Services
A slightly more advanced fix, though similar to the Startup fix, is your list of Services.
In short, Services are part of the available resources that your computer can use. For example, an internet connection is reliant on your computers ability to resolve domains from the internet. There is a service that does this, without the service running, that function of your computer will cease to work.
However, there are some services that are absolutely unnecessary to the smooth running of your machine, and can cause huge slowdown when added up together. If you do NOT know how to recognize certain service types and applications, do NOT do this step.
To access your service list, open your Start menu, and go to “Run.” Type “services.msc” (without the “), and hit enter. You’ll be presented with a rather long list, along with information on the service, how it chooses to start, and whether it is active at the present time.
If, and only if, you recognize a service that you know you don’t need, you can disable it completely by Right-Clicking the service, and disabling it in the “Properties” menu.
If you recognize a service that starts automatically, but you only want it to run when you activate something that requires it, you can set it the Manual activation, via the same “Properties” menu when you right-click.
Defragmentation
Mechanical hard drives are a disk. When you write data to your hard drive, you place data onto that disk. As your hard drive fills, the drive needs to find locations in the disk that are not currently used. This leads to files being separated (fragmented) into multiple locations across your disk. When you go to read that file, the disk then needs to look at several different locations in order to open the entire file. When your disk is largely defragmented, it can cause severe system slowdown, as the mechanical arm on the hard drive is constantly seeking data – over time, this causes a backlog of files that the drive needs to read, causing “tea timer” hangs.
Defragmentation consolidates these files, placing them back “together” and therefore improving the performance of the disk (and in turn, your system) by preventing the drive from having to seek files from different locations.
To open the Windows Disk Defragmenter, you can either access it in your start Menu by going to Start, [All] Programs, Accessories, System Tools, and then finally Disk Defragmenter.
Alternatively, you can go to Start, then Run, and type “defrag” (without the “), and hit enter. Note: You should never defrag a SSD drive, only mechanical hard drives!
From here, you can schedule defragmentation times, or simply just run the tool and have it clean up your fragmented disks.