My 10 Commandments on optimizing Windows:
1 Don’t do too much optimizing
2 Leave the registry alone
3 Leave system services alone. They consume negligible resources
4 Don’t run third party monitoring apps in the background. They consume resources
5 Prevent apps that start with the system unnecessarily
6 Don’t add too many context menu entries. They slow down normal use and can cause instability
7 Leave satisfactorily working drivers alone
8 Cleaning of temporary files only creates temporary space, no performance gains
9 Only defragment sparingly, never SSDs
10 The best optimizing tool is the keyboard, not one-click apps. Know what you’re doing.
NOT picking on anyone, but it's a nice list for showing some misconceptions -- my hope is that pointing them out might prove helpful.
1 & 2 go together... Once your system is set up, unless you add or replace hardware, there really isn't any more optimizing that you can do. Your hardware is what it is, & the same with Windows -- once it's set up properly, that's it, there ain't no more. What you can do is maintenance. It's a lot like your car or truck, or the inside of your home -- how much cleanup & maintenance are needed depends on how it's used, how it's treated. A pickup that regularly hauls heavy loads, & is driven hard in the swamp on weekends is going to need more attention than something that's driven 10 minutes a day on local roads. A home with young kids is likely going to need more washing & painting inside. A copy of Windows that's seen years of Windows updates & had loads of software installed is going to accumulate lots of garbage compared to a copy installed a few months ago, &/or compared to a copy where hardly any software's been added. Eventually that garbage will make a difference.
Whether cleaning up that garbage makes a noticeable difference or not depends on how much there is, how much you remove, and your hardware's resources... Removing a couple of GB of junk files means a lot more when you have 150 GB total than if you have 2-4TB. If you have more RAM, &/or a higher end CPU, your system's more forgiving than a $200 laptop.
If you keep your Windows system partition fairly small -- in the 100-300GB range -- a partition image backup [& restore] won't take long with another internal hard drive, or an external drive connected via USB 3 or eSATA. If you have a backup you can easily restore, the risks of cleaning up that garbage are limited to the value of your time. Alternatively you can reinstall Windows & your software. You can minimize the time it takes to install Windows + all the updates by spending time beforehand creating & then using a .wim file with most updates added -- Google/Bing for info & directions etc.
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#3: Leave system services alone. They consume negligible resources... False & maybe true. Note that services can be added with software, & some services are a security risk. Some consume a LOT of resources -- 1-4 CPU % doesn't seem much, but that load can in some cases be enough to raise the clock speed your CPU's running at. If you're running at say somewhere around 500-800 MHz, consuming minimal power in the CPU's power saving state, a couple of percent can cause a jump to full speed, & maybe10 times the wattage consumed. Services can also cause Windows to take longer starting, or in severe cases, prevent it from starting. Services can also conflict with software you've installed.
When you set your system up initially you can read about the default services & which if any you might want to disable, or switch to manual rather than autostart. If you bought a system with Windows installed, research Any services the manufacturer added -- they may be a security risk as well as a power drain. If you add software that installs it's own service(s), check those out too -- often you can set them to manual & they'll start when you run that app.
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4: Don’t run third party monitoring apps in the background. They consume resources... Maybe ironically, often those running processes are services I just wrote about. ;) That said, it depends on the app, what it does & what it consumes. MSI afterburner is a great example. It sets the graphics card's fan speed on a curve, making up for a factory setting that's designed to keep fan noise levels as quiet as possible. Afterburner consumes very few resources, while helping to keep everything in the case cooler, which is a Very good thing.
Lots of software & drivers include an autoupdate app that starts with Windows. That's an example of stuff you maybe should not run, assuming you can check every once in a while yourself to see if there are any updates. At any rate, you're smart enough to use Windows & run your software -- you're smart enough to decide what you want running -- blank rules in this case don't cut it.
5: Prevent apps that start with the system unnecessarily... That goes with #4.
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6: Don’t add too many context menu entries. They slow down normal use and can cause instability... Another one of those contradictions FWIW, context menus are stored in the registry -- you have to edit it to remove them, or use an app that'll remove them from the registry for you. They are normally added by software installations, frequently along with file name associations. Too many can be a PITA, but you'd have to have an Awful lot before they effected anything but your patience. Myself, to keep life with Windows pleasant I keep context menus to strictly those apps I actually use context menus for, e.g. 7-Zip.
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7. Leave satisfactorily working drivers alone... Absolutely Totally FALSE. There are Gotchas -- research 1st, & backup 2nd. Research because sometimes a driver version is screwed up -- people make errors, you update drivers to make up for errors in the current version, but it makes no sense to move to a driver version that has more errors than what you've got. Sometimes those errors will cause a security vulnerability, sometimes they'll reduce performance &/or stability, sometimes they'll cause a software conflict. Your research will tell you what's fixed, what's not, & let you make up your mind if it's worth the time & effort. Backup because if something goes wrong you can break Windows.
Updating drivers can be tricky because it's often not nearly as easy as it could be to find updated drivers. Usually you go for reference drivers, which are drivers written by the company that made the chips &/or chipset your PC/laptop uses, but If you've got a laptop you may be stuck -- the electronics can vary enough from one manufacturer to the next that you want to make sure an updated reference driver will work on the laptop you own. The reason for reference drivers is that most manufacturers stop working on drivers as soon as they stop selling a model, & often even before that. TO find reference drivers you can look at the chips & motherboard actually used on your PC, to find out what brand & model they are, or you can Google/Bing. Then hit up the site for the company that made those chips.
What about leaving drivers alone?... With your network hardware no -- there might be a security related update. You probably also want to keep up with graphics hardware drivers -- these tend to be so complicated that they're still fixing stuff & making improvements up to the date they decide a GPU is not going to be supported any longer. Chipsets on the motherboard [with the exception of the network chip(s)], like the audio chipset [often Realtek], can be more a matter of if you feel like bothering with it. Research & you'll see what the alleged improvements are -- sometimes it's just for better compatibility with stuff you do not own.
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8: Cleaning of temporary files only creates temporary space, no performance gains... There are generally only 2 ways to increase the performance of a PC/laptop -- adding better hardware or moving to a driver [or drivers] with improved performance. Everything else [& everything but #7] is maintenance. There's no easier way to get rid of garbage than emptying the 2 temp folders [one in the User folders & one in the Windows folder]. Eventually you might run out of room, but in the mean time what's the point of storing an extra couple of GB in your backups? It takes longer to backup, it takes longer to restore, it takes up more space. It also takes longer to do stuff like run a defrag or error check or virus scan. The question isn't why clean it, but why not? Better yet, this is perhaps the easiest Windows maintenance task you can do -- all you have to do is run Windows Disk Cleanup.
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9 Only defragment sparingly, never SSDs... Why & true. SSDs are by nature always fragmented, so that part's right, but running defrag often or not is totally up to you -- lots of people have it set to run whenever their systems are idle.
Files are stored in little chunks of storage space on your hard drive(s), and if it's a conventional drive, that means that data's read from a spinning platter or platters. If a file's stored in these little chunks, & they're spread all over the place, the read head(s) have to jump to the inside of the platter(s), then the outside, then somewhere in between etc. Common sense tells you it's faster to read that file if everything's nice & tidy, all in a row with each chunk next to each other.
OK, that's basic defrag... For many years now defrag apps also try to go a step further, putting the files Windows reads most often on the fastest part of the drive platter(s). The tricky part is what those files are varies from one person to the next, depending on what apps they run most often. In that respect brand X may work better for you than brand Y.
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10 The best optimizing tool is the keyboard, not one-click apps. Know what you’re doing... 2 words -- It Depends. After a quick reminder that we're not really talking about optimizing anything -- it's maintenance, pure & simple -- it depends on what you're after.
If you've got loads & loads of time you can learn & then do whatever completely manually, providing you want to spend your loads of time doing that sort of thing. Someone else may not have lots of garbage built up, & plans on re-installing Windows on schedule later this year anyway. If you research any of the software available for this sort of thing, you can get a good idea of what they actually do, & can decide when & if that might be useful. If you don't want to spend the time & effort researching -- say you're the type who buys stuff from an ad on TV, figuring you'll find out later if it really works or not -- as long as you've got a backup you can restore, or setup files & keys for Windows + your software, go for it.
If you think that your laptop or PC is running a bit sluggish, software like today's GOTD from Ashampoo may help, or not. If the problem isn't loads of garbage built up, trying to clean out that garbage using Any app isn't going to help. It's like buying a new pair of shoes to see if that helps your sore wrist. OTOH people do get lucky -- your feet may hurt so bad from the new shoes that you miss baseball practice & your wrist does get better. Using software to clean Windows registry can sometimes break stuff, & it's entirely possible that software causing your problems will break from cleaning the registry.
Long story short, as long as you can put things back, the only thing you risk is your time if you want to give any cleaning or maintenance app a try. If you think this sort of stuff is only for the technically naive, not always, not as you might think. Simply put, do you know how long it takes to do some of this stuff manually? Do you know how long it takes to delete just 1k registry keys or entries.
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