How to speed up Windows 11 (without the snake oil)

Most "speed up Windows" advice online was written for Windows 7, or it was written to sell you something. The real answer is duller than that. A modern Windows 11 box is slow for a few boring reasons you can fix yourself. Too many startup apps. A pile of bloat phoning home. A drive that's old, full, or never sees a TRIM. A power plan choking your CPU to save three watts.

Fix those four and the wins are real. Below is how to do each by hand. Then, if you'd rather click once, how BRUTAL Optimizer does the same work in one click.

1. Cut your startup apps

Biggest win on most machines. Costs you nothing. Every app that launches at sign-in eats boot time and squats in RAM forever — Spotify, Discord, Steam, the Adobe updater, the Razer and Logitech daemons, three "helper" services you've never once opened on purpose.

Hit Ctrl+Shift+Esc for Task Manager, open the Startup apps tab, sort by Startup impact. Disable anything rated High or Medium that you don't need running before you've even clicked it. You're not uninstalling anything. You're telling it to stop auto-launching. The app opens fine when you actually want it.

Be honest about "need." Your antivirus and your cloud-sync client, fine. A game launcher's web helper? No. A printer's tray icon? Not a chance.

2. Find the actual hogs in Task Manager

Before you change anything else, watch what your PC is actually doing. Open Task Manager, click Processes, and sort by CPU. Then Memory. Then Disk. Let it sit for 30 seconds.

You want the one process pinning a resource while you sit idle. Usual suspects: a runaway browser tab, an indexing job, a stuck update service, a sync client re-hashing your whole library. If something's chewing 100% disk at idle, that's your slowdown. Not your "old" PC.

Write down what you find. A fix aimed at the real offender beats a hundred generic "optimizations."

3. Uninstall bloat (and stop the telemetry that matters)

Settings → Apps → Installed apps. Scroll. You'll hit trialware, manufacturer "experience" suites, toolbars, apps you forgot you installed. Remove what you don't use. Fewer programs means fewer background services and fewer startup entries — it compounds.

On telemetry: some is worth killing, most of the scary-sounding stuff is noise. The honest move is to flip the reversible toggles that actually do something — advertising ID, tailored experiences, activity history, a couple of the diagnostic-data feeds — and leave Windows Update and security telemetry alone. Don't go gutting services blind off a YouTube tutorial. Half those "tweaks" break Store apps or Windows Update, and you won't notice until weeks later when it's hard to trace back.

4. Free real disk space

A near-full drive is a slow drive, especially once Windows runs short on room for its pagefile and temp churn. The built-in tools handle this. You don't need third-party junk.

Turn on Storage Sense (Settings → System → Storage) so temp files and the Recycle Bin clear on a schedule. For a one-time sweep, run Disk Cleanup (or "Cleanup recommendations" under Storage) and clear Windows Update leftovers, temp files, and old Delivery Optimization downloads.

One rule: trust measured numbers, not promises. A cleaner should tell you how many bytes it actually freed by re-checking free space before and after, not flash a made-up "4.2 GB cleaned!" Anything counting a DNS flush or freed RAM as "disk space" is lying to your face.

5. Check drive health and TRIM

If your PC was fast and slowly got worse over years, the drive itself might be the story. Check it.

SSD or NVMe — which is nearly every Windows 11 machine — needs TRIM, not defrag. Open "Defragment and Optimize Drives," select the drive, look at the media type. Windows labels SSDs correctly. Click Optimize and it runs a TRIM/ReTrim, which is the right operation. It does not defragment your SSD. Defragmenting flash just burns write cycles for zero gain.

A real spinning HDD is the one case where defrag actually helps. The same tool runs a proper defrag on it.

For the deeper read — wear percentage, power-on hours, temperature, SMART status — use a tool that shows what the drive actually reports. BRUTAL's Drive Health does exactly that, gates defrag to confirmed HDDs only, and refuses to overwrite-wipe flash. If a drive reports high wear or read errors, no software trick fixes that. It's telling you to back up and budget for a replacement.

6. Fix the power plan

Windows ships on "Balanced," which parks cores and downclocks your CPU hard to save power. On a desktop wired to a wall socket, that's performance thrown away for no reason.

Settings → System → Power → set the power mode to Best performance. For the full unlock, the hidden Ultimate Performance plan stops core parking and holds clocks up. On a laptop, leave Balanced while you're on battery. This one's a desktop move.

7. Update the drivers that matter

You don't need to update every driver on the box. You need the GPU driver current, especially for games and video, plus chipset, storage, and network drivers if they're years stale. Pull them from the actual vendor — NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, your laptop maker — never a "driver updater" that smuggles in its own junk.

Before any big driver install, set a restore point. Drivers are the one thing that can drop you at a black screen, and a restore point is your two-minute insurance against that.

8. The myths to skip

Here's the part nobody selling an "optimizer" wants you reading. These do nothing, or they do harm: