Windows 11 Running Slow? Official Fixes in Order

The single most common cause of a slow Windows 11 PC is too many programs competing for the same resources, usually startup apps and background processes that saturate the CPU, memory, or disk. This guide walks through Microsoft’s own supported fixes in the order a technician would try them: the fastest, lowest-risk checks first, then diagnosis, then the heavier repairs, and finally the last-resort reset. Every menu path and command below was verified against Microsoft documentation as of August 2026.

Start With the Two-Minute Checks Before Changing Any Settings

Before touching any configuration, rule out the temporary conditions that account for a large share of “my PC suddenly got slow” reports. These cost nothing and are fully reversible.

Restart the PC. Not shut down and power on, but Start > Power > Restart. A restart clears leaked memory, releases file locks, and completes any update that is waiting on a reboot. Windows can keep a machine in a degraded state for days if it is only ever put to sleep.

Close what you are not using. Press Ctrl + Shift + Esc to open Task Manager, go to the Processes tab, and close apps you no longer need. Browser tabs count: each one is a process with its own memory footprint.

Check whether an update is mid-flight. Go to Start > Settings > Windows Update. If an update is downloading or installing, the PC will feel sluggish until it finishes. Let it complete rather than fighting it.

Check whether a cloud sync client is running. If OneDrive or a similar client is syncing a large folder, disk usage will sit near 100 percent and everything else will crawl. Pausing sync temporarily confirms whether it is the culprit.

If the slowdown disappears after a restart and comes back a few hours later, that pattern points at a specific app rather than at Windows itself, which is exactly what the next section identifies.

Use Task Manager to Find What Is Actually Eating Your Resources

Guessing is the slowest way to fix a slow PC. Task Manager tells you within thirty seconds whether the bottleneck is CPU, memory, or disk, and that answer determines every fix after this point.

Press Ctrl + Shift + Esc, or right-click Start and choose Task Manager. Two views matter:

• Processes tab. Click the CPU column header to sort by processor use, then click Memory, then Disk. Whatever sits at the top of each list is your suspect. A single process holding 80 percent or more of any one resource while you are doing nothing is abnormal.
• Performance tab. This shows the totals. Memory sitting at 90 percent or higher while idle means you are short on RAM. Disk pinned at 100 percent with low CPU means storage is the bottleneck, not the processor.

Right-click a runaway process and choose End task to confirm the diagnosis. If the machine immediately feels normal, you have found it. Do not end system processes you cannot identify.

Use the reading you get here to jump to the right fix:

Disable Startup Apps So Windows 11 Boots and Idles Faster

Startup apps are the most reliably productive fix on this list, because they cost you resources every single boot whether you use them that day or not. Windows 11 gives you two places to turn them off, and both do the same job.

From Settings: Start > Settings > Apps > Startup. Toggle any app to Off. This path is the same across every Windows 11 release.

From Task Manager: Right-click Start, select Task Manager, and open the Startup apps tab. Select an app and click Disable. Note the version difference: in Windows 11 version 22H2 and later this is the Startup apps entry in the left-hand navigation of the redesigned Task Manager; in Windows 11 version 21H2 it is the Startup tab across the top of the classic Task Manager layout.

Task Manager is the better of the two because it shows a Startup impact rating. Microsoft defines those ratings precisely:

• High impact: more than 1 second of CPU time or more than 3 MB of disk activity at startup
• Medium impact: 300 milliseconds to 1 second of CPU, or 292 KB to 3 MB of disk
• Low impact: under 300 milliseconds of CPU and under 292 KB of disk
• Not measured: enabled, but Windows has no data on it yet

Disable everything rated High impact that you do not need running from the moment you log in. Updaters, launchers, chat clients, and printer utilities are the usual offenders. Disabling a startup app does not uninstall it and does not break it; the app still launches normally when you open it, and you can re-enable it with the same toggle.

You can also stop apps from running in the background: Start > Settings > Apps > Installed apps, select the app, choose More options and then Advanced options, and set Background app permissions to Never.

Free Up Disk Space and Turn On Storage Sense

A drive with almost no free space slows down the entire system, because Windows needs working room for the page file, temporary files, and updates. If your system drive is close to full, fix this before trying anything else, as several later steps need free space to run at all.

Turn on Storage Sense. Go to Start > Settings > System > Storage and turn on Storage Sense. It automatically deletes temporary files and empties the Recycle Bin on a schedule you choose, and it runs on its own when the device is low on space. Under the Storage Sense settings page you can choose how often it runs, when Recycle Bin and Downloads contents are deleted, and when unused cloud-backed files are made online-only.

Run it right now. From the same Storage Sense page, select Run Storage Sense now to clean up immediately instead of waiting for the schedule.

Clear temporary files manually. Start > Settings > System > Storage > Temporary files. Review what is selected before you remove it. Take particular care with the Downloads entry, which contains files you saved yourself and which are not recoverable once deleted, and with previous Windows installation files, which are what makes rolling back a recent Windows upgrade possible.

Uninstall apps you no longer use. Start > Settings > Apps > Installed apps, select an app, then More options and Uninstall.

One important limitation: Storage Sense works on the system drive only, normally C:. For other drives, go to Start > Settings > System > Storage > Advanced storage settings > Storage used on other drives.

Turn Off Visual Effects and Set the Right Power Mode

These two settings cost nothing to change, are instantly reversible, and produce a noticeable difference on older or lower-powered hardware.

Reduce visual effects

Windows 11 animates and blurs a great deal of its interface. On modest graphics hardware that is real work. There are two places to reduce it.

The accessibility toggles: Start > Settings > Accessibility > Visual effects. Turn off Transparency effects and Animation effects. Transparency can also be toggled at Start > Settings > Personalization > Colors.

The classic full control: select Search on the taskbar, type “Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows”, and open the result. On the Visual Effects tab, choose Adjust for best performance and click OK. This strips shadows, fades, and animations in one action. The interface will look plainer and feel faster. Choosing Let Windows choose what’s best for my computer restores the default behavior.

Set Power mode to Balanced or Best performance

Go to Start > Settings > System > Power & battery on a laptop or tablet, or Start > Settings > System > Power on a desktop without a battery, and set Power mode. The choices are Best power efficiency, Balanced, and Best performance.

If the PC is fast when plugged in and slow on battery, this setting is very likely the reason. Also check whether Battery saver is on. It exists to conserve power and prolong battery life by limiting background activity, which can make the PC feel slower while it is active.

Two caveats worth knowing. Not every PC exposes every power mode; availability depends on the hardware and on which power plan is active. And if a custom power plan has been selected on the machine, the Power mode dropdown may be unavailable entirely.

Check Whether the Drive Itself Is Failing

If the slowdown is accompanied by freezes, long unresponsive pauses, file corruption, or failed application launches, stop optimizing and check the storage device. A drive that is wearing out or reporting errors will not be fixed by any software setting, and continuing to use it risks losing data.

Windows 11 has a built-in drive health view: Start > Settings > System > Storage > Advanced storage settings > Disks & volumes. Select the drive and choose Properties.

The health section reports three values:

• Estimated remaining life: the percentage of predicted lifespan left, based on the manufacturer’s model
• Available spare: the normalized amount of spare capacity still available, from 0 to 100 percent
• Temperature: the device temperature in Celsius

Windows also surfaces explicit warnings here. “Spare capacity is low” means spare storage has dropped below the manufacturer’s safety threshold. “Reliability is degraded” means the drive has logged significant media errors or an internal error. A drive set to read-only can still be read from but can no longer be written to.

The critical limitation: this monitoring covers NVMe SSDs only. Windows does not report health here for SATA SSDs or for traditional hard disk drives. For those, use the drive vendor’s own diagnostic utility.

If you see any warning, or if remaining life or available spare is low, back up your data first and plan to replace the drive. Do not treat it as a performance problem to tune.

For file system errors rather than hardware wear, you can run a disk check. Open Command Prompt as administrator (type cmd in Search, right-click Command Prompt, select Run as administrator) and run chkdsk C: /f. Running chkdsk requires membership in the local Administrators group. On the drive Windows is booted from, chkdsk cannot lock the volume, so it will offer to run at the next restart; accept and reboot. A full surface scan with /r can take hours on a large drive, so start it when you do not need the machine.

Install Windows Updates and Update Your Drivers, GPU and Storage First

Outdated drivers are a common and badly underestimated cause of slowdowns, particularly graphics and storage drivers, since those sit directly in the path of everything you see and everything you load.

Windows Update. Start > Settings > Windows Update > Check for updates. Install what is offered and restart when asked. Windows Update delivers recommended drivers automatically alongside operating system updates.

Optional driver updates. These are the ones people miss, because they are never installed automatically. Go to Start > Settings > Windows Update > Advanced options, and under Additional options select Optional updates. Expand the driver section, select the drivers you want, then choose Download and install. Display adapters and storage controllers are the two categories worth prioritizing here.

Device Manager, for a specific device. Right-click Start and select Device Manager. Expand the category by selecting its arrow, right-click the device, and choose Update driver, then Search automatically for drivers, which appears as Search automatically for updated driver software in some releases. Microsoft’s own guidance is that Windows Update is the better route for drivers generally, so treat Device Manager as the tool for one specific misbehaving device.

The manufacturer’s own driver. For graphics cards in particular, the driver published directly by the GPU vendor is frequently newer than what Windows Update offers. If your PC came from an OEM, check the OEM support site as well, since some laptop GPU and chipset drivers are customized for that model.

After any driver update, restart and re-check Task Manager. If a slowdown started immediately after a driver update, you can roll it back: in Device Manager, open the device Properties, go to the Driver tab, and select Roll Back Driver if the option is available.

Leave Virtual Memory on Automatic Unless You Have a Specific Reason

The page file, also called virtual memory, is disk space Windows uses as an overflow area when physical RAM runs short. It is a frequent target of bad advice, and the safe answer for nearly everyone is to let Windows manage it.

To view the setting: select Search on the taskbar, type “advanced system”, and open View advanced system settings. On the Advanced tab, under Performance, select Settings. In Performance Options, open the Advanced tab, and under Virtual memory select Change.

Confirm that “Automatically manage paging file size for all drives” is selected. In almost all cases, that is the correct configuration and you should close the dialog without changing anything.

Only change this if you have a concrete reason, and understand the risk before you do. Setting a custom page file that is too small can cause memory allocation failures and application crashes, which is a worse problem than the one you were trying to solve. If you do set a custom size, Microsoft’s long-standing general guidance is an initial size of 1.5 times installed RAM. Changing page file settings requires a restart to take effect. Note the values shown before you edit them so you can restore them.

The honest framing: if your PC is constantly paging, the real fix is more RAM or fewer running apps, not page file tuning.

Repair Windows System Files with DISM and SFC

If Windows itself feels broken rather than merely busy, with features failing, apps crashing, or updates refusing to install, corrupted system files are a plausible cause. Microsoft provides two command-line tools for this, and the order in which you run them matters.

Open an elevated terminal first. Type cmd in the Search box, right-click Command Prompt in the results, and select Run as administrator. Both commands below require this; they will fail in a normal user window.

Step 1, repair the component store with DISM:

DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth

This checks and repairs the Windows image that System File Checker draws its known-good files from, which is why it comes first. The operation can take several minutes and may appear to stall around 20 percent. It needs an internet connection, because it pulls replacement files from Windows Update by default.

If you want to inspect before repairing, Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /ScanHealth scans for corruption and Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /CheckHealth reports whether the image is healthy, repairable, or non-repairable.

Step 2, repair protected system files with SFC:

sfc /scannow

Run this in the same elevated window after DISM finishes. Do not close the Command Prompt window until verification reaches 100 percent.

You will get one of four outcomes: no integrity violations found, meaning system files are intact; corrupt files found and successfully repaired; corrupt files found but not repaired, which usually calls for running the scan again or in Safe Mode; or the operation could not be performed at all.

For details, the results are logged to %windir%\Logs\CBS\CBS.log. To extract only the relevant lines into a readable file on your desktop, run:

findstr /c:"[SR]" %windir%\Logs\CBS\CBS.log >"%userprofile%\Desktop\sfcdetails.txt"

Restart when both commands have finished.

Rule Out Malware Before Concluding It Is a Hardware Problem

Malware such as cryptocurrency miners is designed to consume exactly the resources you are trying to reclaim, and it typically shows up as sustained high CPU use from a process you do not recognize, often dropping the moment you open Task Manager.

Run a scan with the protection already built into Windows 11: Start > Settings > Privacy & security > Windows Security > Virus & threat protection, then select Quick scan.

If the Quick scan comes back clean but the symptoms persist, run a fuller scan. Under Virus & threat protection, select Scan options, choose the option you want, and select Scan now. Two are worth knowing:

• Full scan examines every file and program on the device. How long it takes depends on the size of the drive and the number of files, so start it when you do not need the machine.
• Microsoft Defender Offline scan, shown in some Windows 11 releases as Microsoft Defender Antivirus (offline scan), restarts the PC and scans before Windows loads. This is the one that catches malware capable of hiding from a scanner running inside a live Windows session.

If you have installed a third-party antivirus product, run its scan instead, and check whether the product itself is the load. Security software performing a scheduled full scan will pin the disk, and running two real-time antivirus engines at once causes exactly the kind of slowdown people blame on Windows.

Reset This PC as the Last Resort, and Back Up First

If everything above has been tried and the machine is still slow, resetting Windows reinstalls the operating system and clears out accumulated software problems in one step. Treat it as the final option, not an early one.

Back up everything you care about before you begin. A reset cannot be undone. Once it starts, there is no way to return the PC to its previous state, and files removed by the reset are not recoverable. Copy your documents, photos, and any application data to an external drive or cloud storage first, and confirm the copy is complete and readable before continuing.

Two more things to have ready. If the drive is encrypted with BitLocker, you will need your BitLocker recovery key, so retrieve and save it beforehand. And gather the installers and license keys for the applications you will need to reinstall, because the reset removes them.

The path is Start > Settings > System > Recovery, then under Recovery options select Reset PC. Earlier Windows 11 releases label the same entry Reset this PC. Then choose:

• Keep my files: reinstalls Windows and keeps your personal files, but removes the apps and drivers you installed and reverts settings to defaults. There is also an option to restore apps that came preinstalled on the PC.
• Remove everything: reinstalls Windows and removes all personal files, apps, and settings. Choose this only when you are handing the PC on to someone else or genuinely starting clean. The additional Clean data option overwrites the drive more thoroughly, takes much longer, and is intended for a device you are giving away or selling.

Then choose how Windows is reinstalled:

• Cloud download: downloads a fresh copy of Windows from Microsoft. Requires a solid internet connection and several gigabytes of data, and is the better choice if you suspect the local recovery files are themselves damaged.
• Local reinstall: rebuilds Windows from files already on the device. No download needed, but useless if those local files are corrupted.

During the reset the screen may go black for as long as fifteen minutes at a stretch. Do not force a restart during that period, because interrupting a reset can leave the installation unbootable. Keep a laptop connected to power for the entire process.

After the reset completes, run Windows Update to current before reinstalling your applications, and reinstall startup-heavy utilities only if you actually need them. A clean machine that immediately gets the same twenty startup apps back will feel slow again within a month.

Windows 11 Running Slow FAQ

Why is my Windows 11 PC slow even though it has plenty of RAM?

RAM capacity is only one of three possible bottlenecks. Open Task Manager with Ctrl + Shift + Esc and look at the Performance tab: if memory sits comfortably below 80 percent but Disk is pinned at 100 percent, your storage is the constraint, not your RAM. Sustained 100 percent disk use usually traces back to cloud sync, a background antivirus scan, search indexing after a large file move, or a drive that is beginning to fail. Sustained high CPU with low memory use points at a specific misbehaving app or at malware. Fix the resource that is actually saturated; adding RAM to a machine with a disk bottleneck changes nothing.

Does disabling startup apps break the programs I disabled?

No. Disabling a startup app only stops it from launching automatically when you sign in. The app itself stays installed, keeps all its settings, and works normally when you open it from the Start menu. The change is reversible at any time from Start > Settings > Apps > Startup or from the Startup apps tab in Task Manager. The practical trade-off is that features depending on the app running in the background, such as instant chat notifications or automatic cloud sync, will not work until you launch the app manually.

Should I run SFC or DISM first?

Run DISM first, then SFC. System File Checker repairs damaged system files by replacing them from a locally stored known-good copy, so if that copy is itself corrupted, SFC has nothing valid to restore from and reports files it cannot repair. DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth repairs that stored copy, which is why it belongs first. Run sfc /scannow afterward in the same elevated Command Prompt window, then restart. Both commands require an administrator terminal, and DISM needs an internet connection to fetch replacement files from Windows Update.

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