Windows 10 System Performance Tweaks - THAT ACTUALLY WORK!

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Misunderstood Wookie
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Windows 10 System Performance Tweaks - THAT ACTUALLY WORK!

Post by Misunderstood Wookie » Sat, 23. Mar 19, 03:05

With all of the tips and trick suggested all over the place, coming from a power users perspective and after having tried countless methods for cleaning up windows and getting lost performance back below are my recommendations for what actually works and not just an AIO solution which often take up more resources than they return.

Without further ado this is my list of utilities and scripts which actually did get the job done without spending hours, tweaking the registry and Group Policy's and are perfect for gaming and or just a smooth fast system
(albeit you may want to re-enable some services for general use)
  • DDU 'Display Driver Uninstaller- MUST HAVE! this is the go too for fixing or removing remnants of any old driver
  • CCleaner - Going to presume everybody who cares about a clean system has this already but needs to be here.
  • Win10 Privacy - Banish Windows 10 Telemetry Collection in a smarter way.
  • Windows 10 - Decrapifier Has some of the functions of the scripts below but those are still a lot better and purpose made for making the OS junk free, stable and FAST, and this is better at general OS bull if you prefer to not play around running scripts.
Honourable Mention
Bitsum Process Lasso Pro - Is excellent for general use but to get the most out of this it needs time and effort to configure in a sensible way for your system, yes I have used this for few solid months and it was hit and miss with some programs actually being worse while this was running and others better out of the box for me it was slowing down processes I actually needed to run at the time but it is a pretty good improvement over Task-Manager just it does require maintenance work to configure. In the end, I removed this as it came with it's own headaches.

Caution Below - Use with proper care and reading!
The below advice ties in well with the above with some overlap.
Debloat Windows 10 PowerShell Scripts - Honestly these are a godsend, just run the scripts relevant for you, letting them do the heavy GPO lifting work these will cut your running processes down by 10-15 and free up just over 2GB of system RAM I really recommend these as they net the most actual noticeable performance gains.

DO READ THE INFO
Before running anything read the descriptions with the exception of CCleaner & Bitsum PL the rest of the stuff have no installer or running process & take some time to check the scripts out as some of these scripts will make permanent changes and you may wish to edit them to keep some stuff enabled it does have a reverse procedure however I have not tried it and cannot guarantee it will reverse every change.
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Morkonan
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Re: Windows 10 System Performance Tweaks - THAT ACTUALLY WORK!

Post by Morkonan » Sat, 23. Mar 19, 19:00

CCleaner is great for cleaning up old caches, logs, and temp files. Windows has a habit of holding multi-bajillion-gigablats of cached crash data that will absolutely serve nobody in no way. "Sure, I want to send fifty-jagabits of crash data to Micro$oft only to get a blank "Solution Page" with nothing but Micro$oft asking "Did this help solve your problem? Yes, No, Comment." CCleaner likes to contact home fairly frequently, though, on Win10 systems, just so it can tell you there's an update and you should go visit their update page when there has actually not been an update. But, the free version is free, so what else should one expect?

Process Explorer, rather than those other things, its probably lighter weight and less sketchy, perhaps.

Dependency Checker is a good little app to check to see what you don't have that something needs in order to work right.

Telemetry blockers, script deleters, "here are the shell processes you don't need" stuff can have you subject to having your box Windows OS randomly bricked ... Micro$oft telemetry for Win10 is all over the place, changes itself often, and blocking/walling those connections can have adverse effects including Micro$oft corrupting your latest updates for you... Happened to me when I got tired of seeing fifteen telemetry connections and thought I'd take advantage of "my powa" to control my own system. Most of those kind of freeware/trialware bits just can't keep up with Micro$oft's bajillion monies thrown at preventing people from blocking what they want to do. (That was "Early Win10, though, when Micro$oft was rabidly fighting to get "inside" everything. They pulled back a bit, I think, after a lot of pushback.)

(In my opinion, which might buy one a cup of coffee if one also has five bucks to go along with it. :) I can't stand friggin' Micro$oft anymore.)

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Re: Windows 10 System Performance Tweaks - THAT ACTUALLY WORK!

Post by Antilogic » Sat, 23. Mar 19, 19:08

Please be extremely careful with all of these if you do not know what you are doing.

CCLeaner modifies your registry and can brick your PC. I NEVER recommend the use of CCleaner.

Running unknown scripts from the internet without understanding what they do is extremely unwise.

If you do not understand what the programs do and/or do not possess the skills needed to unscrew your PC after running them either incorrectly or running a malicious script then do not do any of these.

In general using crapware (which the first three items are) to cleanup crap is unwise. Unless you have a passing knowledge of PowerShell, know your WIndows system information and can understand what the final one will do, then very much stay away.

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Re: Windows 10 System Performance Tweaks - THAT ACTUALLY WORK!

Post by Misunderstood Wookie » Sun, 24. Mar 19, 03:51

I don't hold judgement actually, will have to agree with the two posters above me.
I do recommend anybody who uses anything already understand their system, have a basic knowledge of what is actually being done by those tools and has their backups and complete OS images on stand-by because once you delve into messing with internals of the OS it can be a nightmare to undo and like others have said can end up with an OS which just breaks more often than you would like or not even boot anymore.

CCleaner should be okay for generally cleaning junk files but do take care with the reg fix side of things, I tend to dump the reg file to my recovery drive before using a reg tool to clean up stuff which I simply cannot get removed, tho they are handy for things at times just they are quite risky. Powershell scripts yep obviously I would highly recommend you read the script files before you run them, they do come in individual scripts per job, understand how to comment out lines you don't need or don't want and deffo read up on how to restore removed apps and services. I use them but I do so because I have been using windows since 3.1 and every version of windows I have messed with services and the group policy but if you are not comfortable with self-diagnosis of issues I agree to stay away from the Powershell scripts.

To be honest, most of the stuff added to the OP was for users who have a decent enough understanding of the system to diagnose any issues without resorting to a full-reinstall, They are subjective to my opinion coming from another power user and script user I got pretty tired of tools which claim to increase performance but in the end marginally did so and added to the sucking up of CPU time with thread watchers and the like which is the reason I began using run once and forget tools and turned to PowerShell to do the work of un **** the OS to be more like a server OS and I would then go and refine a few things I did need by re-adding the service or app or whatever as needed, I definitely do not recommend using Powershell scripts if you have no idea what they are going to be changing scripts like these if not understood can create backdoors for intruders so look through the code of any script you run its just good practice.

I hap hazardly do things because I trust myself to fix it, most power users do, I have my full OS image recoveries and file recoveries on standby I would never suggest any major sweep of a system without them.




There is one olther tool which is pretty safe but again you kind of need some power user knowledge to make use of properly, EmptyStandy List is great if you have one of those Windows installs which just eats memory, in pre 17xx build os windows 10 the system would keep memory in standby for excessive periods of time, gigabytes of it in fact. If you think you have this windows bug open up resource monitor from task manager click on the memory tab and check your used standby memory if fill the bar you probably have the issue.

The above program will force free that memory however it has to be manually run each time unless you set up a scheduled task which is why I said to make use of it properly you need some knowledge but you can just click it and run as needed too.
If going with automated route 5min-10min per run should do, no need to make it run too frequently. If your memory looks more like this -
https://i.imgur.com/qGIRP9X.png
Then you do not need to use the program, but I have mine running anyway on a 5min scheduled timer it is still useful while gaming to keep the memory pool refreshed.


I am definitely open to suggestions of process watchers, will check out the one linked above, as stated I had BitSum going for some time but it consumed 1-2% CPU to even do its job. I actually scored higher in benchmarks with its core engine disabled and that told me enough to tell me I should just remove it since I did give the benchmark tool FULL resource access and to be ignored by this process watcher. If you aim is simply to maintain a responsive system without a system deep dive well I still think it is one of the best process watchers out there don't let my words make it sound like trash because it is actually really really powerful and it does work very well out of the box.

But I fixed a lot of my issues by using scripts to simply disable stuff that was not necessary which also freed up memory thus the only use for a process watcher I have now is a lightweight one simply to auto set cores and priority of a process. I don't need smart trimming of memory or anything like that not after I deep dived my system.

Morkonan wrote:
Sat, 23. Mar 19, 19:00
Telemetry blockers, script deleters, "here are the shell processes you don't need" stuff can have you subject to having your box Windows OS randomly bricked ... Micro$oft telemetry for Win10 is all over the place, changes itself often, and blocking/walling those connections can have adverse effects including Micro$oft corrupting your latest updates for you...
So far I have avoided this, but I also do not allow windows to self install updates I do it all manually via PowerShell scripts which selectively pick just the Build updates and ignores the rest.
The tools do work very well tho, at least what they do can be undone.. thanks to the GUI of them, I added those ones because they are not simply scripts it does give you mouse over info on what the tick box is going to do and where to find the actual way to do it manually and they do create backups I believe Sys restore enabled. I would advise some common sense because end of the day like you said they are blocking connections to M$ now that was the intent but side affects often do happen it is just a matter of if you care that they happen lol.

I am happy enough to go and undo whatever if I need to, but most of the time I am happier that M$ is not getting their way lol.
I would use Ubuntu full time if not that getting games to run with ease natively is just a pain in the behind on Linux still.

There may be better tools around I just came across the ones listed after using a few of similar type stuff and found them to be the most simple and safest.
not from some sketchy url either.

Thanks for the suggestion to figure out dependency, will save some time doing manual checks for such or when I need to figure out what thing I disabled is causing what to not work anymore. Because I write scripts based of the ones I linked for an automatic run on fresh installs of Windows it would be way easier if I could iron out the dependency issues of some of the things ahead in the script as well. I would like to have it so when windows boots the script runs and offers a tick box for anything with possible wanted dependency like biometrics and or wifi scanners etc and be able to deselect those, while the core scripts remove bloat and deffo not needed services, services which are safe to set to manual or outright disable if you don't have a specific need to use that service.

I am unsure about Process Explorer, it is now re-branded as sysinternals and owened by Micro$oft.
I had a look at it is no where near as powerful as BitSum Process Lasso I mean would do the job of finding process's but the whole point of BitSum is to automate process restrictions.
BitSum has idle modes where it reduces power usage and lets processes you set to idle priority run it can automate a lot of these things, like setting process cores restrict and prority, it goes beyond this with even being able to restrict memory consumption on a per process basisl. It can if you enable such feature automaticlly reduce porcess priority while you run a demanding application then resume normal operation.

You can create high prority lists, it is actually REALLY GOOD! , just if you do not understand or have the time to reign in that power for your needs it can start to make things worse than better, if you simply install it set up a couple games as high priority or let the game detction do that for you and don't touch anything else out of the box it does what you expect keeps your system responsive 100% of the time even when malware infects your PC and tries to hog up the CPU it can help under that case too as it will kill the process or limit it so you can get control back.

I only stopped using it because under a lot of DEEP testing it was lossing me 200points in benchmarks lol due it needed a bit of cpu time to do all these things..
and as stated after I used powershell to de-bloat I did not need a complex process watcher anymore, I just need a automated method of setting process priority which maybe I can do with task schedules I have not looked into that tbh yet.
I just did not want a process watcher running in background when windows is already doing all this I just need something to force the native windows watchers to set priority a little differently for certain apps.
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Re: Windows 10 System Performance Tweaks - THAT ACTUALLY WORK!

Post by Morkonan » Sun, 24. Mar 19, 19:01

ledhead900 wrote:
Sun, 24. Mar 19, 03:51
...CCleaner should be okay for generally cleaning junk files but do take care with the reg fix side of things,...
CCleaner will backup the registry before any fixes. But, honestly, it doesn't really do much in the way of deep registry examination, IMO. "Orpahned" registry entries is about the limit of what I have experienced it doing and that's kind of "no duh" right after some software updates. One nice thing it will do, however, is check for old caches from other software that registers them properly and clean those out. That doesn't mean that Windows wouldn't do that, it just means that it does it "now" rather than waiting for Windows to get its broom out. That can be helpful if a piece of software is being stubborn about insisting on reading an old cache instead of the one it just created. I've used CCleaner for a long time, through multiple iterations of Windows, and have never had any issue caused by it. But, I can also not remember it actually contributing much to fixing any dire problem. I routinely use it to clean up old caches, tracker crap that either Windows or a browser didn't get rid of, etc..

The thing about "tools" is that they can be really great and very helpful, but a lot of tools are extremely powerful low-level things and most don't explain why there's a warning message... "Warning:If you click this button you could screw up your computer" - That's "verbose mode" for a low-level tool if it bothers with such a warning. It's up to the user to determine the "Why" and that's problematic.

Anyone remember the old Norton Tools? When "Speeddisk" was first out and "Registry Fixer" or whatever was in it? Those were some pretty user-friendly tools. But, of course, that was a commercial product. NOT being a commercial product is one of the problems with a great many tools being offered out there. There's no liability accepted or implied with "joestoolsformyforumbuddies.exe."

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