How To Make Windows 8 Faster


So lets start The Ultimate Guide to Speed up Windows 8. Special attention has been given by the Windows 8 team for making Windows 8 faster than the previous operating systems.

Although Windows 8 is quite better in terms of speed than Windows, but there is always space to make the things better. Therefore, I'm going to share  useful tips of the Windows 8 to let you enjoy Windows 8 smoothly without any unwanted delay.

Make Windows 8 Start up faster by removing unwanted programs and services from startup

To do this type ‘ msconfig‘ in Run or Search box, go to Startup tab and uncheck programs and services not required during start up. The programs and services listed here start with Windows 8 every time so by removing them we can reduce Windows 8 startup time. Do not remove any necessary startup programs.

Speed up Windows Startup

Windows 8 saves its state while shutting down and when you turn it on later, it gets back to the same status. This consumes a lot of resources.

First  Navigate to Control Panel.    Under Power button settings option, choose the option for When I press the power button as Do nothing.

Below you will find the Shutdown settings section, where you need to enable the Turn on fast startup (recommended) option.

MouseHoverTime:

MouseHoverTime is a Windows 8 registry attribute that makes you compute the time that your system takes to display a pop-up menu. Now you can simply speed up your mouse hovering processes to get the things done as soon as you want. Here’s how you can do it:

Open Windows 8 Search using Windows button + Q. Enter “regedit” to search for registry.

Now browse through HKEY_CURRENT_USER --> Control Panel --> Mouse. Search for the property 

MouseHoverTime and simply right click it. “Choose Modify”.

You can change the time by entering “Value data” option that ranges from 0-20. The unit of time is in milliseconds to show information whenever you hover your mouse pointer over a specific menu.

Finally, click “OK” button and restart your system.

Increase Virtual Memory ( Paging File)

Windows 8 consumes more memory than Windows XP but lesser than Windows 8. If you are a heavy computer user who open more programs and windows then you can increase Virtual Memory of Windows 8.

Virtual memory works with physical memory ( RAM).  Hard disk space will be used as virtual memory to keep temporary information which very rarely use by programs and OS. By increasing Virtual memory in Windows 8 computer make sure programs and OS work smoothly.

Right Click on My Computer, select Properties. Go to Advanced tab and click on setting button under ‘Performance’.

Go to Advanced tab in next window, press change button under virtual memory.

Here you can see the current virtual memory size. Virtual memory called ‘paging file’ also.


In next screen under custom size enter size you want to allocate for virtual memory (paging file). It depends on your hard disk size and physical memory.  Make sure it’s not less than system recommended size. Normally recommended paging file is 1.5 of physical RAM. In this example recommended size of virtual memory is 4605MB because my windows 8 RAM is 3GB. So, enter 4605MB in Initial size and Maximum Size fields. Press Set button, you may need to restart computer.

MenuShowDelay:

Presenting you another Windows 8 registry named MenuShowDelay which sets the time while you point your mouse pointer to prompt items of a menu. The property is by default set as 400 but you can easily change this value matching your suitability.

Press Windows +Q to search for “regedit” menu of your system.

Browse through the tree on the left pane to look for MenuShowDelay at this location HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Control Panel > Desktop. Right click this property and choose “Modify”.

Now you will see a “Value Data” option which usually ranges from 0-20. This is the time expressed in milliseconds that is required to invoke the items of a particular menu.
Click “OK” and restart your system to finally see the changes made.

 Change the Power Plan To Maximum Performance

Double click the ” Power Options ” in the Control panel and Click the down arrow showing ” Show Additional Plans ” to see the ” High Performance ” power plan. Now just activate the ” High Performance ” plan and that’s it.

You may go for the advanced settings for further tweaking if you want.
The Power settings in Windows 8 is not automatically set for maximum performance. By default the power plan in Windows 8 is set for a balanced performance with energy consumption on hardware. So you may not get the optimal performance from windows 8 if this is the case. So we need to change the power plan to High Performance Mode.

Disable Visual Effects

Again if you are not an appearance lover of Windows 8 then disable visual effects. It will reduce the load on RAM and VGA.

In same settings tab under performance , go to Visual effects and set for Adjust best performance.  It will bring all visual effects to very standard level, but to better performance.

Defragment disks

Defragmentation helps to improve access time for each file by managing  free space and arranging file locations on disks. It’s recommended to run defragmentation tool very frequently especially when you have lot of data. In our case after deleting unwanted files by disk cleanup in previous step run defragmentation now.

Go to Properties of each disk, select defragmentation under tools and start. Defragmentation takes time depends on size of partition and data.

Windows 8 Disk Clean up

Remove unwanted and temporary files on your Windows 8 disks. It reduces access time on system and your files to make Windows 8 faster.

Right click on each disk, go to properties and press Disk Cleanup button. In next screen you can select file types to delete and start clean up.

Hope you liked the latest edition to our stream of posts detailing interesting Windows 8 hacks

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