How to speed up your laptop’s booting time

Laptops are some of the most versatile pieces of technology we have today, but even they are susceptible to aging components and memory buildup. Both of these factors can have detrimental effects on any piece of technology, and laptops are no different.

When a laptop has been used for quite some time, it can get slow, and of the areas where you may notice this change is the boot time, which is the time it takes to start up your laptop after a shut down.

The good news is that boot times can be improved. Here’s a few ways to improve the boot time or startup time on your laptop.

Upgrade to SSD storage

While there are multiple ways to improve the boot times on your laptop, the one that will give you the biggest boost is SSD storage. If your laptop boots on an HDD (hard disk drive), and supports an upgrade, try upgrading to SSD storage, or at least boot from an SSD drive partition. This should make your boot time significantly shorter.

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Disable a few startup programs

A single startup program may not have much of an effect on your boot time, but when a bunch of programs or games startup along with Windows, it slows the whole system down. To fix this, press Ctrl+Shift+Esc and in the Task Manager window, head to the Startup tab. Here, find any programs marked as high and disable their automatic startup. Remember that you can manually start any program after Windows has booted if required.

Enable Windows Fast Startup

Windows Fast Startup is a handy tool that helps any laptop or desktop boot faster, by changing how the computer processes the shutdown. To enable it, go to Control Panel > Power Options, and click on the ‘Choose what the power buttons do’ option on the left panel. Here, you can click on ‘Turn on fast startup’ in the list of options, and you should immediately see faster boot times.

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Run Windows updates when you’re not using the laptop

Windows updates have somewhat of a bad rep because of popping up when you need something done fast. Clubbed with Windows booting up, this can take anywhere from a couple of minutes to half an hour depending on factors like the update size and your specifications. To avoid Windows Updates being clubbed with your boot times, get updates installed when

Use Sleep over Shut Down

If none of the above-mentioned methods have helped you make your boot time wait shorter, you can try putting your laptop on sleep as a last resort. This will save all your tasks in the memory, and unlike a conventional shutdown, the laptop will be able to just resume from there instead of booting up completely the next time you want to use it.

Those are five ways to make your laptop boot up faster by shortening the wait time in the middle. If none of these methods work for you, and your boot time is exceptionally slow, you should also consider upgrading to a new laptop altogether for better overall performance.