Dave casually mentions that he created task manager as a side project and blows everyone’s collective mind

Single biggest performance increase I have seen on older machines is replacing any magnetic disk with an SSD. That one change can extend the usable lifespan of the machine for several years, especially if you also max out the amount of RAM that the motherboard can support.

As someone who grew up with xp the format option is what we did all the time. It's strange that you mention it as a last resort. We formatted our computers so much we memorized the service pack 2 key. Lol

Dave is a walking talking technical computer encyclopedia, I love listening to his knowledge, experience, and opinions

Speaking as an experienced teacher, I have to say that this is an excellent instructive video. Very fast paced, but easy to listen to. Clear, direct and understandable. I think I actually got 90% of it on the first pass. No annoying music or distracting graphics. I will definitely be turning in often. Gigathanks.

All good tips here. I'd also add: - If the hard drive is mechanical replace it with an SSD - Run CrystalDiskInfo and make sure none of your drives are on the way out. Slow storage is a performance killer and might lead to data loss - If the machine is a high end (gaming, workstation) machine with a heavy cpu heatsink - redo the thermal paste if you haven't touched it for years. Should help with those boost clocks. Especially if the machine has been transported, which might cause the old paste to crack if it has dried out. - DO NOT neglect fans on laptops. Get them cleaned out

Good info. I find these are the most important: 1. Updates; Windows, browsers, apps. 2. RAM ; adding some RAM may improve speed. 3. hard drive space; some of my users I support save too much on the C drive and it gets full. 4. Malware. Many users don't pay any attention to these.

Dave, there's a third scenario to why I watched that video. I came across your channel a few weeks ago after you published a video on Task Manager. After I watched it, I opened another one, about pointers. Your channel is absolutely fantastic. I hope you're having as much fun doing these videos as we do watching them. I missed such content here on YT🎉

“Real computers don’t get slow, they get relegated to full time Space Invader platforms”

Some examples of hardware slowing down; Your computer may have been tuned in the BIOS, XMP for example and then the BIOS gets reset to default values. Your SSD is too full so it has to do extra work to find space to save new data. A component may actually be failing but the computer is hiding the retries so it simply seems slow. You may require the correct driver which has been removed at some point and now the computer is making do with a basic driver. I found a user had been using a machine with the wrong network driver which gave them a 100mbps network when it should have been 1000. They also were using the Windows VGA driver when the graphics had a much better driver available. If they were a gamer they would have not been able to game but all that really happened is the computer felt slower to use.

It's really amusing to see the amount of interest in something that has become so ubiquitous, yet mundane. The windows operating system. Your channel is a treasure trove for information and entertainment for pertaining to all of the little thoughts and questions that pop into my head while using my PC. Thanks for all of your hard work throughout the years!

3:27 eventually HDD can also cumulate failing sectors and slow down, because the HDD is trying to read more that usual a hard to read sector.

Bonus bonus item: clean the physical machine. If the heatsink for your GPU or CPU is covered in a blanket of dust, you might encounter thermal throttling. Blowing that dust off can actually make your computer faster.

I'm really glad to have found your channel. Your the perfect middle ground. By that I mean, you don't dumb things down so far, that I feel like I'm in a 3rd grade classroom, however, you don't use so much technical jargon that I have no hope of ever following a single sentence you speak. Kudos for finding the happy space for folks like me. I've got enough experience with PC and other technology, that I can't be called a novice, or beginner, but I'm not at the master, or expert level either, not by a mile lol. I find your way of explaining things absolutely perfect for the way I comprehend them, and I don't feel like an idiot after watching your videos. Like I said, I'm very glad to have ran into your channel, you get my thumb and my sub, and regular interaction from here on out. Great content, thank you for it!

A brilliant session. Very well presented. I got so much from this too. We have such a machine in our family collection. You have prompted me to become rather thorough in my work to improve its performance. Much gratitude to you for jogging me into action and superbly providing me with a master class. Cheers

I just discovered this channel and after watching only this video, I already love the content. And enjoying Dave's voice! 😊 I'm obsessed about keeping my computers "clean" so this was a useful information. I must add that I had already done all of the stuff mentioned in this video. I'm a computer hoarder! I refuse to throw away my old laptops. 😄 Even though I'm not a computer technician by any means, I keep cleaning and updating all my laptops and desktops in the house. Dave, you should be a book narrator with such a pleasant voice!

This is the first time I've even seen one of your videos and I'm impressed. Extremely articulate, well spoken, and obviously very knowledgeable. Thanks for the info. Will try this on my older secondary desktop.

#1 upgrade for an older computer is: replace the HDD with an SSD.

Great video; a lot of technical information provided in an understandable format. Very watchable.

I just saw your task manager video and started watching these older videos. I feel like I have struck a gold mine! Thanks you for doing thse videos.

Great solid top level advice Dave. And yes, in your opener I have been that person having to try and speed up relatives PCs. My favourites are 1) disable all but the necessary start-up items and 2) convince them to use Windows Defender and ditch 3rd party offerings. My other trick is to turn up with an SSD as a "present" and amaze them with the speed improvement after imaging the C: drive to the SSD. Love your work.

Timestamps: 0:00 - Intro 0:29 - Why Computers slows down 4:06 - Tip #1: Unused Software Bloat 5:51 - Tip #2: Software Updates 7:13 - Tip #3: Startup Apps and Services 9:10 - Bonus Tip: Storage Device Problems 11:10 - Tip #4: System Cleaning & Hygiene 13:20 - Bonus Tip: Proper Malware Removal 14:10 - Tip #5: System File Repair 15:02 - Outro

thank you so much for your experience and information in this area. Much appreciated!

Just stumbled accross this and found it all really fascinating and well presented. Happy to discover at the end a bit of your background. You must have known my Father's brother Ken Dye who ran the MS usability lab in the 90's. He was a wonderful, beloved uncle who passed away early last year.

Hi Dave! New subscriber, glad you're here. Just for fun I thought I'd mention one other way that hardware can degrade over time--the breakdown of thermal compound on the CPU/GPU. Granted, that's beyond the scope of most folks and your system suggestions here are top-notch. :) Thanks for this video!

I agree with replacing the old mechanical drive with an SSD. I run several old machines including laptops. The single most important thing I did for speed was to swap to an SSD in each of them. Those old computers would take 3 or more minutes to start up and several more to become useable. Each one now starts and is perfectly useable within 30 seconds and everything loads 10 times faster.

Bonus bonus tip: if Explorer seems to be getting sluggish (taking longer or even freezing up while switching folders, generating thumbnails, dragging and dropping files, etc.) there's a decent chance that your drive is in the process of failing. (Especially if you have multiple drives and these symptoms only present themselves on one of them.) The reason being that Explorer needs to wait longer while the drive retries the read operation potentially several times before either getting a result or bailing out and presenting you with an error after all.

Love your channel Dave. I was always fascinated by inside stories of people developing things impacting our lives and technology. Be it new type of engine or OS I sank countless hours using. Im using old machines with clean OS and I still observe a bit slowdown. I ovoid installing new software as well. This is mostly in very old ones from XP era, newer machine with win7 with high specs from 2011 still works super fast.

If anyone hasn't done so already, the single biggest upgrade you can do is replace a hard drive as boot device with an SSD.

Dave - I used to use WinDirStat to map out drive contents, but I've found that WizTree is much faster. It scans the MFT of the machine instead of seemingly looping through all the files. While either will do the job, just thought I'd throw it out there in case you hadn't heard of it before. Have an awesome Friday!

Thanks, Dave. This was entertaining AND informative, and confirms what I've always practiced, as well as advised orhers to do (or in many/most cases did for them). Sound advice re: "why we can rely on Windows Defender!" Keep up the awesome fun.

Wow! Awesome video one of the absolute best PC performance/ cleanup videos I have seen. Thank you ☺️

Totally agree that Defender is all you need. Malware can be very odd. Had a case back in the 90s. A user got reprimanded for visiting a ton of porn sites. The router monitoring software said so. I knew very well she wouldn't do that at all, particularly at work. I checked the browser history, but nothing, which I expected. While I sat at her computer the monitored hits kept coming. Turns out there was some malware doing web gets to porn sites, with a referrer code in the get, to generate revenue. The content of the sites went straight to null, so no-one was the wiser.

A couple things to add: dried up thermal paste causing thermal throttling and needing a repaste, and system drive's coming nearer the ends of their lives and replacing them by cloning to new drives, especially new faster ones.

My reason for stopping by was to see what your advice would be and liking this I would watch other videos you made. This was very helpful, as back in my naval days IT Navy Recruiting HQ sent me to college, as a side experience having lack of manpower, do to downsizing, in the early 90s. I am retired and do little on computers today, but I like to keep up on new knowledge about computers/laptops. I did check like and Subscribed.

Great overview for us users who don't aspire to be full-on tech-heads but like to at least more-or-less understand what's going on inside the machine. Not surprised it has hit 1M views. (Maybe the only other thing Dave could have told us was that the Settings for You Tube videos allow you to turn the playback speed down to 75% - it makes Dave sound slightly intoxicated, but gives us mere mortals a chance to keep up with what he's saying !)

One other option to reclaim disk space (I often do this around the same time as running chkdsk and sfc) is to run dism with the check health switches to remove any cruft I can from the sxs directory that grows to gargantuan sizes over the years as updates and patches are installed.

I fixed my older machine from running really slow. I removed windows and installed Linux. Now it runs super fast!

I had an insane performance increase when swapping from an hdd to an ssd. That said, there are a lot of other features you can turn off that boost performance, such as drop shadows or windows search. I also find that programs open way faster by opening them one by one as needed rather than them all fighting eachother for the same memory and disk read upon boot up.

Best video on PC maintenance I've seen! Thank you.

As a long time PC Tech I thank you for repeatedly reminding people not to delete stuff they don't know or understand. The advice you give is spot on!

My Dell Optiplex 780 had become very slow. Upping the RAM from 4GB to 10GB helped, but not as much as I had hoped for. Then I found your vid and did all 5 fixes. Wow, what a huge difference!

As an IT professional this is fantastic information in particular for helping relatives (as Dave mentions). He dispels some common misconceptions and helps prioritize repairs. Grateful for this content.

I love it! And I mostly agree with it. I would however have liked two things: A bigger warning that defragging is for spinning rust only. Like a seizure-warning epileptic-fit-inducing flashing lights and sounds big warning. Because not everyone is an expert and forcing a defrag on SSDs is bad. And the second, an actual in-depth look at how the performance of your SSD slows down horribly over time and how each one is a bit ... different. SLC is generally problem free, but low capacity. MLC, LTC, and QLC (and soon PLC) have ... things ... to watch out for. Storing more than one bit per cell, their first write is faster than subsequent writes, so write performance varies. Also they tend to cache a portion of their capacity as SLC. As long as you don't fill the drive up, you can enjoy that cache speed. Fill them up however, speed go bye bye. Sometimes deleting files gets you back that speed, sometimes not. Etc. SSDs are ... complex, and can be a H U G E factor on why your modern PC slows down with age. Seeing a cohesive analysis of all of the complexities to be aware of and what can be done would be a nice part 2, IMHO. You could also look at how some anti-malware packages are, "better" than others about slowing down your system, if you need more time to fill? Maybe go into background tasks? Bloatware from folks like Dell?

All current hard drives use zoned geometry, The outer tracks have more sectors per track than inner tracks. The each zone will have a set number of sectors, as the zones progress towards the center of the disk surface, the number of sectors per track is reduced. This prevents the waste of space that would occur from only having the number of sectors on the outer track that can be reliably recorded on inner tracks. This zoning system started sometime around when the IDE/ATA LBA (logical block addressing) system came into widespread use. Early IDE drives emulated fixed sectors per track geometry for compatibility with older system BIOS and software.

Thanks, Dave. Sometimes, as I get older, I forget some of the things that are important and your reminder is a great help.

Thank you Dave, I've been looking for SFS (well, something to do that) and didn't know it existed, much appreciated. Cheers!

Hi Dave, Always fun watching your content. I can honestly say after 31 years in the IT industry I always learn bits n bobs from your content. thank you. I wonder if you could do a video on software tweaks. There used to be tons of Registry hacks we used when I was a desktop engineer (a while ago!) and it would be nice if we had your wisdom on the same, such as PowerToys or the like. Regards, TJ

Also, if you are running a mechanical hard drive clone it to an SSD and old machines will perk up significantly. I use Macrium's Reflect. I find it does an excellent job at doing an exact clone. Don't forget to also allocate some empty space, (usually around 10% of total disk volume), at the end of the disk for over provisioning. (I also highly recommend Samsung SSD's for speed and reliability.)

I love the information you provide, but it would be highly appreciable if you could show a demo of how things are done and the aftermath.

Dang Dave... I wish I had a craft room growing up, or even now. I couldn't imagine having parents that were technologically literate or supportive of any of that. I've had to fight for all of it, it's been a long and hard journey but now I am (for the most part) competent with systems programming and development... I can only imagine how much progress I would have made if I had a good start. What your doing is absolutely amazing. I never realized how valuable that kind of thing was.

Dave, two tools you didn't mention are "AUTORUNS" to edit startups & "PROCESS EXPLORER" to get a better detailed look at what is in memory and the process tree that is attached to the executables. But good cleanup video for the medium tech inclined used.

Great video and insight for Windows users! Although I feel sorry for Dave's iMac, I just upgraded my 2015 21' iMac from LMDE 4 to LMDE 5 (Short for Linux Mint Debian Edition), the computer is now faster, more reliable and has better functionality, it will be running like that in next 3 years (minimum), regardless how many programs I will be installing. That will never happen with Mac OS or Windows, unheard of.

Thanks Dave for sharing your knowledge with us.

This guy is very well spoken, & for to knowledgeable for me, I’m new to computers, so I will just look & listen.

Thank you, Dave! I'm autistic myself, and am inspired by you in a huge way to make sure my non-verbal son can enjoy the gift of his life to an equally amazing degree! Take care Dave, and thank you so much.

The ultimate solution: wipe the hard drive and reload a fresh Copy of the OS and apps. That is essentially a factory reset that gives you exactly what you had when you bought it. Then do a disk image backup. Next time it gets slow, wipe the drive and restore the disk image backup. Voila, super fast computer again.

I just watched this entire video. Thank you, your awesome!! Full of knowledge and wisdom. Saved my PC

Great tip Dave about the hibernatiion feature! managed to save some valuable space on my ssd. Thank you!

Great tips Mr. Dave.. I always try to have this type of info. to make and keep my equipment running.. Still using win7, and remember hating the transition from XP.. Not so bad, but the software I use works best in the older systems..

You didn't spend much time on thermal throttling but I've found it to be significant with my old laptop. Laptops are used on your lap, or laying on the sofa, or the bed, and their intakes can bring in bits of lint. My laptop had a very small air cooler and right in front of that air cooler was a big dust bunny. I removed the fan, removed the dust bunny, and the computer didn't thermal throttle as bad. In most situations I don't think this would affect a big desktop computer as much unless it is in a pretty bad environment.

Amazing video! Thank you very much for such an informative video

Great advice here, thanks Dave 👍

Something I found throughout the years: Many of the SATA cables that I got with motherboards/drives back when it was a brand new standard got glitchy over time(also wobbly in their connectors although I'm not sure they weren't like that new). Sometimes loading something would just stall for a few seconds or even hang the system. If the system decided to "hang" moving the cables around a bit would often get it moving again. Even if all seemed fine drive benchmarks would sometimes be "slow" because the controllers fell back to the lowest speed they could as they were getting too much garbled data. On HDD's the actual disks would make clicking/chirping noises (seagate drives here). If you run into something like that, check the UDMA_CRC_Error_Count (or something similar) SMART stats. If it's high, replace the cable before replacing the disk to get everything running smooth again.

Dave just casually rocking some of the best hardware on the market. Also, his book is amazing and after 30 years of "Why am I like this" I am getting tested myself in a couple months.

About 15/18 years ago I switched to an Apple system because I was having to spend so much time doing maintenance cleaning crap out of the system-maybe an hour or two a week, usually on weekends. I am/was a journalist/researcher/copyeditor and used the internet in some odd places. Very little of this time wasted with my Mac mini. Anyway, one cost is I still feel uneasy with my lack of familiarity with Apple operating systems. I don’t need to kludge around in them, but in a couple of cases that caused big problems that would not have happened with windows, or I could have worked through them. But I was amazed that after all these years, I understood precisely or had used an earlier version of every fix you mentioned! When you pointed to old versions of a file, I remembered the file! Thanks, I enjoyed this.

Excellent informative video. Thanks very much Dave!

Thanks as always, Dave! Having HFA In big tech and being pretty good a masking, I was always concerned about the stigma that might be associated with disclosing that I’m neurodivergent. The openness with which you discuss your own ASD has really helped me to embrace that part of myself. Looking forward to reading your book one of these days!

With regards to the "angular velocity" theory: I know there is a similar principle at play with optical media (which also spins), and the placement of certain files can greatly influence loading times. This heavily influenced the console development (DVD organization) of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. As it relates to a HDD, I'm not sure if angular speed has much influence, though I can say, at the very least, physical storage location on the platter does affect read speeds. We're aware of fragmentation and its effects, though I've also noticed performance improvements in reading files written to a nearly fresh (recently wiped) installation. That data can be consistently accessed far quicker than had it been written only slightly after a few other files on a clean install, lending itself to carefully choosing those very first files.

I wish any of this applied to me. I’m a poor bloke who bought his computer off a guy on Craigslist ten years ago. I don’t go online with it and I’ve never done any software updates or upgrades beyond printer/mouse drivers. I don’t even have an Adobe reader as such software doesn’t want to even install on my computer when I’ve tried. I’ve gone through all the usual disc cleanup and defrag. The only thing I add to my computer is scanned photos and documents, which, once slow-down became noticeable, I started transferring to external storage and emptying my recycle bin. Whatever caused the slow-down wasn’t reversed by any of that. Even a simple procedure like copying/pasting an image from Paint to Word takes longer as time progresses.

Excellent content! Keep up the great work!

I agree with all your recommendations. You sort-of touched on this BUT - The BIGGEST improvement one can make with an older machine is to replace the old rotary drive with a SSD. I didn't hear you explicitly say this.

The 1st change I tend to make when asked to "speed up" someones machine (with a HDD) would be to image it onto a higher capacity quality SSD. That provides a cold backup and a 30-ish-X IOPS bump. Basically a do no harm update that tends to be cost effective. Followed by all of the steps in this video of course. RAM isn't always accessible, and when it is it may not be available or have sane pricing.

You're video speeches are some of the best. Great videos

Great Informative video Thanks a Million Professor.

Ages ago a friend called me up and asked me to please come take his computer. He was just tired of dealing with it because it ran so poorly, he assumed it was because it had a cyrix CPU. 5 minutes on the bench and I knew why. It had the minimal amount of ram it could possibly run with, was running windows Me and had a winmodem (I did say ages ago). I maxed out the memory, installed NT and replaced the winmodem with a US Robotics serial modem. I used that thing for at least another 5 years in my lab. Now a days when a system seems slow I replace the drive with an SSD and max out the memory, when that doesn't cut it anymore I install linux and use it for other things. I still have systems running that are >15 years old. I drive them until something major gives out.

11:16 A note on WinDirStat: It's something of an old program and is somewhat slow. Wiztree is a newer variant and runs so much faster. Helps the file trimming go much faster when you aren't waiting minutes between drive scans

Dave. Thank you for all of the videos I've seen so far. My time goes back to BASIC. I was an outside beta tester beginning with Win 95. I've all but forgotten this experience as I started testing up to Win 10. I refuse to buy any PC post 2015. So I'm assed out But your videos have inspired me to pull out my old HP Form Factor and play around with it Thanks for that

Very helpful tips to salvage my old iMac. Thanks!

Oh sure, show off your cool craft room and don't even mention the super cute dog. You'd better apologize to that dog, tell it it's a good dog, pet it, and give it a treat!

Hard drives do use constant angular velocity, but the number of sectors per track does change. Fewer sectors per track at the inner part of the drive, but more sectors per track at the outer tracks. Check documention for Seagate drives . Disk to head transfer rates are for outer track. Ibm described the change in sectors per track as "notches". Even back when disk drives were described using tracks sectors and heads, the drives had the smarts to translate that to a block number, and locate the data on the drive. Data is written and read from the drive at different speeds to allow the bit density to remain constant over the surface of the drive. 3.5 inch hard disks could have as much as a 3 fold advantage in both speed and reduced head seek at the outer edge of the drive as opposed to the innermost track. Think this started with ata/ide drives.

Thank you, I just subscribe to your page. I needed this please keep them coming.

That is so cool having the family work/gather/pc room!

Hardware wise, I think you nailed it Dave. Cooling is a big thing - esp on laptops. Very often when a laptop battery gets old, a lot of the charging current ends up as heat in the battery, this - possibly in conjunction with clogged vents or fans - can cause thermal throttling. I have revived several laptops for people by cleaning the airways and replacing the battery after noting that the old (usually original) battery was almost too hot to touch! Completely agree about that hard drive "Outer edges" thing - it's rubbish cos (a) of the factors you cite and (b) cos on modern drives all access is via LBNs (Logical Block Numbers) at the OS driver level and at the cluster level above there. How the mapping of LBNs map to physical drive surface locations is a per-manufacturer/per-model decision implemented in the drive's internal firmware and varies quite a lot. In short, it may not use a "Start from the middle and work out" algorithm. All that HDD optimisation stuff that was built into early Unix systems (and for all I know early DOS and Windows 3.1 systems) and used intimate knowledge of the disk drive hardware, such as average seek times, head switch times, cylinder read rates, rotational latency minimisation and read or write clustering to get the best possible performance out of hard drives which, even with all that stuff, was pretty poor by today's standards. Thankfully all that optimisation stuff moved into drive firmware in the late 1990s for the most part and around the same time, they started including thousands of spare blocks to transparently replace any main blocks that became unreliable with age. So now (aside from manufacturer diagnostics) hard drives are black boxes offering a huge bucket of perfect 512 byte storage blocks, each with a unique LBN and that's about all that anything at the OS level knows, or needs to know. About the only optimisation you can do now at the OS level is to change the cluster size to suit your use of the storage (video files = big clusters, thousands of tiny files = tiny clusters). In short, anyone trying to tell you that you can affect physical placement of your files, is probably trying to sell you something!

Nice information, especially the HDD platter speed, always thought of that, this was a nice explanation. I personally hate both Microsoft and Windows, and for good reasons. I moved to Linux when I was at university some 15 years ago, never been happier. I hated the random BSOD and the fact the de-fragment on Windows XP actually made my computer much slower (tested several times, always had to format after it). Add to that the crazy HDD activity when I went to sleep and did not shutdown my computer. The Windows HDD actually wore out much earlier than the Linux HDD. As for pushing the settings away, I recently joined a company where they use Edge by default and found that search engine settings where actually hidden and not as straight forward as in Firefox or Chrome for that matter. Love your channel though, always learning something new. Keep it up!

i used to install so much on my windows 98 machine back in the day i knew the ins and outs of the registry, never ran a antivirus and was willing and able to do a complete reinstall religiously about once a month... after evaluating all those juarez...... lol , sometimes stuff just bloats like you said. i love how you said exactly what i was thinking once again dave! THANKS man maybe ill be joining up in your discord or something where we can actually talk about some things but for now i will post my praise here and at least for me, i really dig your channel and persona. keep on rockin man.

Its always a joy to hear from people that know what they’re talking about. Very informative.

If your computer has a HDD, then run Defrag every month, or so. Another thing you could do that a lot of people overlook, is checking your service tab, and see what running automatically or delay. Try to see if you can set some of the services to manual. This can result in faster boot time, and the program will still work once trying to open. Opening up the laptop or desktop and clean out dusk can reduce the thermal throttle with proper air flow.

I remember computer magazine c’t writing a HDD test program that showed different speeds on different parts of the disk. That was 100% a thing. But with many platters that gives you more of a sawtooth pattern depending on logical to physical sector mapping

It has been a long time since I had watched anything from you. So I subscribed. Love it how you bought MACS for the hardware, etc., and installled Windows in them! Way back then, I learned a lot from you when I was first getting into PC's for the household. You made the scary for me unscary. I should say that you helped a newbie's confidence. You think I could afford a technician/repairperson?! Thanks Dave!

Definately a Video for the new user and Very Noob reliable tip. This is a great video to show new users of the computer world that is easy to do and will show you some good bennefits of responcible usage of your PC. Good Job Mr. Garage Techman. Garantied this video will bring the enthusiast in your Viewers who haven't yet found out why PC is so dominate!!! Presentation is very informative and in the face which will be great to guide new PC or even more experienced novice user. BIG THUMBS DAVE!!!!!

Thanks Dave. I learned a lot especially about Task Manager which I have always used to end tasks that were in a 100% CPU loop! I have a question that does relate to Windows performance. Over many years I have been annoyed that Windows does not seem to natively prioritise it's tasks. I mean that it doesn't differentiate between tasks that have a screen component (i.e. you are directly interacting with that task (say, Word)) and tasks that are running in the background - foreground v background I guess. A couple of examples, rendering a video or a security product running a full disk scan versus a user trying to start UKposts and waiting forever. I see that you can set the priority of a task but why doesn't WIndows do this automatically? I am miffed about this because in the 1980s I programmed DEC minicomputers that were way less capable than my current desktop and successfully hosted say 4 high speed data entry operators and as-many-as you-like concurrent background tasks, such as compiling COBOL programs or running reports without any degradation of the data entry tasks. In other words the users who needed the attention of the CPU and Ram got prioritised over the other tasks that were not time critical. Is there a way to get these result with Windows 11? Thanks.

Your vote of confidence in Defender has me thinking about ditching Avast, which seems to just get increasingly cumbersome, spammy and dopey, even though certainly it works fine as far as its core function is concerned. My performance on my Windows laptops is already reasonable, but getting rid of even more bloat sounds pretty cool. Thanks!

So, you're the dude! I've been wanting to say thanks to you for decades about the Task Manager. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't use it for one reason or another and it's help me save countless systems from virus's, rootkits and other malware as well as find and tune performance issues on countless others. Sure, there are plenty of tools in the arsenal but the one that is used along with all of them has been the Task Manager (along with its sidekick, Performance Monitor). I'm originally from the Amiga world and was dealing with PCs (286's and DOS at the time (mid-80s to early 90s)) while in the Airforce. I remember finding an OEM copy of Windows 2 in one of the boxes and, out of curiosity, installing it on one of the spare systems in the shop (which was a classroom, I was an instructor by then). Once it was installed, I was severely dumfounded at how awful it ran compared to my Amiga 2000 at home. If I could get two programs loaded, they would try to beat the crap out of each other through the curtains of the "Windows" until one, or both, of them would give up, crash, or hang up the whole shebang. I wasn't impressed at all, So I went back to playing with the Amiga and a 286 system that I'd made a trade for and playing around with the "Upper Memory" and dialing up BBS systems and such. Windows 3 and 3.1 were the game changers that got me into my first hobby build of a 386DX system (at a blazing 33 Mhz, with a Turbo button and a huge, partitioned 80 MB Hard drive, too and 4 Megs of RAM. (My buddies were still swapping floppies on their Commadore 64s and playing Pong on their Ataris.)). It's been both a blast and major PITA (at times) ever since. I, too, try to keep systems out of the scrap piles for neighbors, relatives and such folks but have to get away from it every now and then or I get pestered half to death or end up getting stuck with of a lot of (sometimes piles) obsolete stuff from them. Thanks again, from the bottom of my heart! You got my Sub!

Thank you for creating Task Manager. My favorite is Windows 7 even though I have Windows 10 on another computer. It was running slowly so I went into Task manager and found 2 programs eating up my CPU Real which is a multimedia app and WD drive Manager. I used CC cleaner to disable them from startup, rebooted, and CPU usage went from up to 100 percent down to 4 percent. Runs like lightning now.

Most HDDs in the modern age do have variable geometry (ZBR) packing more sectors into the outer tracks - that's part reason why CHS addressing was replaced by LBA. So, outer tracks should experience better performance due to having to seek to the next one less often. Directory placement at the middle is generally for seek performance - any advantage having it near the outer edge would soon be lost otherwise. Minor revisions being better - sometimes. I remember Windows XP having zippy performance when you installed the base product but then you'd put the Service Packs on and it'd get more sluggish with each one (and this is before any other additional software or great time elapsing). Hibernation file - fast startup needs it since modern Win versions have the option to just shut most of the OS down and write the kernal off to the hiberfile. It's also a must-have if you have a UPS. Macs - the best thing you can do for one of them is to put Windows on it. But in general they'll be a bit slower than a same spec'd generic Intel machine.

Hey Dave! Thanks for the video. I found it very informative, and reassuring of what I have been doing with my machines + family and friends’. I have a question though! How do you feel about disabling sysmain/superfetch? I have disabled this in the past, and have noticed increases in speed. Again, thanks for the video, and for task manager. Cheers

Thanks for this video. I'm so pleased I already knew most of these things. 😏 I've been cleaning up my system for hours on end the past few weeks. I used Task Manager heavily for that, so thanks for that. I might try a grand update to latest everything, following your tip.

My Alienware 17r2 laptop is still operating as fast as did when I bought it nearly 10 years ago. BUT, I didn't buy it to be used as a gaming laptop, I bought it to be used as a regular laptop. So I haven't wore out the fans nor overcrowded the drives or stressed the CPU. Proof that a few extra money spent can indeed go a long way. On two occasions it did do the dreaded blue screen. I blame that on faulty Windows updates. But she's still going strong!

A lot of OEM thermal paste degrades and/or pumps out so it's a good idea to do a sanity check on CPU temperatures with HWiNFO and Prime95 and repaste if temps get out of control. (by out of control I mean thermal shutdown, throttling below base clock speed, or reaching a steady state temperature over 90C with stock power limits (12900K excluded))