Why Is My PC So Slow? (And How to Actually Fix It)

Quick Answers

Common questions answered at a glance

Is my PC broken?

Almost definitely not. If it was fast when you bought it and slow now, the issue is software, not hardware. Your PC is bloated, not broken. It’s your car loaded down with sandbags — the engine is fine, it’s just hauling extra weight it doesn’t need.

What’s the single fastest fix?

Will any of this break something?

You bought your PC and it was fast. Really fast. Apps popped open, games loaded, everything just worked. Then, somewhere around the 6-month mark, something changed. Booting now takes a full two minutes. Chrome freezes if you open a second tab. There are stutters in the games that used to run smooth in a fight. You didn’t drop it. You didn’t break it. You didn’t install anything weird.What happened?

IQON's automatic optimizations can help resolve many of these issues with one click.

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The short version: your PC didn’t get slower. Everything around your PC got heavier. Windows has been silently installing apps you never asked for, running background services you don’t need, stuffing AI features into every corner of the operating system, and letting every program you ever installed lazily add itself to the start list. It’s the same hardware you had on day 1. Just buried under months of digital clutter no one told you to clean up.We’ll walk through the most common symptoms here, what’s actually causing them, and link to a full fix for each one. Everything here is free, reversible and takes minutes.

“My PC Takes Forever to Boot”

This is the common complaint, and in most cases comes down to one thing. Too many programs loading at startup.Every app you install adds itself into the startup list. Discord, Steam, Spotify, Adobe Creative Cloud, OneDrive, the software for your printer, the updater for apps you forgot you have to begin with — these all load at boot and stay in your memory forever. After a year of installing software, your PC might have 15–20 different programs fighting each other for CPU and RAM every time you turn it on.The cost of which is real. Discord alone uses up about 50–80 MB of memory. Spotify uses anywhere from 100–200 MB, Adobe Creative Cloud uses 200–400 MB. All running in the background while you have none of them open, and especially if you are actually using them. And that adds up to 500 MB+ before you’ve even opened an Internet browser.Even better, if your drive’s got garbage in it — temp files from crashed apps, old Windows updates that never got cleaned up after they downloaded and failed, the hibernation file quietly filling up 4–8 GB for a feature you probably could go your whole life without using — even if you have that amazing SSD, it’ll start slowing down when it gets above 85–90% full.The fix: Open Task Manager (Ctrl + Shift + Esc) → Startup tab → right-click anything you don’t need at boot → Disable. Our startup optimization guide walks through every program you can safely disable, and which to watch out for. For disk clutter, our disk space cleanup guide navigates you through the use of Storage Sense, Disk Cleanup, and disabling hibernation.

“Everything Feels Sluggish — Apps Take Longer, Chrome Puts Up a Fight”

If your PC boots okay but feels sluggish when you’re using it, the problem is usually in the background: what’s working while you’re working.What exactly is doing all this work, you ask? Why, it’s bloatware, of course! Windows comes pre-loaded with apps you did not install. Candy Crush, Copilot, Xbox Game Bar, Microsoft News, Clipchamp, Solitaire Collection, all sitting on your hard drive, running background processes even if you never open them yourself. The performers are collectively sucking up 100–300 MB’s worth of RAM and 500 MB–2 GB’s worth of disk space.Not just Microsoft, either. When you download a free app, a PDF reader, say, or a video converter, or a file archiver, extra software sneaks past. A toolbar you did not ask for. A “system optimizer” that improves nothing. A browser extension that redirects your searches. These are called PUPs (Potentially Unwanted Programs), and they’re designed to slip past you during that “Next, Next, Next, Finish” installation process. They run in the background, chewing up your RAM and slowing everything down.Then there’s your power plan. Windows defaults to “Balanced,” which sounds lovely but actually throttles your CPU to save power — even on a desktop PC sat plugged into the wall. Your CPU is running at 60–70% of its full throttle. You paid for a Ferrari and Windows stuck a fuel-saving eco chip in it.And finally: Telemetry. Windows is constantly beaming information back to Microsoft — where you are, how you type, what apps you use, diagnostic data. These telemetry services spike at random intervals, directly in the middle of doing whatever you’re doing. It isn’t malicious (Microsoft uses it to improve Windows) but it’s bandwidth hogging, and you should have control over it.The fix: Uninstall apps you don’t use (Settings → Apps → Installed Apps). Our guide to removing bloatware explains what is safe to get rid of. Switch your power plan to High Performance or Ultimate Performance — our power plans guide explains which one to use. And our telemetry guide shows how to turn down the bulk of Windows telemetry.

“My PC Got Slower After a Windows Update”

This one is infuriating because you didn’t do anything wrong. Windows updates are supposed to speed your PC up, but frequently do the opposite. This is what really happens when you download a real “biggie” update:Settings get reset. Power plans, privacy toggles, startup preferences — updates can then restore them to defaults. The telemetry you turned off? Back on. The bloatware you removed? Reinstalled. Windows has a feature called “Consumer Experiences” that literally redownloads stuff like Candy Crush after major updates.New features get added that you forgot to call for. Every major Windows update adds new background services. Some of them are of use. Many are AI hooked to various things via Copilot, like ad systems, draining resources the moment they’re plugged in.The fix: After every major Windows update, check your settings again. Our Windows Update guide explains exactly how updates affect your system and how to stop them undoing your changes.

The AI Problem — Copilot and the Features You Never Asked For

This one gets its own section, since it’s been making the rounds as one of the biggest woes of 2025 and 2026.Windows 11 is now shipped with a dozen or so AI features turned on as default. Copilot is the headline, but it is only a tease. There’s AI in your search bar, AI in your file explorer, AI suggestions in Notepad, AI in Edge, AI in Outlook and in every Office app. A recent thread on r/pcmasterrace about disabling 13 AI features had many thousands of upvotes, with the top comment being: “Wait until the update changes it back.” No, not a joke, that is really an issue.The issue isn’t AI being terrible. The issue is, those features are running in the background, using up crucial RAM and CPU time, sending info back to Microsoft’s servers, and you never asked for that. For a lot of people, the PC they bought to do A, B, and C — whatever those happened to be — is now busy working on a feature they never intended to bother with.How to remove Copilot yourself:1. Uninstall the Copilot app: Settings → Apps → Installed Apps → search “Copilot” → Uninstall. That removes the standalone app.2. Hide the taskbar button: Settings → Personalization → Taskbar → toggle Copilot off.3. If you want to really remove it, you can disable it via Group Policy or registry. The key is TurnOffWindowsCopilot under HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsCopilot — set that to 1. Pureinfotech’s walkthrough goes through every step in detail.4. For the other AI features embedded in Edge, Notepad, and Office, those can’t be fully uninstalled but can be toggled off in their respective app settings.If you don’t want to mess with registry keys, our app does it all in a single click — it’ll uninstall the Copilot package, set the registry policies, and hide the taskbar button. But the above manual steps work just fine on their own.For a full picture of all of the things Windows installs without asking, our Copilot & Bloatware guide details every preinstalled app, what it does, and if it’s safe to remove.

“My Games Stutter or My FPS Dropped”

Everything above applies to gamers, too, but there’s a second level of problems that specifically apply to gaming performance.Xbox Game Bar is running whether you use it or not. Even if you’ve never pressed Win+G, Game Bar loads at startup, sits in memory, monitors for “gaming activity,” and includes Game DVR which can silently record clips. Cost: 200–400 MB of RAM and 18–23 ms of input latency. That input latency is the equivalent of adding an entire frame of delay between your mouse click and action on screen.Memory Integrity (VBS) is costing you FPS. Windows 11 enables this by default. It creates a mini virtual machine alongside your OS to validate code execution — a security feature designed for corporate environments. On a gaming rig that isn’t connected to domain resources, it’s generally safe to disable. Independent testing shows it costs 5–10% FPS in general, with some scenarios measuring losses of 25–33%!Your power plan is throttling your hardware. Even the Balanced plan from Symptom 2 is painful when it comes to gaming. During combat and heavy scenes your CPU and GPU need to function at full power, and Balanced is actually restricting them.The fix: Disable Game Bar (Settings → Gaming → Game Bar → Off) — use NVIDIA ShadowPlay or OBS if you want to record. Our Game Bar & DVR guide explains everything it does and why to turn it off. For Memory Integrity, our Memory Integrity guide covers what VBS does, who needs it, and the security trade-offs. For power plans, our power plans guide explains every option and which one to use for gaming.And if you play specific games, we’ve written per-game optimization guides that go deeper into in-game settings, GPU driver config, shader cache, and network tuning:• Fortnite — Unreal Engine 5 settings, Nanite, and shader cache• Warzone — Shader Quality, texture streaming, and the packet burst fix• CS2 — Source 2 CPU bottleneck, NVIDIA Reflex, and pro settings• Escape From Tarkov — 32GB RAM requirement, boot.config, and the Unity engine• Valorant — Already lightweight, but 20–40% still on the table• View all per-game guides

The 5-Minute Checklist

If all you have is 5 minutes, pick a few of these to do in order:1. Clean startup programs (Task Manager → Startup → Disable the junk)2. Uninstall bloatware and Copilot (Settings → Apps → find what you don’t use)3. Switch power plan to High Performance or Ultimate Performance4. Disable Xbox Game Bar (Settings → Gaming → Game Bar → Off)5. Run Disk Cleanup (Search “Disk Cleanup” → Select drive → Clean system files)6. Reduce telemetry (Settings → Privacy & Security → turn off what you don’t need)7. Gamers only: Disable Memory Integrity (Settings → Device Security → Core Isolation → Off → Restart)That’s 80% of the benefit in 5 minutes. Everything else in this guide is the other 20%.

Last Thing

We want to be straight with you about this. Optimization has its limits. If your PC is truly ancient — say, a 10-year-old CPU with 4 GB of RAM and a hard drive — no amount of Windows tweakery is going to make it feel new. Optimization is about taking off the weight your PC is carrying. It doesn’t add horsepower.But for the vast majority of PCs that are roughly 1–5 years old, and just got slow over the years? What you read here will make it feel like you just bought it. Because you’re not adding anything new — you’re taking everything off that was weighing it down.Your PC didn’t get slower. Everything else got heavier. Now you know how to lighten it.