Easy ways to increase the booting speed of your laptop

Easy ways to increase the booting speed of your laptop

Having a laptop is great: you can play games and use applications that won't run on your smartphone or tablet and still take the it you wherever you go. Unfortunately, there are many people who feel that it takes too long for their Windows or Mac laptop to start up and would like to have a way to make things better. If you're one of them, here are some tips to increase of booting speed of your device.

Before we begin, you should know that the startup speed of your laptop is heavily dependent on the hardware, so you can't realistically expect a laptop that you bought five years ago to boot as fast as the one that your neighbour purchased yesterday. However, the tips that you will find here won't take a lot of time or effort to set up, yet in most cases, the results will be quite noticeable.

Maintenance

If it's been more than one year since your laptop has been taken apart and cleaned, that's really a problem. Dust accumulates on the components, not only overheating your computer, but will also causing it to start up a lot slower. The solution for this is pretty simple: take your laptop and have it cleaned. Of course, if you know how, you can do it yourself, but if you have any doubts, you might be better off taking it to a specialist; it shouldn't be that expensive.

SSD

Solid State Drives offer a significant increase in execution speed, and in this they are way better than regular hard-disks. The first one that I bought reduced my PCs booting time from 20+ seconds to 8 seconds. Fortunately, SSDs aren't that rare today, and the prices have dropped quite a bit. However, if you're strapped for cash or simply don't like spending too much on your laptop, I recommend buying a smaller SSD of about 128 GB and installing your operating system on it together with the applications that you really need (like Word or PowerPoint). You can keep the rest of your files on your regular hard disk, but as long as your operating system is on an SSD, the laptop will boot a lot faster.

Built-in Startup Features

Both Widows and Mac laptops have built-in features that can help reduce the time it takes for your device to start up. Let's check them out one at a time:

Windows - Fast Startup

Fast Startup

I'm not sure if you know this, but Windows 10 has a setting called Fast Startup that reduces your booting time. Basically, it saves your system state as a hibernation file, then loads it when you start up your laptop, making it boot faster. What's the difference between this setting and the "hibernate" option from the Start menu? The Fast Startup will only save your system state, while "hibernate" also remembers your running applications, opened folders, etc. This means that it consumes less of your battery while starting up your laptop just as fast.

Activating this settings is very easy: open the Control Panel by right-clicking your Start button and choosing the corresponding option, then go to the "Hardware and Sound" section and click on the small blue button named "Change what the power buttons do" from the "Power Options" category.  Now, simply scroll down and make sure that the box marked "Turn on fast startup (Recommended)" is checked. If it's not, and you can't access it because it's greyed out, go to the top of the window and click on the button with the text "Change settings that are currently unavailable", and then you will be able to check the box.

Mac - Auto login

Automatic Login

Mac users who have more than one account registered on their machine can reduce the time it takes for their laptop to start up by automatically logging in to their account. In order to do this, launch the System Preferences, then go to "Users & Groups" and click on the lock icon in the lower-left corner. After you've entered your password, click on the "Login Options" button at the bottom of the left-side pane, then go to the "Automatic Login" button and choose your account. Type in your password one more time, and you're done.

However, before doing this, you should remember that this setting means your Mac will automatically log in to your account when turned on, without asking for password. So, if people you don't trust have easy access to your laptop, you might not want to use it.

Startup Programs

Mac Startup list management

Of course, one of the biggest factors that determine the boot speed of your laptop is the set of applications in your startup list. Simply put, the more programs set to start automatically you have, the longer your laptop will take to properly start. This is why, I recommend you always keep an eye on your startup list and be very selective about what applications are included. If you're a Windows user, our website has already described the best ways to manage your startup list in the article "How to add and manage startup programs on Windows".

In case you own a Mac laptop, you will need to open the System Preferences, then go to "Users & Groups" and click on the "Login Items" button. You will see a list containing all the applications that are automatically launched with your operating system. Uncheck the ones that aren't absolutely necessary, and your Mac laptop will boot faster.

Now that you know how to increase the booting speed of your laptop, you might also want to find out "How to boost the performance of your Android tablet" or read about the "Best tricks to speed up your iPhone".