Speed Up Your Windows

Give your PC a burst of speed with this collection of tools to tweak, optimize, and reinstall Windows

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When it comes to outright speed, your PC never seems to have enough. Or to put it another way, it doesn’t matter how smoothly it’s running, your PC could always do with being that bit faster. Armed with the right know-how, you can fine-tune your PC to squeeze more performance from it, but the effort involved can be more than it’s worth.

Which is where we come in. In this feature, we’ve dug out the finest free tools we know of that can help speed up your machine. We kick things off by revealing our favorite tools for fine-tuning your system. Your hardware could use some optimization, too, so we’ve collected the best overclocking and tuning apps for pushing it beyond its limits. And finally, when you next bite the bullet and reinstall Windows, we reveal five tools that can help safeguard and speed up the process, before running you through the steps you need to take to restore Windows to its pristine, like-new form, unencumbered by bloated apps and collected detritus.

Your computer is ready to take its performance to the next level with the help of our essential apps, so turn the page to get started with giving it a much-needed boost of speed.

TUNE UP YOUR SYSTEM

Discover how to streamline your PC for an extra burst of speed with the help of these powerful—and free—apps

Windows has been designed for maximum compatibility, so while it runs on a wide range of PCs, it’s not been optimized for any of them. This is where the apps in this part of the feature come into play. They give you the tools required to speed up your PC in several ways. As is usually the case with apps, less is more— there’s no point recommending 100 apps whose combined demands outweigh the benefits of using them in the first place, which is why we’ve pared them down to five.