but­tons.

Check if the check­box is checked in the quick launch sec­tion. It may not be there if the hiber­na­tion mode was pre­vi­ous­ly dis­abled on the com­put­er. In this case, click on the hyper­link marked with the num­ber “2” to acti­vate the man­age­ment with admin­is­tra­tive rights.

When the switch­es on the para­me­ters become avail­able for mak­ing changes, check the quick launch item. Click on the save but­ton.

The effect of turn­ing on the fast start is notice­able only after a com­plete shut­down. When you restart your com­put­er, it does­n’t show up.

Cleaning up the startup partition

Open the start menu again. We launch the task man­ag­er.

In Win­dows 10, it looks like the screen­shot shown by default. An emp­ty win­dow that does not dis­play use­ful infor­ma­tion. Click on the area marked with an arrow to switch the task man­ag­er to a detailed view.

There are sev­en tabs avail­able to us. We select among them the mid­dle one, with the name “Start­up”. This sec­tion lists all pro­grams that have per­mis­sion to auto­mat­i­cal­ly start when the oper­at­ing sys­tem starts. Accord­ing­ly, the longer the opened list, the more neg­a­tive impact we get when you turn on the com­put­er. We select pro­grams in sequence and dis­able them using the but­ton in the low­er right cor­ner. The num­ber “4” in the screen­shot shows how the soft­ware should look in an inac­tive state.

Pro­grams that have a high impact on start­up are dis­abled first. Of course, it is worth approach­ing the issue with­out exces­sive fanati­cism. For exam­ple, third-par­ty antivirus soft­ware can have a high degree of influ­ence, but you should not remove it from start­up. The effect of the per­formed manip­u­la­tions becomes notice­able imme­di­ate­ly after the reboot.

We remove garbage

Dur­ing oper­a­tion, the oper­at­ing sys­tem itself and installed pro­grams con­stant­ly cre­ate tem­po­rary files with dif­fer­ent life cycles. Win­dows 10 has built-in tools designed to remove them in a time­ly man­ner.

Open the sys­tem set­tings using the key com­bi­na­tion “Win + I”. Select the sec­tion shown in the screen­shot.

We find in the selec­tion area a block con­tain­ing mem­o­ry set­tings. The slid­er indi­cat­ed by the num­ber “2” is dis­abled by default. Acti­vate it and go to the detailed set­tings on the hyper­link indi­cat­ed in the screen­shot.

The first option that opens deter­mines the tim­ing of the disk cleanup. You can set the fre­quen­cy of auto­mat­ic start in the range from a day to a month. The last item acti­vates the clean­ing mech­a­nism when the disk is full to a crit­i­cal lev­el.

The main pur­pose of the next para­me­ter is to auto­mate the clean­ing of tem­po­rary files cre­at­ed by the OS and pro­grams. The switch for this mode is marked with the num­ber “1”. Here you can also set the stor­age peri­od for files in the bas­ket and the Down­loads fold­er. The time inter­val set­ting menu is shown in the screen­shot under the num­ber “2”.

The last sec­tion of set­tings con­tains an imme­di­ate clear but­ton. By click­ing on it, we acti­vate the dia­log for select­ing files to be delet­ed.

The screen­shot shows the menu in an abbre­vi­at­ed form. Oppo­site each item is a brief descrip­tion of the files to be delet­ed and the disk space they occu­py. The arrows show the radio but­tons that you can use to add or exclude a cat­e­go­ry of files from the cleanup list.

Reg­u­lar auto­mat­ic clean­ing of the sys­tem from “garbage” allows you to main­tain the per­for­mance of your hard dri­ve at an opti­mal lev­el.

Defragment HDD

Sol­id state dri­ves do not need to be defrag­ment­ed, so this item only applies to com­put­ers with reg­u­lar hard dri­ves.

Launch File Explor­er and select “This PC” from the side menu. Call the con­text menu by click­ing on the hard disk icon and open its prop­er­ties.

Switch to the “Ser­vice” tab. Click on the “Opti­mize” but­ton.

Turn on auto­mat­ic defrag­men­ta­tion with the but­ton marked in the screen­shot.

Put a tick in the place indi­cat­ed by the arrow to acti­vate the sched­uled work.

The default fre­quen­cy for run­ning the defrag­menter is once a week. This set­ting can be left unchanged dur­ing con­fig­u­ra­tion.

Configuring Boot Configuration Utility

Let’s col­lect some data about the sys­tem in order to pro­ceed to the last step and make changes to the boot para­me­ters using the con­fig­u­ra­tion util­i­ty built into Win­dows.

Open the OS set­tings using the com­bi­na­tion “Win + I”. Go to the “Sys­tem” sec­tion. In the selec­tion area locat­ed on the left side of the win­dow, we go down to the very last item. On the right side, we also scroll all the infor­ma­tion to the end. We find the sec­tion “Relat­ed para­me­ters” and fol­low the hyper­link marked with the num­ber “2” in the screen­shot.

The old Win­dows inter­face win­dow will open. Here we look at the size of the installed RAM. After that, use the Nav­i­ga­tion Pane to open the Device Man­ag­er.

In the tree-like list of equip­ment we find the sec­tion “Proces­sors”. Expand it and look at the num­ber of items it con­tains. Each sym­bol­izes one of the CPU cores. In this case, as you can see in the screen­shot, the com­put­er has a dual-core proces­sor.

After col­lect­ing the nec­es­sary infor­ma­tion about the sys­tem para­me­ters, we acti­vate the Run dia­log box. Open it with the key­board short­cut “Win + R”. Enter the com­mand “mscon­fig” in the text field, as shown in the screen­shot. By press­ing the “OK” but­ton, we launch the sys­tem con­fig­u­ra­tion util­i­ty.

At the top of the win­dow, go to the “Down­load” tab. Select the item “Advanced options” marked with the num­ber “2”.

In the win­dow that opens, acti­vate the item marked with the num­ber “1”. We set the known num­ber of proces­sor cores installed in the sys­tem. The next step is to acti­vate the max­i­mum mem­o­ry size. In this case it is 2 GB. The num­ber in the text box is in megabytes. Since there are 1024 of them in 1 GB, in the screen­shot we see the num­ber 2048. We com­plete the set­tings by click­ing on the “OK” but­ton.

After clos­ing the con­fig­u­ra­tion util­i­ty, we get a sys­tem noti­fi­ca­tion requir­ing a reboot to apply the changes.

Con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, this set­ting does not give a sur­pris­ing per­for­mance boost, but it can save a few more sec­onds at the ini­tial boot stage.

Windows SDK tools

The Win­dows SDK includes var­i­ous tools, one of which is for ana­lyz­ing the per­for­mance of your com­put­er. Since the entire SDK is not required, it is enough
down­load only installer.

After start­ing the instal­la­tion, we tra­di­tion­al­ly agree with the license agree­ment. Hav­ing reached the choice of com­po­nents, we leave only the item indi­cat­ed in the screen­shot. Uncheck the box­es next to the rest of the tools and click the “Install” but­ton.

The Win­dows Kits sec­tion will appear in the Start menu, con­tain­ing a per­for­mance analy­sis util­i­ty.

To per­form test­ing, we use the com­mand line or the Pow­er­Shell shell. Run it with nor­mal rights and enter the com­mand: “xboot­m­gr ‑trace boot ‑result­Path C:tempStart”. The last part “C:tempStart” indi­cates the direc­to­ry where the result of the per­formed test will be saved. Run the com­mand by press­ing “Enter”. The com­put­er will issue a warn­ing and reboot.

After log­ging in, a win­dow is dis­played with a count­down from 120 sec­onds. We are wait­ing for the end of test­ing, with­out inter­rupt­ing it by press­ing the but­tons.

After two min­utes, we go to the pre­vi­ous­ly spec­i­fied direc­to­ry with the results. Open the file marked in the screen­shot asso­ci­at­ed with the graph­i­cal analy­sis util­i­ty.

In the selec­tion area, we go down to the end, to the “Oth­er” sec­tion. Dou­ble-click to open the results of the “Boot Phas­es” analy­sis on the right side of the win­dow. As a result, we obtain graph­i­cal and dig­i­tal data reflect­ing the phas­es of com­put­er load­ing. The total time tak­en by the sys­tem to launch is shown in the screen­shot with the num­ber “2” in the “End Time” col­umn.

The next step is to launch Pow­er­Shell with admin­is­tra­tive rights. We enter the next com­mand sequence: “xboot­m­gr ‑trace boot ‑prep­Sys­tem ‑ver­boseReady­Boot ‑result­Path C:temp”. The “-prep­Sys­tem ‑ver­boseReady­Boot” lines are designed to opti­mize prefetch­ing and off­set­ting the boot sec­tor to the ini­tial sec­tor of the hard dri­ve. We start the exe­cu­tion by press­ing the “Enter” key. The com­put­er will restart six times. At each stage, the win­dow indi­cat­ed in step #4 is dis­played. The entire sequence of oper­a­tions, depend­ing on the size of the hard disk and the infor­ma­tion stored on it, may take sev­er­al hours.

After the final reboot, repeat step 3. As a result of the opti­miza­tion, the sys­tem start­up time was reduced by 10 sec­onds.

For the puri­ty of the exper­i­ment in Win­dows, autoload adjust­ment, clean­ing and defrag­men­ta­tion were not pre­vi­ous­ly per­formed.

Using CCleaner

Our experts eval­u­at­ed the effec­tive­ness of using solu­tions built into the oper­at­ing sys­tem in com­par­i­son with the pop­u­lar opti­miza­tion pro­gram
CClean­er. Test­ing was per­formed on the free ver­sion with basic set­tings.

The main fea­ture of CClean­er, declared on the home page, is high-qual­i­ty clean­ing of the hard dri­ve. Dur­ing a test run, the pro­gram detects and offers to delete 540 MB of tem­po­rary files. Let’s ana­lyze where this fig­ure came from.

The sys­tem cleanup util­i­ty, run in par­al­lel on the same sys­tem, found 251 MB. It should be not­ed here that Win­dows does not take into account the data of third-par­ty browsers.

In the set­tings of Fire­fox installed in the sys­tem, we find anoth­er 293 MB. To clean them reg­u­lar­ly, just check the box marked in the screen­shot.

Sim­ple math gives us 251+293=544 MB ver­sus CClean­er’s 540 MB. The dif­fer­ence can be attrib­uted to the error. Thus, there is no ques­tion of any “advanced method” of clean­ing. For a “mod­est” price of 10$, the user gets what he already has in the oper­at­ing sys­tem.

Replacing a hard drive with an SSD

The above meth­ods are designed to pro­gram­mat­i­cal­ly opti­mize Win­dows with­out using rad­i­cal meth­ods such as reset­ting the con­fig­u­ra­tion or rein­stalling. A sig­nif­i­cant boot accel­er­a­tion, depend­ing on the PC con­fig­u­ra­tion, more than three times, can only be achieved by replac­ing the HDD with an SSD. Com­par­a­tive analy­sis gives the aver­age load time:

1. HDD 45 to 65 sec­onds;

2. SSD from 16 to 25 sec­onds.

Aver­age read/write speed:

1. HDD: 60–110 Mb/s (at 5400 rpm);

2. SSD: 700‑1200 Mb/s.

High data pro­cess­ing speed allows the oper­at­ing sys­tem to boot faster and work with­out notice­able “freezes”.

Finally

A review by our experts shows that Win­dows 10 has a suf­fi­cient set of built-in tools to speed up load­ing at the soft­ware lev­el. The oper­at­ing sys­tem fea­tures allow you to con­fig­ure auto­mat­ic start­up of pro­grams, clean up tem­po­rary files and opti­mize the per­for­mance of your hard dri­ve. The use of “tweak­ers” and “opti­miz­ers” only leads to dupli­ca­tion of these func­tions and may adverse­ly affect the sta­bil­i­ty of the OS.