A PC with a slow startup is really annoying, and this is caused mostly by all the software you may have installed, especially if it's on your startup list, which we will go over and fix for you. But other factors are included as well, such as your registry not being that organized, which we will fix too.

To start off this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to manually remove these programs. Now, you may wonder how some of this stuff got on your system, like if there is anything you don't remember installing. This can happen many ways, one such example would be like say you wanted to edit some audio files, and went to download a piece of software such as Audacity, but you forgot to click custom installation, and went with express. This could automatically install extra things along side it, that you didn't ask for, and in all probability, don't even need.

Go to your start menu, and click on, or search for "Control Panel", and select this, and then you should see the "Uninstall a program" option, like so:

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Then once you find any software from the list displayed before you that you don't want or need, you can click on any program to select it, then click the option to uninstall it up at the top like so:

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Simply go through this whole list, and anything that you don't recognize, look it up, and if it's not important, and you don't need it, remove it. LOOK IT UP FIRST, I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH. DON'T JUST UNINSTALL WHAT DOESN'T LOOK FAMILIAR, LOOK IT UP FIRST. I put in all caps to make sure those who just skim these things will see it. Afterwards, there may still be programs you need, but that you don't use every session, so later on in this tutorial, I will show you how to disable these things from starting with your operating system, so they'll only start up when it's your intention to start them by running said application, which will take stress off of your CPU and make your startup faster by not launching these things automatically on every single startup. But that's part of the final step which is cleanup, so for now, just continue along to the next part of the tutorial.

Viruses and malware are nasty business, but luckily, there many free softwares that you can use to your hearts desire, to help fix this problems. Now please note, installing 7 different anti-virus programs all at once isn't smart, so please don't assume that the more of them you have, the more safe you are, because this is false. There's many different anti-virus programs you can choose from, and I'll list some free ones below, with the appropriate links to the developers websites. Do your research before selecting one though, as many components go into finding the right anti-virus, such as ease of use, effectiveness, and other such traits. Some anti-virus programs allow you to use certain components free, which others include only in the premium versions, but at the same time, that second anti-virus developer, may have a free version as well, that also has some things free, that others have only as premium. So do some research, and choose the right one for you. As for registry cleaning and such, some anti-virus software includes features like this, but ignore that when determining the one you want, as there will be a completely separate piece of software later on in this tutorial, that takes care of all of that for you and even more. For now though, here's some links to some free, yet effective, anti-virus programs:

BitDefender:


AVG:


MalwareBytes:


Avast:


360 Total Security:


Avira


Of course there are paid versions of these, but clicking "Download" instead of "Buy" in any case will bring you to the free version. Some of them like AVG will link you to the free version right from the homepage of their site, but remember what I said, choose the one that best fits you.

So there's many services that go into a Windows OS, most of them which run from boot up to shut down, but you don't need every single one of them. Some of them are for things such as bluetooth, which if you aren't a bluetooth user, you can just disable. Services won't play a huge part, but if you're an optimization junkie like me, and have the time to do so, you could actually go through and look up everything on the huge list of services, and disable what you don't need. I'm not gonna go through every service, for now, I'm gonna limit it to non-microsoft services, which I only have a few of. The rest, you can look through, and do research on, and disable if it suits you. Everyone has different uses for everything, so my way to do this isn't gonna benefit you as much as it does me, you need to set it up how you like it.

First, open a CMD window, and type in "msconfig", and in the window that pops up, select the Services tab like so:

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And here's the window that pops up, where you can select the Services tab:

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Once it's opened, you will have a list like the picture above. There's an option to hide Microsoft services, select that, and then go through the list of installed services that come with some software like my Firefox update service, or Adobe stuff, and you can just disable the services you don't want or need. I do it to get every bit of CPU speed I can muster up, and it keeps my system running as smooth as possible, so I like to keep my services as minimal as I can.

to disable a service, simply uncheck the box next to it, I've hidden Microsoft services, and disabled the unimportant stuff, like so:

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After you have done that, simply click "Apply", and then "Okay" to close that window, and as for the CMD window, you can close that too.

Now, there are many performance options in Windows itself, that can speed up or slow down your system depending on if they're activated or not. Most of these have very little effect, but for someone looking to take any step possible to speed it up even the smallest bit, here's some other things you can do. These do include the use of aero, and the snapping features, pretty much anything that is there purely for visual reasons, you can change. Such as say you have a page minimized, and you click it to bring it up, there's a style in place that makes it look like it's coming from the small icon at the bottom and transforming into full size, but if you disable that, it'll just snap to it's position on screen with no transition effect. As I said, it doesn't have a huge difference at all, but if you really want to change these settings, here's how.

First, open up your start menu, and type in "Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows" (They need a new name for that lol) and select the option displayed in this image:

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And once you select that, this screen will appear:

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Now there are quick options you see right away, like adjust for appearance, or adjust for performance, or even let Windows choose whats best (Yea like that's ever been a good idea lol). So there's some options to choose from, each that mess with performance a small bit, either speeding or slowing your system depending on it's it's enabled or disabled. Go through these, test what they do, look what works best for you. I keep mine on because I do like the display styles, and the CPU speed I've saved elsewhere, can go here a little bit, I don't mind, I just like how it look so most of mine stay enabled.

So let's get down useful software, what they do, and where to get them, links will be provided:

CCleaner


DeFraggler


Speccy


Core temp


Rainmeter

So, you've done quite a bit possibly while following this guide, but now, it is time for cleanup my friends. Earlier, I talked about CCleaner, if you don't have it, go download it, there's link above in my "Useful Software and Applications" section. After downloading it, follow along. First, run the cleaner. It's simple, just open it, and on the first tab, click run cleaner. You may edit what it will scan and clean, here's an illustration:

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And after it's completed, which doesn't take long unless you have a LOT of crap built up:

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next you can move onto the "Tools" tab, we'll leave the registry for last. Within tools, you'll be able to uninstall anything else you might have missed earlier through control panel, and you'll be able to edit what starts up with Windows. The things I have set to start up with are CCleaner, Lightshot for image capturing, my trackpad driver, and Rainmeter. That's all I have set to run when Windows boots, and it let's my system boot so much faster, here have a look:

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Then, for the final step, we can move onto the registry, it's pretty straight forward too, first go to the Registry tab, click on "Scan for Issues", then wait til it's done. After it completes, it'll ask if you wanna make a registry backup, which saves by default to your "Documents" folder, I always click yes, just in case, and after that, you can just click on "Fix all Selected Issues", and there you go. You can do this multiple times until your scans stop showing any issues, and here's an illustration of what it looks like:

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