Speeding up the laptop

Cromax said:

if you know what you want to be cleaned its fine

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Yes mate I did try it but it wanted delete all of my Brave browser features so am going to give it a miss.

My 2014 Dell laptop became slow despite my best efforts to clean up using Autoruns, Wise Disk Cleaner and CCleaner. I decided to clean install Windows and installed only essential software e.g. I just use Edge and haven't installed any other browsers. All is now much snappier. I'm using the drivers installed by Windows and only installed the Dell drivers required to fix unknown devices in Device manager.

ICIT2LOL said:

Yes mate I did try it but it wanted delete all of my Brave browser features so am going to give it a miss.

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i literally cleaned brave now and works fine

ICIT2LOL said:

and there is no financial outlay eh

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I use the free version. (Make sure you download the free version from the get-go) For cleaning junk files, it's all anyone needs. If one doesn't like it, it uninstalls cleanly. It also offers a portable version. @Bree brought up an excellent point. Ccleaner gives you control over what cookies you want to exclude on all scans.
Ccleaner offers 2 methods of cleaning-Health Check and Custom Clean. My preference is Custom Clean. (Options-Settings)
My preference is also to turn off Ccleaner's automatic Cleaning. I prefer to do it myself. (Options-uncheck 'smart cleaning')
As with any maintenance I recommend making a restore point first. I also recommend regular system backups.

Everyone who knows the need for routine maintenance has their own way of doing it. It doesn't matter how one does it , just so they do. Over time a system will accumulate so much junk, performance will suffer. This is especially true for systems that are under-powered and minimumly equipped.

ICIT2LOL said:

Well Wai I think you are a bit open to all sorts of attack and I would suggest you invest in a good AV suite such ESET which I use on all of my machines. As for a browser I find the Brave browser is very user friendly and has a low profile when it comes to saving resources.

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is this sarcasm? Hard to tell on the interwebs haha

ShamrockRig said:

is this sarcasm? Hard to tell on the interwebs haha

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Rather or not it's just bs to my Eye's/Ears bc I'm smart enough not to click anywhere but the provided links and not those on the far right/top

glasskuter said:

My preference is also to turn off Ccleaner's automatic Cleaning. I prefer to do it myself. (Options-uncheck 'smart cleaning')
As with any maintenance I recommend making a restore point first. I also recommend regular system backups.

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Ok might give it another try I just didn't want it clearing my Brave browser cookies.

ShamrockRig said:

is this sarcasm? Hard to tell on the interwebs haha

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No Shamrock not at all I am definitely not that sort of person just concerned about other members on line safety as many others will agree with me.

ICIT2LOL said:

Ok might give it another try I just didn't want it clearing my Brave browser cookies.

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Options > Cookies. Just add all the ones you want to the 'Cookies to Keep' list. Both lists are searchable, and you can right-click on a 'keep' entry and edit it to include a wildcard.

Even safer, uncheck the following.

Thanks Bree and Porthos I will try that out as I don't want to lose some of the features of the Brave browser

As many people mentioned, modern computers with SSDs and plenty of RAM won’t slowdown almost under any circumstances. Win 10 and Win 11 are not what XP used to be. Some AVs can affect a computer’s performance, even powerful ones, trialing for a while is a must to find out.

As much as tests show MS Defender being slower than other AVs, with my two machines (Win 10 and Win 11) it does not affect their performance) although an AV's footprint can vary considerably with different machines. I still use CCleaner, the portable version, but only as a junk cleaner, a legacy from the XP days. I don’t think speed is affected at all by using it, although I would never ever touch the registry with it. Is it still intrusive? Not in my experience using the portable version.

Yes well I use ESET as my AV now previously Kaspersky but found that ESET was much lighter on resources and is in my mind a very good suite to use. Now the CCleaner has done a good job although it lost some of my auto logins for example this and the 10 forum but the Brave browser does a good job at keeping those details and is only one click away from login again.

The thing is what are your temperature of the CPU as the CPU can be thermal throttling. In my case, I have a i7-8750H Dell XPS 9570 with 32GB of memory so the specs are not the issue. My system will be fast after a reboot but eventually be almost non-responding and lag after a day or so as the CPU utilization will be close to 100% due to the thermal throttling and that's even modifying the resources with higher limits which does help... This include the following in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\SubSystems\Windows

Windows SharedSection=1024,20480,8192

from Default Value: 1024,20480,768

For GDI handles change the following Registry Keys:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows\GDIProcessHandleQuota

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows\GDIProcessHandleQuota

Change it to 65536
Range: 256 - 65,536. Default value: 10000

For USER handles change the following Registry Keys:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows\USERProcessHandleQuota

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows\USERProcessHandleQuota

Change it to 18000
Range: 200 - 18,000. Default value: 10000

And ofcourse the system will speed up and fast again periodically with the CPU at 30% but the only way to get it fast again is by rebooting because my temps are always in the 90C-100C range most of the time.

Windows 11 has blocked access to the MSR registers so you cannot undervolt directly with either Throtlestop or Intel XTU as undervolting will remedy the problem but with Virtualization enabled, it won't work.

Read this for more information:

This tells you what undervolting is:

Almighty1 said:

The thing is what are your temperature of the CPU as the CPU can be thermal throttling. In my case, I have a i7-8750H Dell XPS 9570 with 32GB of memory so the specs are not the issue. My system will be fast after a reboot but eventually be almost non-responding and lag after a day or so as the CPU utilization will be close to 100% due to the thermal throttling and that's even modifying the resources with higher limits which does help... This include the following in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\SubSystems\Windows

Windows SharedSection=1024,20480,8192

from Default Value: 1024,20480,768

For GDI handles change the following Registry Keys:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows\GDIProcessHandleQuota

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows\GDIProcessHandleQuota

Change it to 65536
Range: 256 - 65,536. Default value: 10000

For USER handles change the following Registry Keys:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows\USERProcessHandleQuota

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows\USERProcessHandleQuota

Change it to 18000
Range: 200 - 18,000. Default value: 10000

And ofcourse the system will speed up and fast again periodically with the CPU at 30% but the only way to get it fast again is by rebooting because my temps are always in the 90C-100C range most of the time.

Windows 11 has blocked access to the MSR registers so you cannot undervolt directly with either Throtlestop or Intel XTU as undervolting will remedy the problem but with Virtualization enabled, it won't work.

Read this for more information:

Undervolting on Windows 11 with PowerMonkey | Mr Eggtart.

How to undervolt in Windows 11 with Hyper-V, WSL or WSL2 enabled, when ThrottleStop and Intel XTU stopped to function properly.

mreggtart.com

This tells you what undervolting is:

The ThrottleStop Guide (2024): Lower Temperatures, Increase Performance and Battery Life

Author's Note: I wrote the first edition of this ThrottleStop guide for UltrabookReview as part of a short undervolting/tweaking guide several years ago. I

www.ultrabookreview.com

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Wow mate that is some piece of work - well done - and as it might work I don't like making that many changes to the registry as a rule of mine.

CCleaner:

cd <catalog>
del .
echo "Profit"

Does it work?

# Processor energy performance preference policy (default AC - 33, DC- 50)
C:\Windows\System32\powercfg.exe /SETACVALUEINDEX SCHEME_CURRENT SUB_PROCESSOR PERFEPP xx
C:\Windows\System32\powercfg.exe /SETDCVALUEINDEX SCHEME_CURRENT SUB_PROCESSOR PERFEPP xx

You can replace a mechanical hard drive with an SSD and add more RAM. But if you don't wish to upgrade any hardware, then the greatest speed boost you'll get is to do a clean Windows installation.

When you're doing a clean installation, Windows setup will give you the opportunity to delete any existing partitions. On a laptop, you'll probably see partitions you may not have even known you had. Delete them all and start with a clean drive. Windows setup will create all the necessary partitions for you.


Note: Backup any data that you want to keep prior to doing a clean Windows installation.

Almighty1 said:

Windows 11 has blocked access to the MSR registers so you cannot undervolt directly with either Throtlestop or Intel XTU as undervolting will remedy the problem but with Virtualization enabled, it won't work.

Click to expand...

Almighty1 said:

Read this for more information:

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On which laptops does this work?
I have VBS disabled but still no access.

abactuon said:

On which laptops does this work?
I have VBS disabled but still no access.

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Should work on all of them. Use PowerMonkey as a workaround... or did you mean how to temporary get access to use throttlestop to get the actual voltages? What I did was first turn off Intel Virtualization in the BIOS and then used this:

and ran .\DG_Readiness_Tool_v3.6.ps1 -Ready
then ran .\DG_Readiness_Tool_v3.6.ps1 -disable HVCI
and rebooted so I can find the voltages with Throttlestop
then after that:
turn Intel Virtualization in the BIOS back on
and then ran .\DG_Readiness_Tool_v3.6.ps1 -enable HVCI
rebooted and then built PowerMonkey as Throttlestop is no longer needed, it's only used to find the voltage numbers needed. In my case, the most I could do without errors was -100mV on both the CPU core and CPU cache.

On my Asus i7-11370H laptop I couldn't do 'undervolting' when using Windows 10 (but two years ago). And there is no voltage access in the bios, you can only disable virtualisation.
Is it just Windows or is there firmware dependency?
Yes, on my previous MSI i5-9400H laptop everything would have worked.