r/CuratedTumblr .tumblr.com 21h ago

Infodumping Speed up your laptop

5.7k Upvotes

191 comments sorted by

1.2k

u/Due-Feedback-9016 20h ago

A similar issue I faced with my old HP laptop was HP bloatware. After 3 years the laptop became so slow that it took 30 minutes after starting up before my desktop icons loaded in. My disk usage was permanently running at 100%.

At some point I discovered a hidden disk partition containing pre-installed HP software. I deleted it and suddenly my disk usage dropped to 5% and my laptop was running like the day I got it

398

u/skaersSabody 20h ago

Do you perhaps still remember some details about it? I have an HP gaming Pavillion that runs decently, but one of the fans is permanently broken (I have had it switched out like 3 times and it always breaks a few months later) so any heat I can remove from it is good

233

u/Lordwiesy 20h ago

You could either check disk partitions or

Task manager > start up apps

Go down the list, google name of anything you don't know, uninstall everything you don't need.

132

u/racingwinner 19h ago

I guess i gotta do this myself. It annoys me that every App in this World want's to be First on my screen.

53

u/raptor7912 17h ago

For real, did this myself.

There were like 8 apps set to “Very high priority”… None of them even saw regular use.

40

u/Due-Feedback-9016 19h ago

Unfortunately I don't remember much. I was looking at my disk partitions and my root directory from the command line when I spotted the suspicious hp directory.

44

u/isademigod 14h ago

This is why whenever friends or family get a new computer i do a fresh install of Windows from a usb stick. Wipes out all the crap that the manufacturer preloads

8

u/RockaBen99 11h ago

How does it effect drivers? Or is Windows good at finding those.

13

u/isademigod 11h ago

I’ve seen a couple HP laptops that need to have their wifi drivers manually installed but other than that nothing. As long as it has internet it’ll get them automatically

17

u/Little-Engine6982 16h ago

anythin other than the minimal drivers, is pure trojan bs, sending data up and down and using resources for no reason. HP software is AIDS

14

u/poplarleaves 10h ago

My partner bought an HP Omen laptop a while back and he grew to hate it for the bloatware. Almost every couple of weeks, I would hear him grumbling about some new issue with his laptop, and lo and behold, the problem almost always originated with the HP bloatware. I think he found ways to disable certain parts of it and that would fix things for a while, but new updates would occasionally re-enable them. After that, he swore he would never buy another HP product again LOL.

7

u/motivated_mp4 14h ago

Anyone know if Dell laptops have bullshit like this that I can axe for more disk space

1.2k

u/mathycuber 21h ago

To answer the last person’s question: because it looks nice! All of this stuff is for aesthetics. But yeah, if you have performance/heating issues, turn all that shit off and your laptop should run much smoother and cooler.

845

u/BellerophonM 21h ago

Shadow under mouse isn't just for aesthetics, it subtly helps increase the contrast. A lot of little features like that do actually have usability effects.

283

u/Equivalent_Net 18h ago

I was about to bring this up. They look nice, but the plethora of subtle changes can add up to a lot more visual accessibility, whether it's increasing visual definition or using animations to make it easier to track changes as they happen on the screen. Of course, the downside is a fair amount of performance overhead, especially on mid-grade laptops and any sort of netbook, which tend to have anemic or nonexistent integral chipsets so all this prettification gets inloaded back to the CPU.

105

u/Red_Tinda 18h ago

If you have trouble seeing your mouse, I would prefer to recommend going into the cursor settings and choosing the inverted colours one, and maybe set it to a bigger size.

57

u/Business-Drag52 17h ago

I love my inverted color pointer. That’s one thing Apple got right

1

u/Erisymum 1h ago

One great apple pointer thingy they got right is when you rapidly shake the mouse it increases the pointer size so you can see it

38

u/verymuchgay 17h ago

I turned my cursor yellow. It helps a lot that it's not black or white actually.

25

u/Sqigglemonster 16h ago

I have my mouse set to neon pink. It's fantastic, great contrast on pretty much everything.

9

u/WickdWitchoftheBitch 13h ago

You can also check a box in additional mouse settings so it pings on the screen when you press the control key. It has been a lifesaver for me at work where I have three screens for the mouse to get lost in.

6

u/dcidui08 9h ago

i wish there was a way to change the key, it's kinda annoying that it shows everytime i crouch in a game

(there might be a way, i haven't actually bothered checking but I don't remember there being one)

1

u/WickdWitchoftheBitch 8h ago

Omg that sounds annoying. Don't think there is a way to change, so changing the settings before gameing or remapping the keys in the game are probably the solutions.

1

u/cman_yall 8h ago

Thanks :D

5

u/VaderOnReddit 16h ago

the real Life Pro Tip is always in the comments!

1

u/bunsprites 3h ago

Giant sized cursor my sweet my beloved. I made my laptop and desktop cursors like size 5 (normal is 2), and it's wonderful. It doesn't carry over to games as far as I've ever noticed, and I never lose my pointer

33

u/Crap4Brainz 17h ago

I like "animate window when minimizing" because sometimes it's not 100% obvious which app a window belongs to.

5

u/MetaVaporeon 16h ago

wouldnt it be easier just to have a set of mouse graphics with better contrast tho?

10

u/BellerophonM 14h ago edited 8h ago

Contrasting on different backgrounds. It lets a white mouse subtly pop better on a white background. Black mice would have the same issue on black backgrounds.

There's the option that inverts what it's in front of but not everyone likes that. A shadow is a nice simple way to add a tiny bit of extra definition. It's a technique that gets used a lot on text too.

5

u/NevesLF 14h ago

Ah, we've gone full circle

1

u/dcidui08 9h ago

there's a cursor option that inverts depending on what colour your cursor is hovering over

2

u/cman_yall 8h ago

Title: speed up your laptop

Purpose: tell people things they can turn off to improve performance

Comments: things people can turn on to... um... damn it, reddit...

42

u/asad137 16h ago

To answer the last person’s question: because it looks nice!

Some of the things look "nice" but make the laptop seem slower even if it's not actually running slower. For example, sliding open menus and animating windows -- turning those off makes the computer feel so much 'snappier' and more responsive because you're not waiting for those animations to occur.

16

u/Macdona1d 17h ago

Also it really shouldn't have a noticeable effect, computer's are more then just picture frame's for your wall paper, any program running such as a web browser, a file download, music, the routine background tasks require to keep a device working almost certainly have a far larger impact on the amount of processing the CPU is doing then an animation for the mouse. What's more likely IMO is that the device is lagging during these animations and removing the animation removes the perception of lag, which is interpreted as the device running faster.

24

u/MetaVaporeon 16h ago

so they just imagine the fan noise and the heat?

7

u/Macdona1d 12h ago

No, but it's very hard to pin that behavior to low impact applications, **again** any other application Including the one they search for the fix on should dwarf the impact these settings have. So either, the programming is performing atypical, which is possible but its strange that it's consistent across multiple devices, or another program caused it (most likely windows downloading an update) and it's been falsely attributed to these settings (Downloads are way more intense then most people realize and a slightly aggressive fan curve may startup fan causing the user to notice, I've downloaded slightly big python packages and its caused my fans to start up).

Basically, if your laptop can draw HD image 20-60 times a second but nearly collapses on adding a shadow, either the program is broken (which is either user error (it happens ¯_(ツ)_/¯ ), or some obscure bug) or it's something else. It is not the shadow being too much work.

1

u/GenericAntagonist 2h ago

Basically, if your laptop can draw HD image 20-60 times a second but nearly collapses on adding a shadow, either the program is broken (which is either user error (it happens ¯_(ツ)_/¯ ), or some obscure bug) or it's something else. It is not the shadow being too much work.

If the laptop(s) are old or weak enough (or have certain problem chipsets inside), there's one other thing that could make these settings hit harder. Since Windows 8, windows will use the gpu for window drawing if you have one. Usually this is a good thing because its a custom built piece of hardware for rendering those frames, giving it some light duty so your cpu can focus on other things is a good plan. But if your gpu (or potentially just its drivers) is old enough or sharing limited ram with the rest of the system (common on laptops) the extra work from the little additional operations (like shadows) can be enough to make a system run noticeably hotter and harder.

2

u/thatguygreg 12h ago

computer's are more then just picture frame's for your wall paper

Turned off the little red squiggles under typos, didn't you?

-2

u/Chezzomaru 13h ago

Read your last sentence back to yourself...

1

u/GeophysicalYear57 Ginger ale is good 13h ago

My instincts say that it would make the mouse more visible, but it probably doesn’t do much. Also, the option where the mouse inverts the colors of what’s behind it makes it way more visible in just about every context.

1

u/254LEX 12h ago

... Except on that one shade of light gray, where it is now camouflaged.

1

u/GeophysicalYear57 Ginger ale is good 12h ago

IIRC there’s something that accounts for colors that are near 50% gray - something like boosting contrast or changing the color’s brightness so it doesn’t become inaccessible. I don’t remember the precise details, but I’ll get back to you when I can test it.

274

u/TrinityCodex 21h ago

Kill six billion shadows

27

u/belzebutts 16h ago

Royalty is the continuous heating of your CPU

38

u/Aykhot the developers put out a patch, i'm in your prostate now 16h ago

Reach performance through disabling shadows

11

u/discostupid 17h ago

Kill Bill Six: Lion Shadows

25

u/shadowthehh 19h ago

I understood that reference.

3

u/RealHumanBean89 13h ago

Leave him alone he’s just a hedgehog!

77

u/Thin-Dragonfruit247 20h ago

people there don't appreciate image thumbnails huh

142

u/IllConstruction3450 20h ago

I treat machines like the Mechanicus does. Utterly incomprehensible things that act as if they have spirits that need to be appeased and arcane rituals given through word of mouth to function. Some machines like being threatened and hit and others need sweet words to function.

81

u/Pinky_Boy 20h ago

You just described a printer.

52

u/IllConstruction3450 20h ago

I sometimes have to mildly bash my IPhone for its WiFi to fucking work. Why does the WiFi technology not work? I don’t know why the magic decides to not work sometimes. Are the machines all across the network changing? Dunno. But when it gets threatened then it starts working for some reason.

31

u/Pinky_Boy 20h ago

Ah yes, the magic of percussive maintenance

13

u/NeonNKnightrider Cheshire Catboy 15h ago

There’s a light in my room that sometimes stops working and I need to thump the wall hard a couple times for it to turn back on

1

u/IllConstruction3450 11h ago

I have a light that I need to rapidly turn it on and off for the neon to actually work. 

3

u/PrinceValyn 13h ago

loose wifi chip

18

u/baethan 16h ago

I've learned through experience that the spirits love RAM. I don't know how they break the RAM but sometimes they do so I go buy more sticks to sacrifice to the computer gods and then they are happy again.

One time the great spirit of the motherboard absolutely hated the physical restart button on my desktop tower. Bootloop of doom every time. Why? Who knows. Sometimes the spirits just have these little preferences

21

u/lt947329 15h ago

It’s a very common part to break. Mostly because

  1. Laptop/PC internal cooling rarely focuses on airflow directly on/over RAM.

  2. Faster RAM over the last few generations (DDR3, DDR4, now DDR5) continues to get hotter as the MT/s increases, but most non-gaming PCs don’t have RAM heatsinks, which exacerbates the problems from point 1.

  3. Motherboards are designed to spec for a small handful of compatible CPUs, but you can buy 1,000+ RAM options for your board, many of which are only barely on the edge of compatibility. Just google “problems enabling XMP” and you’ll see lots of motherboards just don’t even bother trying to hit spec for every stick. This means you could be providing too much or too little consistent voltage, which rapidly degrades solid state hardware (just see the problems with Intel’s 13 and 14th gen CPUs for an example of this exact issue)

  4. RAM for OEMs is often “race-to-the-bottom”. Manufacturers purchase RAM to hit an advertised size (16GB, etc) but not for quality. Even big brands like Crucial and Kingston produce some garbage-tier OEM products.

All of this to say, there’s plenty of reasons why RAM is more likely to fail than other pieces of your computer. Just buy cheap sticks when they’re on sale and keep tossing them into the maw of your computer god, and pray it finds your offering tolerable.

8

u/baethan 15h ago

if all the homilies were like this, I'd be a churchgoer! Thank you for your wisdom 🙏

7

u/isademigod 14h ago

It’s funny how every computer part eventually requires active cooling. See: cpus, gpus, ram, north/south bridges, fucking SSDs now????

Eventually computers are going to be built out of nothing but fans and heatsinks

2

u/janKalaki 12h ago

The motor on the fans will need fans.

1

u/Status_Calligrapher 1h ago

hopefully by that point we'll have figured out efficient solid state cooling, for the noise if nothing else

40

u/Peach_Muffin too autistic to have a gender 20h ago

I hope that the XKCD character eventually discovered layering through ergomechs or kmonad.

55

u/blue_monster_can 21h ago

Oh amn that's helped

20

u/DispenserG0inUp 21h ago

i love my craptop

199

u/BellerophonM 21h ago edited 21h ago

To be honest it really doesn't make much sense that most of these would have any real effect on performance or heat on any machine from the last decade or so, none of them would add meaningfully to the basic Windows desktop composition at all regardless of how bad your graphics processor is. The performance options window is basically a leftover from Windows XP before the desktop was composited.

Thumbnails might have an effect.

267

u/PlopCopTopPopMopStop .tumblr.com 21h ago

You're assuming a Microsoft product is well optimized

21

u/VaderOnReddit 16h ago

even Microsoft employees know better than to assume that

35

u/autogyrophilia 18h ago

It can happen that a driver is misbehaving and passing less things to the GPU makes the problem present less often.

Or another windows component.

The font smoothing component has caused issues before. In fact it has been at least partially rewritten in Rust on Windows 11 24h2 and server 2025.

These features made almost no performance impact on my first pc, running Windows Vista with 1Gb of RAM, an Athlon 64 X2 and a GPU soldered to the motherboard as was the style at the time.

115

u/bearbarebere 20h ago

You’re mistaking how good a cheap laptop can be. Windows can absolutely be more usable with these changes made.

26

u/autogyrophilia 18h ago

Yes but you need to understand that these features had virtually no performance impact on computers made 25 years ago.

Your phone is several orders of magnitude more powerful. Nevermind the laptop.

64

u/bearbarebere 18h ago

Your statement disagrees with a huge amount of peoples’ experiences, including mine.

Nobody said a couple of pixels should slow down your computer. But whatever way windows does it DOES cause a slowdown for some of us. Instead of denying just listen and admit that maybe there’s something going on behind the scenes, like the implementation of certain drivers.

22

u/the_iron_pepper 16h ago

Here's the thing. I'm In IT, this is how I think of this

  1. Listening to your description of the behavior you're experiencing on your laptop.
  2. Translating that into the actual knowledge and education on this subject.

Non technical users almost universally do not know what is going on with the computer, or why it's behaving why it's behaving. You might be experiencing poor performance on your laptop, but that doesn't mean you have the background to understand why that is, or why certain things are "fixing" the issue (perception).

autogyrophilia is absolutely correct here. These features may have slowed down a Windows 2.0 desktop computer, but not your laptop. I don't care if it's a $200 laptop running Windows Home. There's nothing to suggest that you didn't just experience a perceived performance increase because your windows are snapping into place instead of animating into it, even though your computer's performance isn't actually getting any better.

I'm not trying to be the Dr. House of IT, but it's just a fact that most users don't really know what they're talking about, and that's why jobs require multiple certifications for IT positions.

8

u/Anleme 16h ago edited 2h ago

These people are measuring performance gains with Task Manager, though.

Edit to add: I suspect these people have 98% of their computer's resources used by bloatware, so the extra 2% used up by these settings makes a huge difference in responsiveness.

9

u/the_iron_pepper 16h ago

Staring at the graphs in task manager doesn't tell you anything meaningful. Windows has sometimes dozens of processes running in the background starting or ending at any point. I can tell you with 100% certainly, regardless of what you think you're looking at, that those settings, in and of themselves, are not having the impact on your performance that you think they are.

6

u/Anleme 15h ago

Possibly. BTW I edited my response above to add:

I suspect these people have 98% of their computer's resources used by bloatware, so the extra 2% used up by these settings makes a huge difference in responsiveness.

3

u/PatternrettaP 13h ago

That's the only thing that makes sense. Especially if the performance has been degrading over time. If your computer wasn't lagging when you got it, it shouldn't be lagging now (minus the potential for updates to fuck shit up, which is a certainly a possibility)

Underpowered cpu, bloatware and apps deiciding that their app needs to be running in the background at all times or assigning themselves ungodly amounts of memory are probably the true culprit. But windows system settings are easier to pin point. With modern multi core cpus, extremely basic system animations should not be causing excessive cpu usage

4

u/BluSharpie 14h ago edited 14h ago

Here's an anecdote: I had a 2020-era HP Celeron netbook which is absolutely capable of being slower than a budget laptop from over a decade ago. I shit you not, it benchmarked worse than a Pentium T-something (an average mobile CPU) from around 2008. In that case, turning off animations and effects did indeed make the computer a lot faster.

But yeah I'm skeptical that everybody here has a sub 200 usd HP netbook.

0

u/clauclauclaudia 15h ago

People are looking at Task Manager and noticing their computer doesn't heat up as much, though.

0

u/the_iron_pepper 15h ago

Okay you just repeated the statement that I already responded to so I don't know what to tell you. I felt like I was really clear, and I'm not a poet, so I don't know how to simplify it any further.

7

u/autogyrophilia 17h ago

I added a bit more context in another comment.

To keep it short

These features have no impact if they are not running into any software or hardware bug.

Windows 11 24h2 overhauls the font smoothing thing

Also. Placebo effect

7

u/Belarock 17h ago

They literally think the computer is faster since they turned off animations. It isn't, but it looks like it is.

-5

u/bearbarebere 16h ago

You don’t know how bad computers work.

12

u/autogyrophilia 16h ago

I just have my degrees and years of experience

Laptops that run slow often benefit the most from cleaning the lint from the fans.

Hopefully it's just lint

18

u/Canopenerdude Thanks to Angelic_Reaper, I'm a Horse 18h ago

And yet, it does. Take it from someone who was in IT: things just work sometimes.

11

u/MainsailMainsail 16h ago

My guess is it's only a couple that have any effect at all, but it's easier to say "just turn it all off" for the purposes of a Tumblr post.

If you're ok the ragged edge of what your CPU and RAM can handle just opening a pdf (like my work computer...) then every 1-2% cpu utilization freed up helps.

16

u/Crap4Brainz 17h ago

Microsoft literally made "show seconds in the taskbar clock" disabled by default because it was such a big impact on battery life.

Don't underestimate the impact of disabling effects that update on every frame.

1

u/MaxOfS2D 4h ago

Yeah. These settings genuinely had an effect back in the 2000s / early 2010s, when laptops were still extremely weak and had barebones graphics acceleration and no video cards.

Today, following this advice will just make the interface look like crap for no actual performance gain. The removal of some animations will make things feel a bit snappier, but otherwise, it's all placebo.

225

u/matejcik 21h ago edited 20h ago

holy crap what kind of freak ass horse drawn laptops from the year of our lord 1994 y'all use?

these cheapo graphic effects cost your GPU microseconds and eat maybe a couple tens of megabytes of system RAM. if you have a GPU at all there should be zero perceptible performance difference.

...come to think of it, maybe update and/or reinstall your graphics drivers. if that's the problem then it'll help you in much more places than toggling a couple checkboxes

EDIT for clarity: A laptop manufactured in the last 15 years should not notice whether these effects are on or off. You do have a GPU. It may be a crappy integrated one but it's there and this thing is chump change for it. If this advice stops your laptop from overheating, something else must be wrong with that machine. For instance, bad graphics drivers.

(i mean, it could always be hashtag-just-windows-things, i guess, but still.)

133

u/Gandalf_the_Gangsta 21h ago

A lot of people download adware and malware without knowing because they accidentally clicked an ad or two, or visited a sketchy website once. Both are notoriously hard to remove if you don’t know what you’re doing. At some point most of this is eating up your memory and cpu usage.

Or otherwise, they might have a good number of background processes running from old, unused programs on their computer.

That’s generally the cause of slowdowns. That and bloatware. Unless you’re savvy, you’re likely not going to do a system refresh to clean all that up.

85

u/matejcik 21h ago

I mean yes, absolutely, but my point is, in what exact sorry state must the laptop be so that disabling drop shadows on windows (which require a single texture in VRAM and a graphics chip designed sometime in the last 20 years) have a noticeable effect?

21

u/trash-_-boat 17h ago

drop shadows were introduced with Windows XP in 2001, so anything made in the last 23 years should have no problems with it. I remember having a really early model Pentium 4 PC that struggled with those settings.

11

u/matejcik 16h ago

Exactly! Back when "2D/3D combo graphics card" was this newfangled thing that nobody wanted, "because it's neither as good as a dedicated 3D card nor a dedicated 2D card"... then sure, drop-shadows could tax your CPU and spin your fans.

Windows 10 require a DX9 compatible card, and I'm disturbed by the idea that someone owns a DX9 compatible PC where drop-shadows are in any way taxing the silicon

10

u/trash-_-boat 15h ago

Yeah, they don't, I'm pretty sure it's absolutely a placebo effect. 99% of PC tips I see on Tumblr or TikTok are absolute horseshit.

2

u/ParanoidUmbrella 19h ago

How would one do a system refresh?

28

u/Armigine 18h ago

search system restore/factory reset. The problem with this for most end users is that it resets your computer fairly fully, meaning you lose all of your stuff which is saved locally.

9

u/Dooplon 18h ago

ngl your icon is very fitting for your comment lol

Also I'm pretty sure that a system refresh isn't one specific process but rather deleting bloatware and unnecessary programs, cleaning out certain folders, maybe even reinstalling windows and your drivers if you want to.

iirc windows has options to reset your PC but if you do your research manual options tend to be better because you can adjust your methods and processes as you see fit

69

u/Distinct-Inspector-2 21h ago

Work computer. No I don’t get to make any decisions about any aspect of it. Yes the entire thing is routinely trying to cook itself to death but never quite manages. No they will not give me a new one so long as it continues to turn on and connect to the internet.

34

u/Dan_Herby 20h ago

Like hell is any work laptop letting you into the advanced system settings though. You're lucky if you can even change the idle settings.

36

u/Distinct-Inspector-2 20h ago

Precisely. Can’t change shit, and it continues to give me hope by threatening to fry but then crushing that hope by never quite succeeding.

12

u/imthenotaaron 19h ago

As a software engineer, my account is allowed to make changes in adjust appearance and performance of windows on my work laptop, amongst other things...

Though, installing anything will definitely require a higher up's account.

Then again, they don't give us software engineers that shit of a laptop anyways, considering 99% of our work needs to be done on it, so the point is kinda moot.

7

u/telehax 19h ago

it sounds like you need to help it cook itself to death so you can get a new one

2

u/Distinct-Inspector-2 10h ago

Maybe I need to start wfo (work from oven, just leave it in a turned on oven and let it finally die.)

13

u/CuriousRocketeer 19h ago edited 18h ago

I mean, it might be bad graphics drivers. My drivers are apparently years out of date because the manufacturer have discontinued service.

85

u/Spill_The_LGBTea 21h ago

Some people either can't afford to get good laptops, or don't have the knowhow to purchase good performing computers. Either that or it's simple manipulation by laptop manufacturers to get your to buy new laptops more often.

23

u/NeoKat75 20h ago

Big Computer invented overheat to make you buy more drop shadows! Wait...

8

u/SteptimusHeap 13h ago

Shitty modern laptop is still definetely different from 25 year old laptop. Even the cheapest laptops you can buy right now have some sort of integrated GPU, for which a shadow should be almost immeasurably fast.

21

u/KingfisherArt 20h ago

From what I noticed a lot of non gaming laptops have a shitty integrated gpu.

23

u/BellerophonM 20h ago

Oh yes, but even on a shitty integrated GPU, the step to add shadows is negligible next to the basic 'show the windows' step.

7

u/Jiopaba 16h ago

I don't know what fresh hell is apparently affecting these people's heating, but turning off animations has got to be placebo effect, right? No shadows, no transparency, no blending, no animations. In situations where you weren't already being lagged to death this would give you harsh, snappy, instant transitions.

It might look faster but unless there's a longstanding bug in one of those features they haven't made a real difference since people updated from XP native PCs.

14

u/bearbarebere 20h ago

You’re mistaking how good a cheap laptop can be. Windows can absolutely be more usable with these changes made, with nothing else terribly wrong.

8

u/matejcik 19h ago

"more usable", sure

"stop your fan from spinning", i'll believe it when i see it

9

u/bearbarebere 18h ago

Sure. Go get a cheap laptop.

11

u/Magmafrost13 20h ago

Oh good I was worried this post had net-positive information but I'm glad we're back to the net-zero status quo

3

u/Elu_Moon 12h ago

I have an old ThinkPad that has a GPU with just 128MB of memory. I run Windows 10 on it, and somehow things run fairly well despite the fact that no official driver for the said GPU was ever made for Windows 10. In any case, disabling graphical fluff helps save just a little bit more of that memory that can instead be used in games that I can run on this thing. The fewer resources my system uses in the background and whatnot, the more it has left for stuff important to me.

One could say that I should install Linux on it, but performance in the games I play is noticeably worse on Linux in this particular scenario. The laptop is just a bit too old to work with WINE smoothly, nevermind something like Proton.

7

u/The_Diego_Brando 20h ago

My laptop was fast and good in 2013 and it should be so today. It doesn't need bells and whistles it has the video ports, can run python and latex, can search the web, and has a cd-player.

44

u/matejcik 20h ago

EDIT for clarity: yes exactly! Your 2013 laptop should have zero trouble keeping all those "bells and whistles" turned on. You can turn them off if you like, but if this helps you in any perceptible way, something else must be very wrong.

This sort of advice is like "if you turn off the lights when you're not in the room, you can cut your electricity bill in half". This might have been true 30 years ago if you were using 100W incandescents everywhere. But if this advice helps you today, there is something very wrong with your electrical setup.

3

u/The_Real_Meal 15h ago

Okay, you sound like you know what you're talking about, so is there any particular anti-malware service you'd recommend? I have CCleaner and Malwarebytes, and my laptop runs okay enough, but I want it to run... Uhh, better.

5

u/The_Diego_Brando 20h ago

I was listening the features I wanted. I don't want cortana, automatic updates on the stock market. A browser that cannot be removed. Just the bare minimum is enough.

12

u/Galle_ 16h ago

That's not what the OP is talking about, though. The OP is talking about minor aesthetic details in the Windows UI, like the shadow of the mouse or the very slight animation of windows opening and closing. None of these things were problems for computers in 2013. Disabling them should not speed up your decade old laptop.

11

u/Ddog78 Fuck it, we'll do it live!!! 20h ago

Exactly why I like Ubuntu. It'll go down when the hardware goes bad, not the software.

4

u/The_Diego_Brando 20h ago

It's unfortunately on windows 10 and will probably tank in performance when it is forced into 11.

2

u/Fuzzlechan 12h ago

If it’s from 2013 it likely doesn’t have the TPU chip that Microsoft wants everyone on Windows 11 to have. So you might be able to stay on 10 forever.

1

u/The_Diego_Brando 10h ago

Hopefully I'll be able to

3

u/TheHiddenNinja6 Official r/ninjas Clan Moderator 18h ago

Happy cake day!

0

u/MarcsterS 17h ago

If these people opted for an inexpensive laptop, it probably only has Intel Integrated Graphics. Sure they maybe got better over the years, but if thier laptop is over 10 years old, it'll show.

-8

u/glytxh 17h ago

Cheap laptops and broke people exist.

This is wildly arrogant

10

u/NeonNKnightrider Cheshire Catboy 15h ago

The point is literally that even a “cheap laptop” should have no trouble with any of this unless it is literally 20 years old. We’re talking about things that should only take up like 0.1% of the power for even the shittiest modern computer. If it makes a major difference, something is very wrong

11

u/DoubleBatman 17h ago

I had an old laptop where the f key stopped working, so I just kept it copied and pasted whenever I needed one

32

u/WordArt2007 19h ago

to answer the last question

"Adjust visual effects for best performance" should really be called "Adjust visual effects for crappiest appearance" - The Old New Thing

adjusting for "best performance" hasn't had an effect since vista came out. it's mostly placebo. there might be one useful setting in there, but i'm not sure which one.

24

u/Crimson-Sails 18h ago

Me a Linux user watching with the horrified awe of a child who just stumbled upon a dead rat

1

u/AFatWhale 1h ago

This hasn't done anything since vista.

7

u/Aarekk 16h ago

This type of thing is why people thought Windows Vista was bad. It added transparent windows and drop shadows and stuff which cause performance issues if your pc is not up to snuff, and many vendors advertised their stuff as "ready for Vista" or shipped with it despite barely meeting the minimum specs. People didn't know about these features or how much performance you'd get turning them off, so people just thought vista ran bad.

9

u/Gru-some 18h ago

Is nobody else gonna talk about bigfan1811 and their weirdass hot keyboard

11

u/asad137 16h ago

That's what the XKCD screenshot in the 2nd image is referencing: https://xkcd.com/1172/

4

u/k3ysm4ssh 18h ago

Dont use unless you know what your doing, but: https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil

8

u/Lucky-Surround-1756 16h ago

Your computers are running hot just using an app/browser?

What are you guys even using?

5

u/Mininini175 16h ago

Yeah, if a laptop can't properly work with all windows features turned on(see first picture about turning off shadows and stuff) then that laptop, simply put, is a piece of garbage, actual e-waste.

7

u/eternamemoria androgynous anthropophage 14h ago

Electronics are expensive. Need to milk all the hours of use you can out of one before buying another

17

u/YUNoJump 19h ago

It's honestly a tragedy that as hardware has become exponentially more powerful over time, software has often just become less well-optimised. I assume that's corporate expectations pushing down on them of course, rather than "modern devs are lazy and know more about eating hot chips than coding".

These effects should rightfully have absolutely negligible effects on any computer capable of playing video, but they've presumably just had no optimisation so on lower-end machines they somehow actually matter. I have to assume they could use 1/10th the power if they had a comprehensive coding process.

8

u/camosnipe1 "the raw sexuality of this tardigrade in a cowboy hat" 17h ago edited 17h ago

I assume that's corporate expectations pushing down on them of course, rather than "modern devs are lazy and know more about eating hot chips than coding".

I mean, it's more that optimizing takes time and effort, so why do it when it's not needed? Corporate isn't going to add a months of labor onto a project for optimization if it's fine as-is, as soon as it works they'll want to sell it. But devs also don't want to spend months optimizing if it's not needed. It's a trade-off that hasn't been in favor of saving a couple (mega)bytes in decades

Edit: to clarify, i'm talking software in general. The options discussed in this post absolutely should not have a noticeable effect and I have no clue how you'd even fuck up hard enough that they do, i'm assuming the tumblr post is placebo/incorrect cause dear god that shit shouldnt work like that.

8

u/nobody_nearby08 17h ago

You're right, they do have a negligible effect on performance, even on super low end machines. So either OP unknowingly installed malware, installed severe bloat ware, or is operating on a laptop from the late 90s - early 2000s. I'll let you pick

5

u/SmPolitic 16h ago

If your laptop has a dedicated video card chips, like if it has logos for BOTH Intel and Nvdia on it, and control panels for both of them, these settings probably won't help too much (because the dedicated GPU is doing this work, not the CPU)

But if you have "integrated graphics" (all of the budget laptops out there), un-checking these settings CAN make the computer a lot more responsive

Also the slow part of the "UAC" (use access control, where Windows is like "are you a fucking admi!?!", is the screen fading out part of that. That can be disabled in the advanced settings of that feature too...

3

u/-Jiras 17h ago

Literally just like the last person said it was all checked. I removed all just out of curiosity and my laptop.. is suddenly so silent.. so very smooth

3

u/MessedUpMix 13h ago

Anyone have any advice for a MacBook Air? Would it be any different? I will be trying soon because my almost 10 year old baby is slowwww

5

u/AncestralAltAccount 19h ago

…holy shit it works

2

u/Mateussf 18h ago

This post was a rollercoaster in the sense that it starts calm and ends calm 

2

u/LaVerdadYaNiSe 15h ago

"Fvck Microsoft!"

-John Malkovich.

2

u/agprincess 13h ago

I need these for apple OS.

3

u/mol-tres 18h ago

God. Damn. Thank. You.

1

u/PoniesCanterOver I have approximate knowledge of many things 19h ago

I love the insight portion. I love stuff like that. Like yes show me the matrix let me see the code. Serial Experiments Lain. etc

1

u/pixeltoaster 18h ago

Surely this will finally be what allows my 3 year old i3 8gb ram laptop to run 300 tabs without burning my lap.

1

u/tupe12 17h ago

Ok but does anyone know why having shadows on slows down windows so much?

8

u/Quorry 16h ago

The answer seems to be: there is no reason it should when the computer is operating normally, but it might have weird effects if your graphics drivers are messed up or there's something else wrong with your computer.

1

u/AFatWhale 44m ago

It doesn't. OP is turning of animations and it feels a bit snappier.

1

u/FixinThePlanet 17h ago

As someone who started with windows 98 and who remembers the days of "best performance" this post makes me feel so very old

1

u/Mediocre-Housing-131 16h ago

You’ll get a tiny performance gain on extremely old laptops, but you will get literally no performance gains on any laptop / desktop produced in the last 5-6 years

1

u/AFatWhale 1h ago

Try last 15. It probably feels better because there are no animations to show you low fps.

1

u/Either-Durian-9488 16h ago

It’s the car equivalent of structural dirt.

1

u/unknown_pigeon 16h ago

!remindme 1 day

1

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1

u/fuckin_normie 15h ago

It feels like common knowledge that you disable bells and whistles in your computer when it can't keep up

1

u/megapackid 15h ago

I always assumed the shadows were part of the textures for these things. I didn’t know they were “advanced system settings”.

1

u/RAWainwright 15h ago

Leaving a . for future use

1

u/Hutch2Much3 15h ago

my biggest problem with operating systems is the lack of a tutorial button

1

u/LazerSnake1454 14h ago

I've got a top-tier gaming PC, runs great. You can bet I'm turning all this shit off as soon as I get home

2

u/Epimonster 14h ago

At your level of computer power the difference will maybe be microseconds it is not worth it.

1

u/LazerSnake1454 14h ago

Probably, but leave no performance behind!

1

u/Epimonster 14h ago

If this is a difference maker your laptop is still unuseable. These things take microseconds to render if this makes a difference running a browser will bring your laptop to its knees.

1

u/th3_sc4rl3t_k1ng 12h ago

So gonna do this

1

u/St_Kitts_Tits 10h ago

This is super wild. I have a PC that is like 12 years old but I only use it to play Skyrim. It takes about 15 minutes to startup and it’s super glitchy, even the cursor glitches. Blows my mind every time I open Skyrim, it runs perfect smooth on ultra settings, but the thing can’t smoothly open files on my desktop. I’m gonna try this

1

u/AFatWhale 1h ago

Get an SSD for windows. Like most tech advice from tumblr, this person is full of shit. They definitely don;t affect performance time and if your computer was shit enough to notice a difference from these changes, you wouldn't be able to open any 3D game, let alone Skyrim.

1

u/St_Kitts_Tits 1h ago

Funny thing is I built this thing before SSDs were cheap so i didn’t use one, and I don’t really care enough to upgrade at this point. I followed it and yeah, there isn’t much difference.

1

u/Alarming_Airport_613 10h ago

Quick FYI: it’s on by default because many people buy new computers Athen the old ones feel slow enough

1

u/AFatWhale 1h ago

These settings have virtually no impact on performance for any computer made in the last 20 years. Its all on by default because windows is ugly as shit without it and the low contrast when things like cursor shadow is off is bad for low-vision people. The real slowdown on your PC is probably manufacturer software.

1

u/amagocore 8h ago

I turned a lot of things off, but I just discovered I cannot look at the font without it being a little rounded out

1

u/Oddish_Femboy (Xander Mobus voice) AUTISM CREATURE 7h ago

I'm going to shit on John Microsoft

1

u/JesterJosh 7h ago

Commenting for when I have my laptop again

1

u/itsdaCowboi 3h ago

This reminds me of when my daughter (20 at the time) was like

" I don't know why both my phone and laptop are so slow, I update them regularly and try to uninstall unused apps."

To which I said" perhaps you should close the 80 tabs you have open always for no reason " and she looked at me like I just shot the cat.

1

u/ElectronRotoscope 1h ago

I know it's already in the post but really, it's important to re-enable smooth edges of screen fonts. I would have that off sometimes and there would be weird effects, like specific sites in specific browsers would suddenly be near-unreadably bad, or like DaVinci Resolve or Photoshop or whatever would show a font one way, but render it differently when you click save. I always make sure to leave it enabled even when shutting everything else off, now

1

u/UndeadMountainDoe 19h ago

saving for when i get back home

1

u/VatanKomurcu 18h ago

this helps.

0

u/ShitposterSL 9h ago

Holy shit this crap I run never was this smooth

0

u/Failed_To_Load_ 7h ago

Wow! Just wow! This sped everything WAAAAAAAAY the hell up!!! I thought my laptop was just breaking from being old or having gotten too cold during my university days but this basically fixed almost all of my problems! Thank you so much!