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Want Windows 10 to run faster? We’ve got help. In just a few minutes you can try out this baker’s dozen of tips; your machine will be zippier and less prone to performance and system issues.

1. Change your power settings

If you’re using Windows 10’s “Power saver” plan, you’re slowing down your PC. That plan reduces your PC’s performance in order to save energy. (Even desktop PCs typically have a “Power saver” plan.) Changing your power plan from “Power saver” to “High performance” or “Balanced” will give you an instant performance boost.

To do it, launch the Control Panel app, then select Hardware and Sound > Power Options. You’ll typically see two options: “Balanced (recommended)” and “Power saver.” (Depending on your make and model, you might see other plans here as well, including some branded by the manufacturer.) To see the “High performance” setting, click the down arrow by “Show additional plans.”

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To change your power setting, simply choose the one you want, then exit Control Panel. “High performance” gives you the most oomph, but uses the most power; “Balanced” finds a happy medium between power use and better performance; and “Power saver” does everything it can to give you as much battery life as possible. Desktop users have no reason to choose “Power saver,” and even laptop users should consider the “Balanced” option when unplugged — and “High performance” when connected to a power source.

2. Disable programs that run on startup

One reason your Windows 10 PC may feel sluggish is that you’ve got too many programs running in the background — programs that you rarely or never use. Stop them from running, and your PC will run more smoothly.

Start by launching the Task Manager: Press Ctrl-Shift-Esc, right-click the lower-right corner of your screen and select Task Manager, or type task manager into the Windows 10 search box and press Enter. If the Task Manager launches as a compact app with no tabs, click “More details” at the bottom of your screen. The Task Manager will then appear in all of its full-tabbed glory. There’s plenty you can do with it, but we’re going to focus only on killing unnecessary programs that run at startup.

Click the Startup tab. You’ll see a list of the programs and services that launch when you start Windows. Included on the list is each program’s name as well as its publisher, whether it’s enabled to run on startup, and its “Startup impact,” which is how much it slows down Windows 10 when the system starts up.

To stop a program or service from launching at startup, right-click it and select “Disable.” This doesn’t disable the program entirely; it only prevents it from launching at startup — you can always run the application after launch. Also, if you later decide you want it to launch at startup, you can just return to this area of the Task Manager, right-click the application and select “Enable.”

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Many of the programs and services that run on startup may be familiar to you, like OneDrive or Evernote Clipper. But you may not recognize many of them. (Anyone who immediately knows what “bzbui.exe” is, please raise your hand. No fair Googling it first.)

The Task Manager helps you get information about unfamiliar programs. Right-click an item and select “Properties” for more information about it, including its location on your hard disk, whether it has a digital signature, and other information such as the version number, the file size and the last time it was modified.

You can also right-click the item and select “Open file location.” That opens File Explorer and takes it to the folder where the file is located, which may give you another clue about the program’s purpose.

Finally, and most helpfully, you can select “Search online” after you right-click. Bing will then launch with links to sites with information about the program or service.

If you’re really nervous about one of the listed applications, you can go to a site run by Reason Software called Should I Block It? and search for the file name. You’ll usually find very solid information about the program or service.

Now that you’ve selected all the programs that you want to disable at startup, the next time you restart your computer, the system will be a lot less concerned with unnecessary programs.

3. Shut off Windows tips and tricks

As you use your Windows 10 PC, Windows keeps an eye on what you’re doing and offers tips about things you might want to do with the operating system. In my experience, I’ve rarely if ever found these “tips”  helpful. I also don’t like the privacy implications of Windows constantly taking a virtual look over my shoulder.

Windows watching what you’re doing and offering advice can also make your PC run more sluggishly. So if you want to speed things up, tell Windows to stop giving you advice. To do so, click the Start button, select the Settings icon and then go to System > Notifications & actions. Scroll down to the Notifications section and uncheck the box marked “Get tips, tricks, and suggestions as you use Windows.”

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That’ll do the trick.

4. Stop OneDrive from syncing

Microsoft’s cloud-based OneDrive file storage, built into Windows 10, keeps files synced and up to date on all of your PCs. It’s also a useful backup tool so that if your PC or its hard disk dies, you still have all your files intact, waiting for you to restore them.

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It does this by constantly syncing files between your PC and cloud storage — something that can also slow down your PC. That’s why one way to speed up your PC is to stop the syncing. Before you turn it off permanently, though, you’ll want to check whether it is actually slowing down your PC.

To do so, right-click the OneDrive icon (it looks like a cloud) in the notification area on the right side of the taskbar, then click the More button at the bottom of the screen. From the popup screen that appears, click “Pause syncing” and select either 2 hours, 8 hours or 24 hours, depending upon how long you want it paused. During that time, gauge whether you’re seeing a noticeable speed boost.

If so, and you decide you do indeed want to turn off syncing, right-click the OneDrive icon, and from the popup, select Settings > Account. Click “Unlink this PC,” and then from the screen that appears, click “Unlink account.” When you do that, you’ll still be able to save your files to your local OneDrive folder, but it won’t sync with the cloud.

If you find that OneDrive slows down your PC but prefer to keep using it, you can try to troubleshoot OneDrive problems. For info on how to do that, check out Microsoft’s “Fix OneDrive sync problems” page.

5. Turn off search indexing

Windows 10 indexes your hard disk in the background, allowing you — in theory — to search your PC more quickly than if no indexing were being done. But slower PCs that use indexing can see a performance hit, and you can give them a speed boost by turning off indexing. Even if you have an SSD disk, turning off indexing can improve your speed, because the constant writing to disk that indexing does can eventually slow down SSDs.

To get the maximum benefit in Windows 10, you need to turn indexing off completely. To do so, type services.msc in the Windows 10 search box and press Enter. The Services app appears. Scroll down to either Indexing Service or Windows Search in the list of services. Double-click it, and from the screen that appears, click Stop. Then reboot your machine. Your searches may be slightly slower, although you may not notice the difference. But you should get an overall performance boost.

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If you’d like, you can turn off indexing only for files in certain locations. To do this, type index in the Windows 10 search box and click the Indexing Options result that appears. The Indexing Options page of the Control Panel appears. Click the Modify button, and you’ll see a list of locations that are being indexed, such as Microsoft Outlook, your personal files, and so on. Uncheck the box next to any location, and it will no longer be indexed.

6. Clean out your hard disk

If you’ve got a bloated hard disk filled with files you don’t need, you could be slowing down your PC. Cleaning it out can give you a speed boost. Windows 10 has a surprisingly useful built-in tool for doing this called Storage Sense. Go to Settings > System > Storage and at the top of the screen, move the toggle from Off to On. When you do this, Windows constantly monitors your PC and deletes old junk files you no longer need — temporary files, files in the Downloads folder that haven’t been changed in a month, and old Recycle Bin files.

You can customize how Storage Sense works and also use it to free up even more space than it normally would. Underneath Storage Sense, click “Configure Storage Sense or run it now.” From the screen that appears, you can change how often Storage Sense deletes files (every day, every week, every month or when your storage space gets low).

You can also tell Storage Sense to delete files in your Download folder, depending on how long they’ve been there, and set how long to wait to delete files in the Recycle Bin automatically. You can also have Storage Sense move files from your PC to the cloud in Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage if they’re not opened for a certain amount of time (every day, or every 14 days, 30 days or 60 days).

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You can also delete old versions of Windows that might be hogging space. At the bottom of the screen, check the box next to “Delete previous versions of Windows.” Storage Sense will then delete old versions of Windows ten days after you’ve installed an upgrade. Note that if you do this, you won’t be able to revert to the older version of Windows.

7. Clean out your Registry

Under the Windows hood, the Registry tracks and controls just about everything about the way Windows works and looks. That includes information about where your programs are stored, which DLLs they use and share, what file types should be opened by which program, and just about everything else.

But the Registry is a very messy thing. When you uninstall a program, for example, that program’s settings don’t always get cleaned up in the Registry. So over time, it can get filled with countless outdated settings of all types. And that can lead to system slowdowns.

Don’t even think of trying to clean any of this out yourself. It’s impossible. To do it, you need a Registry Cleaner. There are plenty available, some free and some paid. But there’s really no need to outright buy one, because the free Auslogics Registry Cleaner does a solid job.

Before using Auslogics or any other Registry Cleaner, you should back up your Registry so you can restore it if anything goes wrong. (Auslogics Registry Cleaner does this for you as well, but it can’t hurt to have it backed up twice.) To do your own Registry backup, type regedit.ext in the search box, then press Enter. That runs the Registry editor. From the File menu, select Export. From the screen that appears, make sure to choose the “All” option in the Export range section at the bottom of the screen. Then choose a file location and file name and click Save. To restore the Registry, open the Registry editor, select Import from the File menu, then open the file you saved.

Now download, install and run Auslogics Registry Cleaner. On the left-hand side of the screen you can select the kinds of Registry issues you want to clean up — for example, File Associations, Internet or Fonts. I generally select them all.

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Next, tell it to scan the Registry for problems. To do that, click “Scan Now,” and from the drop-down menu that appears, select Scan. That lets you first examine the Registry problems it finds. If you instead choose “Scan and Repair,” it makes the fixes without you checking them.

It now scans your Registry for errors, then shows you what it found. It ranks the errors according to their severity to help you decide which to fix. Click Repair when you’ve made your decision, and make sure that “Back Up Changes” is checked, so you can restore the Registry easily if something goes wrong.

I know it’s a narrative that we hear every year, but the iPhone 12 was truly poised to be a monumental release for Apple. Especially in light of the fact that iPhone sales have been somewhat stagnant over the past few years.

It was widely assumed that the iPhone 12 — the first iPhone with 5G support — was going to help boost year-over-year sales.

The coronavirus, however, may completely upend Apple’s plans. While it’s safe to assume that Apple will release the iPhone 12 in 2020, a September release is no longer a guarantee for a few reasons. For starters, there are questions as to whether or not the supply chain can sufficiently get up to speed in time for a September release. Second, travel restrictions involving China may have slightly pushed back milestones in the iPhone 12 development process.

Another issue to keep in mind is that unemployment in the U.S. is at an all-time high, which is to say that many people may not care about a new iPhone even if Apple manages to launch it in September.

In light of all this, a new research note from Wedbush analyst Dan Ives articulates that Apple will most likely delay the iPhone 12 release by a few months. And while this might see the iPhone 12 roll out sometime in October or November, Ives notes that a December 2020 release is also on the table:

While mass production of iPhone 12 would not likely start till the May timeframe, the pre-planning, design coordination, and normalizing component shortages in the supply chain make the Fall timeframe a very difficult one to hit for starters. Taking a step back, having one of its most important iPhone launches in its history into a consumer environment still recovering from the impact of this unprecedented COVID-19 dark storm would be a risky decision that likely gets shelved until holiday season in our opinion.

As Ives and others have noted, Apple will only get one chance to launch its first 5G iPhone and the company will naturally want to do everything it can to avoid a tepid response. Consequently, Ives adds that investors are already starting to “factor in a 5G launch that moves into the December timeframe.”

According to previous reports we’ve seen, Apple executives will make a decision regarding the iPhone 12 release date sometime in May. As for what we can expect out of Apple’s iPhone 12 lineup, a recent leak relays that Apple this year will release four new models. Note that the Pro models will all have triple-lens camera schemes and a LiDAR camera module similar to what Apple previously added to its recently unveiled iPad Pro.

Microsoft may have the next Windows 10 upgrade burning a hole in its pocket, but if it’s smart, the Redmond, Wash. developer will keep that code to itself for now.

In fact, software developers could do all tech users a big favor by slapping a moratorium on all non-security, feature-filled updates and upgrades until further notice.

Call it “software distancing,” but rather than make versions stand six feet apart force them to keep six months’ separation.

Why hold Windows 10 2004? Because we’re busy, in case you haven’t noticed

Microsoft must be eager to dispatch Windows 10 2004, the year’s spring feature upgrade: It’s been working on the refresh for more than a year now. But really, what’s the rush? After 13+ months of testing, testing and more testing, another half dozen isn’t going to hurt.

In fact, there are several reasons why postponing the upgrade makes good sense.

IT and users have higher priorities right now

At the top of the list is the simple fact that everyone has more important things to do than process a feature upgrade to Windows 10.

That item may be short-lived – it will get scratched out at some point – but that’s why timing must play a part in Microsoft’s decision (and outsiders’ appeals). Even for faster-acting companies, such as Microsoft itself, as well as Amazon and Google, it has been just one month since they told employees to head home and, if possible, work remotely.

Everyone is still settling in, especially those who have never worked at home or from the field for extended periods. Ditto for the IT staffs with little experience managing devices outside the office perimeter. Employees of all kinds, line workers and IT alike, are heads-down getting used to the situation, stressed out, if by nothing else (and there are many elses here), than by the newness of it all.

It won’t be like this the entire time America (and elsewhere) are locked down. People and organizations will adapt. But right now? They’re busy.

Bandwidth doesn’t grow on trees

Microsoft has already begun prepping IT personnel n the nuts and bolts of updating large numbers of remote PCs. One of the items it has focused on has been potential chokepoints, notably the VPN (virtual private network) many firms mandate when outside-the-perimeter machines access corporate assets and information.

Because workers now located at home are likely connecting to the corporate network via VPN, updates and upgrades may get shoved through the latter, overwhelming the VPN’s capacity. In several technical posts, including here and here, Microsoft has been showing admins how best to manage updates when VPNs are in place.

Ideally, Microsoft said, updates should not go through the VPN but directly to the Internet. “The Microsoft recommended approach is to configure the VPN client to only send traffic bound for corporate resources located on-premises via the VPN connection, allowing all other traffic to go directly to the Internet and to be routed accordingly,” the company asserted. “This is how the VPN is configured internally at Microsoft.”

Upgrades, of course, are significantly larger (measured in gigabytes) than the monthly updates on, say, Patch Tuesday – all the more reason why they would negatively impact the connections between remote clients and the company’s on-premises infrastructure.

And it’s all the more reason for Microsoft to back off on Windows 10 2004 until IT sorts out the VPN situation, or better yet, the bulk of the workforce returns to the office and its internal network.

In a more general sense, bandwidth is simply a precious commodity. Not everyone has a fat pipe for a home connection to the Internet, for instance. (Some may not have an Internet account at all, relying instead on their smartphone and a metered – and expensive – data plan from a mobile carrier.) What bandwidth is at hand is occupied with more important traffic.

“The last thing we need right now coming down our already-full pipes filled with Zoom and Team meetings is a feature release,” contended Susan Bradley, a computer network and security consultant, the moderator of the PatchMangement.org mailing list and the contributor known as “The Patch Lady” to the AskWoody.com Windows tip site.

Help desk personnel are stretched thin

Everyone is busy adjusting to the new regimes, but the help desk is busier than most. Personnel have scrambled to get remote workers up and running, helping employees diagnose problems with systems and network configurations outside the corporate standard, forwarding cables and monitors to at homers. And while much of what the reps did – and continue to do – could and can be done remotely, there are parts of their jobs that required them to be at a specific somewhere, like when they needed to do an in-person examination of a system to uncover the root of a problem.

Those cubicle calls are now so much history, forcing the help desk to make adjustments.

Throw in a feature upgrade, even one that goes smoothly, and the calls might well overwhelm the help resources. And if the upgrade goes south? (As some of Windows 10’s have.) No one even wants to think about that.

“We don’t have the excess help desk capacity,” argued Bradley. “We need to focus on security and not features at this time.”

By holding back Windows 10 2004, Microsoft could put more in it

For an upgrade that has been in the works – and in public testing with Insider participants – for more than a year, Windows 10 2004 looks light on the new features and functionality.

It’s not clear what within 2004 – at least of what Microsoft has revealed – required the extra effort. In February 2019, when Microsoft departed from its established schedule and began beta testing the first upgrade of 2020 before starting to test the second for 2019, the firm said “some things we are working on in 20H1 require a longer lead time.” (20H1 was Microsoft-ese for the first feature upgrade of 2020, or what later was numbered Windows 10 2004.)

Late last year, Microsoft severed the links between under-development features and future upgrades, saying that it would put the former into one of the latter “when they are ready.”

Microsoft has been testing numerous features that didn’t make it into 2004 – which was locked down, feature-wise, in late 2019 – and could put its money where its mouth is by using the additional time to add some to the upgrade.

Holding Windows 10 2004 would be a great excuse to scale back to one upgrade a year

Yet another reason 2004 should be postponed has nothing to do with the coronavirus pandemic. But Microsoft could take advantage of circumstances to do what many users want from the company: a single upgrade annually.

Microsoft, in fact, showed its hand last year when it downgraded the second upgrade to little more than a repeat of the first, a minor upgrade that included so few new features it was dubbed a “service pack.” During 2019, there was really just the one feature upgrade worthy of the name, even though Microsoft went through the distribution process twice.

Earlier changes by Redmond, including the lengthening of support for Windows 10 Enterprise and Education customers, then Microsoft’s abdication of control of when upgrades occur, put most customers on a once-a-year cadence. Microsoft would be smart to simplify Windows 10’s maintenance by reducing the number of upgrades issued to the number customers are typically installing.

Which is one per year.

If Microsoft were looking for an opportunity to downshift to one feature upgrade annually, this is it. Even those who still hewed to the Windows-as-a-service concept and saw value in multiple upgrades each year would likely accept the news that 2020 would offer just a single feature upgrade. (Microsoft, as it has done in the past, could couch the move as temporary but make it permanent after the crisis subsides.)

Giving the decision positive spin, a sacrifice for the greater good, should be a snap for Microsoft’s PR, enough perhaps to make many forget that Microsoft set great stock in a faster release tempo and explained the multiple yearly upgrades as necessary to keep pace with technology’s changes.

Microsoft should think of it as a win-win.

But, but…what about support and deadlines?

True, Microsoft would have to massage the schedule if it postpones the launch of Windows 10 2004, no matter the reason for the delay.

Fortunately, that’s as easily done as making an announcement, like the one last month when Microsoft added six months of support to the I-didn’t-know-you-could-still-run-that version, Windows 10 1709.

Windows 10 1903, which according to analytics company AdDuplex accounted for 51% of all Windows 10 versions as of March 25, would be one Microsoft would have to modify. Normally, Microsoft would begin to replace 1903 on PCs running Windows 10 Home or unmanaged systems running Windows 10 Pro, with 2004 around the end of July or start of August. (Windows 10 1903 is currently scheduled to end support Dec. 8.) A 2004 launch set for anything beyond late June or early July would make that difficult or impossible. Instead, Microsoft would likely extend 1903’s end-of-support, maybe by the same six months as 1709. (That would make 1903’s support run until June 8, 2021, a month later than 1909’s retirement of May 11. 2021. In this scenario, both 1903 and 1909 would be upgraded to 2004 by Microsoft early next year.)

On the other hand, if Microsoft took advantage of the COVID-19  crisis to scale back to an annual cadence, it would need to do more.

First, it should rename the feature upgrade to a more accurate four-digit number, like 2009, if it waits until September or October. By Microsoft’s rules, 2009 (née 2004) would receive 30 months of support on Windows 10 Enterprise and Windows 10 Education. Assuming an October launch, the version would exit support in April 2023. That would be a problem, seeing as how there wouldn’t be an upgrade released in the spring of 2023.

If Microsoft issues one upgrade annually, it would make sense to extend support to 36 months. As the following figure shows, enterprises would have to be fairly agile to run an every-two-years upgrade tempo when support ends at 30 months. Stretch support an additional six months, however, and companies would be able to upgrade on a two-year cycle and still take 12 months to test, pilot and deploy each version.

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Microsoft could stay stingy on Home and Pro, retaining the 18-month support span for those SKUs (stock-selling units), forcibly upgrading devices as the previous version neared retirement. Those systems would continue to be upgraded approximately every 12 months.

Next, Microsoft should spell out the new tempo and any associated changes necessary to make the every-12-month rhythm workable.

There’s something to be said about Windows 10 being able to run (read: boot and open small apps) on very modest hardware as long as it has a compatible x86 CPU that runs at 1 GHz or higher, paired with at least 1 GB of RAM (2 GB for the 64-bit version).

After all, Windows Vista launched with similar system requirements more than 13 years ago.

However, that doesn’t mean that’s the best it can do. In an experiment spotted by Tom’s Hardware, Twitter user @0xN0ri — who is an embedded systems enthusiast — went ahead and did a useless but rather fun experiment to see how low spec you can go before Windows 10 is no longer able to work properly.

For simplicity, Nori ran the 32-bit version of Windows 10 1909 in a virtual machine using Oracle’s VirtualBox software under Arch Linux on a Dell Inspiron 3670 desktop tower. Then, the 16-year-old tinkerer gradually reduced the amount of RAM committed to the virtual machine and looked at whether Windows was able to boot and make it to the desktop.

The first attempt was made with 512 MB of RAM, which is higher than what had already been achieved in the wild on a real machine with a Via C7 CPU running at 400 MHz (far below the 1GHz minimum requirement) and a measly 448 MB of RAM (technically 512 MB with 64 MB reserved by the system for integrated graphics).

The second try involved lowering the maximum allotted RAM to 256 MB of RAM, which booted just fine. At 192 MB, Windows 10 still made it to the desktop, and at 140 MB the virtual machine didn’t make it to the login UI. Lowering that even further to 128 MB resulted in a glorious blue screen.

Interestingly, this was achieved without disabling services or “streamlining” the installation of Windows 10 used in the experiment. Some of you may have fond memories of tinkering with nLite to remove components from Windows XP or vLite to do the same to Vista, which had an insane memory footprint for the time it was launched, but could be reduced to allow systems with 256 MB of RAM to run just fine — albeit with a lot of Windows components removed and using the classic interface.

Still, a real system like this would hardly be usable as the only things Nori was able to run was the task manager, command prompt, and file explorer, and slower than any of us would be able to bear. Booting Windows 10 with a low amount of RAM took several minutes, which is also far from ideal. But just like trying to run Windows 95 on the Apple Watch or an alternative smartwatch, geeks can’t resist the temptation to do it.

And it’s not just for the sake of experimentation, either. There’s a popular YouTuber calling himself LowSpecGamer that makes a living from video tutorials on how to get PC games to run on the lowliest of the Windows machines that are out there by tweaking config files and modding the game until everything looks smooth and plastic.

If you don’t like seeing Windows 10 starve on too little RAM and want to see the opposite of this ridiculous experiment, Linus Tech Tips looked at how Windows 10 runs on no less than 2 TB of RAM. And, of course, he also looked at how many Chrome tabs you can open on that before you reach the limits of both the hardware and the software side of things.

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Thousands of Android apps have been found as part of a new study to contain hidden backdoors that facilitate secret behavior, including everything from changing user passwords to preventing users from accessing specific content that’s sometimes political in nature.

The study comes via researchers from Ohio State and New York Universities, as well as the Helmholtz Center for Information Security, and it took a look at 150,000 apps — the 100,000 most popular Google Play apps circa April 2019, plus 20,000 apps from Baidu as well as another 30,000 apps that Samsung pre-loads onto its devices. The focus was on two specific issues: To what extent do apps support secret behaviors, and is there an inherent danger of abuse.

Among the findings: Almost 13,000 of the 150,000 apps that were studied suggested the presence of backdoors via things the researchers found like secret access keys and master passwords. More than 4,000 also appeared to be watching for blacklisted keywords like the names of political figures and other words related to controversial news topics. Almost 7% of the Google Play Store apps suggested the presence of backdoors, while 5.3% of the Baidu apps did so, according to the study. Double that for the apps pre-installed on devices (16% or so).

That’s part of the reason a few dozen privacy-minded organizations sent a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai earlier this year, pleading for Google to clamp down more on so-called bloatware that’s pre-installed on devices. “These pre-installed apps can have privileged custom permissions that let them operate outside the Android security model,” they wrote. “This means permissions can be defined by the app — including access to the microphone, camera, and location — without triggering the standard Android security prompts. Users are therefore completely in the dark about these serious intrusions.”

Also as part of the new Android app study, the researchers picked 30 apps at random that had at least 1 million installations, and they found one that allowed for remote logins. It’s the kind of thing the Play Store has been dogged with incessantly, and though Google’s security team stamps outs the threats as soon as they’re found or publicized in the press, it still has to deal with the PR headache stemming from apps sneaking in that can do everything from logging into Google and Facebook accounts to accessing key features of a user’s device, spreading malware and so much more.

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