Although Windows 10 is an efficient system, its performance is bound to dwindle due to bugs, viruses, malware or hardware glitches. Swati Aggarwal, technical lead at IBM India Pvt Ltd, walks you through the best ways to speed up, optimise and improve its performance. 

Restart the device
Shutting down and restarting the device is the first thing to do. It improves performance as shutting down closes all the running applications and processes. The data stored in memory gets cleared, solving technical issues. 

Disable startup apps
Many applications can configure themselves to start automatically during a startup and continue to run in the background, wasting valuable system resources that can significantly slow down the experience. If you want to speed up Windows 10, you should disable all these applications. 

Disable apps, re-launch on start-up
Windows 10 has a feature that can restart the apps from your last session after a reboot even before you sign in. Although this is a useful feature that can speed up the process to resume where you left off quickly, it can also impact the system performance.

Uninstall non-essential apps
Usually, new devices come bundled with many applications you do not need, including the usual bloatware and system tools that you will never use and that only waste space on the hard drive. When trying to increase the system’s performance, remove non-essential applications. 

Install quality apps only
Here is a well-known piece of advice. Old and poorly designed apps, and apps that load unnecessary features, can negatively affect performance. Also, just because an app comes from a known company does not mean it is good.

Typically, you want to install apps available from the Microsoft Store, which have been checked for security and performance. If the app is not available through the store, only download apps from trusted sources and confirm they were designed for Windows 10. 

Use drive defragmentation
If you have a device with older hardware with a traditional rotating platters hard drive, organising the data can increase the machine’s responsiveness. 

Perform malware scan
When a device starts to operate slow, this could be a…