How To Optimize My Laptop

Disable Notifications That You Do Not Need

Some notifications are sent to your laptop that you dont need. For example, if youve been using Windows for a while, you do not need notifications about suggestions on how to use it.

Open Settings via the taskbars search box and select System.

On your left, click on Notifications & Actions. Here uncheck all of these boxes do not disable important notifications. These appear lower.

How To Speed Up Your Windows Laptop: 9 Ways To Boost Pc Performance

Steve Larner Steve Larner carries over ten years of content management, editing, and writing experience in a wide variety of industries. As a tech enthusiast, Steve also enjoys exploring new products and devices and helping others solve their technological problems. Read more May 21, 2021

Do you suffer from a slow laptop? Before you go out and get a shiny new one, there are several things you can do to give your current model a speed boost. Tinkering with startup programs, defragmenting the hard disk drive , and using a third-party cleaner are just a few ways to boost PC speed and give old laptops new life or newer models faster speeds. Regardless, there are even more gains to be had if youre willing to get your hands dirty.

Here are nine affordable and relatively easy ways to squeeze every ounce of performance from your old laptop.

Get Rid Of Programs You Dont Need

If you have a lot of programs installed on your Windows 10 gaming PC, theyll compete for precious RAM which means lower FPS while gaming.

Avast Cleanup addresses this issue on two fronts: first, by uninstalling programs you arent using, and second, by preventing other programs from hogging RAM with background activity. Heres how to get more FPS from your gaming machine with Avast Cleanup:

Avast Cleanup will hibernate these programs when youre not using them, then wake them up when its time to dive back in. In the meantime, youll optimize Windows 10 for gaming and increase FPS thanks to more RAM and CPU power for your games.

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Disable System Visual Effects

On Windows 10, you will find many visual effects from animations to shadows to more advanced visuals elements, such as blur and transparency, reveal highlight, and part of the Fluent Design language.

Although these effects can make the experience more visually appealing, they also require system resources that can slow down computers with older hardware. However, you can disable these effects to save resources and make Windows 10 seem a little faster.

Recommendation #: Wise Care 365 Pc Cleaning And Speed

Fortunately, several utilities are available to hunt down and remove personal information and unwanted/unnecessary files and extensions. One popular program is Wise Care 365.

The software is FREE, but there is a paid Pro version that unlocks additional features.

This program is fast yet reliable. The application includes several optimization processes, such as Registry Cleaner, Common Cleaner, Advanced Cleaner, System Tuneup, Privacy Protector , and more.

Wise Care 365 is the fastest weve seen that produces very effective and safe results. If you navigate to the About Us > Awards webpage, youll see row upon row of awards from sources like Softpedia, PC World, PC Magazine, ZDNet, and more. No, this is not a sales pitch, although Ive used the software for over five years now without having any problems. Regardless, back up your system and important files before making any advanced changes, such as the Services optimization options found under System Tuneup > Startup Manager.

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Optimize Your Laptop For Streaming

If you spend copious amounts of time online, and you enjoy streaming, then you need the best laptops for streaming possible because they need to keep up with the multiple web applications you are going to have open at any given time. What you may not be aware of is that all these web applications will impact your streaming capabilities directly.

Opening up multiple web applications leaves your computer vulnerable to what is called caching. Your laptop is downloading thousands of small files that are needed to display these pages, and that is going to slow down the streaming capabilities.

Therefore, you want to either restart your computer, which should delete those temporary files or clear your cache. In doing so, your laptop should find it easier to stream.

Defrag Your Hard Disk

Old mechanical hard drives can often suffer from fragmentation. This happens when the various bits that make up a complete file are scattered across the physical surface of the drive platter. Because the drive head has to travel further across the surface of the disk to read all the separate portions, this slows the machine down. Defragmentation – or defragging – restructures the disk so that all of the bits that make up various files are grouped in the same physical area, which hopefully increases the speed of hard drive access at the same time. Note, however, that because solid-state drives do not use spinning-platter disks, they are immune to fragmentation.

Its easy to check whether a physical disk needs defragging simply head to the storage tab in Windows 10s system settings menu, and click the option labelled Optimise drives. This will open the optimisation wizard, which allows you to analyse all of your machines drives individually and presents you with a percentage showing how fragmented each one is. From there, you can defrag the drive, which should result in more stability and faster performance.

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Use Readyboost To Help Improve Performance

ReadyBoost lets you use a removable drive, like a USB flash drive, to improve your PCs performance without opening your PC and adding more memory . To use ReadyBoost, youll need a USB flash drive or a memory card that has at least 500 MB free and a high data transfer rate.

To use ReadyBoost

Note: ReadyBoost can’t be used if Windows is installed on a solid state drive . An SSD is already fast, and ReadyBoost won’t be able to improve its performance.

Overclock Your Laptops Gpu

Overclocking entails increasing your laptops performance speed beyond what the manufacturer intended and then allowing it to consume more power to support this change. You can overclock both your laptops CPU and GPU. If youre using a laptop with Intel processors, use Intel® Extreme Tuning Utility to overclock it.

You can overclock your laptops GPU if it uses AMD Ryzen processors with a Radeon graphics card. However, I must warn you that overclocking was initially made for desktops because you can actually purchase the hardware to support this process. Therefore, you must know your laptops limits before attempting this. If you would like to know how to do this, read our guide on How to Overclock a Laptop.

For the best gaming experience, you must ensure that your laptop is optimized to do so, especially when it is not competent enough. All of the processes highlighted here are not risky since they can be reversed, except overclocking. We would like to know if you enjoyed reading this and if it was helpful to you. So, please leave a comment below to inform us if that was the case.

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Use The Windows 10 Power Troubleshooter

If the battery life on your laptop is poor, and you cant determine the cause, the Windows 10 Power Troubleshooter might identify the problem. You can use this for other issues, too.

To get started, right-click the Start button, and then click Settings. From here, click Update & Security > Troubleshoot > Power, and then click Run the Troubleshooter to activate the tool.

Windows will search the current settings for potential issues that could be impacting battery life. It will change any mismatched settings automatically to fix any detected issues.

The troubleshooting tool isnt perfect, but it should resolve any high-impact settings that could drain your laptops battery over the long-term.

If the battery life of your laptop isnt meeting your expectations, try to give it some regular TLC. Charge it often, and try to keep the battery level above 50 percent whenever you can. If you regularly drain your laptops battery to zero percent, it can cause it to wear out more quickly.

How To Improve Display Settings Further With Nvidia

To begin with, you must open the NVIDIA control panel. To do this, click the Show Hidden Icons button on the far right of your taskbar.

Next, right click the NVIDIA icon in the hidden icons section. After that, you can click on NVIDIA Control Panel.

Once inside the NVIDIA Control Panel, you can click Adjust desktop color settings and from there you will have a number of sliders to control.

Its up to you how youd like to set your display settings here. Adding brightness, contrast, gamma, and digital vibrance can make colors pop out more in video games and movies.

If you want more saturation and more vibrant colors, you can adjust these settings.

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Check Your Internet Speeds

There are multiple places online that allow you to check your internet speed connection. Sites such as Speedtest.net will test your internet speed, and it will enable you to check if your internet is running optimally.

You should already know what you download speed you are paying for with your provider, and if your test isnt remotely close to this, call your provider and get your ISP to check.

Keeping Things Running Smoothly

Once youve cleaned up your computer by implementing some of the tips above, no doubt youll want to keep it running at top speed. To avoid getting frustrated with lackluster performance, its a good idea to schedule a monthly cleanup. Use the above list of tips as a handy checklist and youre all set.

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Laptop Gaming Performance: Improved

Who’d have thought that you could so much to improve gaming performance on a laptop computer? While most apply purely to Windows 10 laptops some tips can be transferred to equivalent settings on macOS and Linux.

Let’s review the 10 top ways to make your laptop faster for gaming:

Update Using The Official Website

You can also update your drivers through the official website of your GPU product type.

Nvidia Drivers

If you have an Nvidia card, you can go to and fill in the form based on which type of card you own.

Using this website is very straightforward, but we have attached a screenshot below as a guide. After you have entered your graphics cards info, click start search.

After hitting the search button, you will see a bunch of drivers that are available for download. We recommend going for the latest game ready driver to ensure stability. Click the Get Download button to start the download.

You can now start installing the new driver as soon as your download is finished.

Keep in mind, however, that you should create a system restore point before installing the driver, this is in case there are problems with the latest driver. This option will be available during the installation process.

AMD Drivers

Next, for AMD cards, go to and search for the type of graphics card you have. Attached below is a screenshot as a guide. You may also use the search for your product option using the drop-down list found in the screenshot below. We highly recommend using the list for a faster search.

After searching for your product type and selecting it, click the Submit button. You will then be redirected to the Download Page. Select the current operating system that you have and, finally, click on .

Intel Drivers

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Pc Booster #: Switch To Linux

A more drastic option to speed up your laptop is to install a Linux distribution instead, such as Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mint, Dolphin, etc.

While its not as flexible with gaming as Windows 10, it is gradually getting closer to that mark, but it is very flexible with many utilities and apps. Linux is versatile, customizable, and fast. Use it for music, word processing, surfing the web, designing apps, building websites, downloading videos, and much more. Its free, easy to install, and there are enough versions to suit everyone, including low-resource options that will make your laptop flyat the cost of features and visual appeal.

Update Your Graphics Card Drivers

Your graphics card is the centerpiece of your gaming experience, but you cant unleash its true performance without the right graphics driver. Updating your graphics card driver can be a huge FPS booster. Take a look at this recent chart from GPU manufacturer Nvidia, which shows how gaming performance improves with updated drivers.

Updating to the latest driver boosted performance by up to 23%. Source: Nvidia

Heres how to update the drivers for the Nvidia GeForce, ATI Radeon, and Intel HD graphics cards:

A 2021 driver update lowered the latency for games such as Overwatch. Source: Nvidia

Regardless of which GPU you have, updating your driver can give you an immediate FPS boost and optimize Windows 10 for gaming. AVG Driver Updater automatically updates all your computers drivers for consistently optimized performance. When you dont need to worry about updating your drivers, youre free to focus on more important things like actually playing, and dominating, your games.

Wait, how do I even know what graphics card I own?

To find out the manufacturer and exact serial number of your graphics card, all you need to do is follow these steps:

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Update Graphics Card Driver

Updating graphics card drivers is one of the most common ways to optimize gaming performance on a laptop. A new version of driver updates is released regularly to fix bugs from previous versions and to enhance gaming performance.

Some features are also added during these updates. So it is essential to check for updates regularly.

There are several ways on how to update a GPU driver. In this section, we will guide you on how to update your driver in the most convenient way. You may also have to restart your system after each update.

Things can go wrong when you update your drivers, so before updating anything on your computer, make sure that you backup your system first.

You can follow these steps on how to back up your system using System Restore www.gizmofusion.com/how-to-backup-your-system-using-windows-system-restore.

There are three ways to update your graphics card drivers, via Windows Update, official websites themselves, or from dedicated GPU software.

Turn On Windows Game Mode

Windows Game Mode focuses your computers resources on your game and boosts FPS. Its one of the easiest Windows 10 performance tweaks for gaming.

If you dont already have it on, heres how to get better FPS by turning on Windows Game Mode:

Windows Game Mode will automatically detect when youre playing a game and optimize Windows 10 for gaming.

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Tweaking The Geforce Experience Settings

The best part about using GeForce Experience is that it will automatically optimize each game for you. It will analyze your system and will provide recommended settings for each game based on your systems specifications.

This feature is available when you are opening the GeForce Experience app for the first time. You can also access this setting by going into the GeForce Experience home tab, and then choose your desired game and click OPTIMIZE

Changing The Power Plan Of Your Desktop Computer To High Performance

Computers have different power plans to control how the computer uses power. Some settings optimize battery life by lowering performance, but High Performance will increase the speed and performance of the computer. Note that this will only work on a desktop, as the HighPerformance setting on a laptop will drain the battery.

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Tweak The Amd/ati Control Center

The AMD/ATI Control Center is another fantastic way to squeeze out more performance and increase the visual quality of your games. To fire it up, right-click on your desktop, select Radeon Settings, and head over to the Gaming Settings.From here, you can set individual graphic settings for games you have installed. But we suggest going with the Global Settings as our recommendations usually apply to all games.

These are the most important settings: