By default windows 10 can be slow and lag.
So I prefer to declutter it and focus on only gaming. I will explain the process I use to make my computer ready for gaming.
Start by searching the internet for some guides on disabling unnecessary windows 10 services. I disable hypervisor (hyperV) and remote desktop, fax/smartcards/search/airplane mode and heaps of other things i dont need. learn what they are and do then decide if you dont need the service or not and disable it by holding windows key pressing R key and typing in services.msc and double clicking and setting to disabled.
Next hold windows key and press E then when explorer opens you should in my computer your hard drives. You can right click and go to properties then uncheck drive indexing to turn it off. This can take a few minutes to apply. You dont need drive indexing as it just makes searching for file names in your drives a bit faster but you dont normally type in and search for files and it will still work just take a few seconds longer. Importantly without wasting time indexing all the files everything will feel quicker. a noticable speed/performance boost.
Next you'll want to hold windows key and press pause break. then click on advanced system settings. If you dont see a pause break key try to find your way to the classic control panel and under its under "system". In the performance tab you can adjust appearance for best performance if u want every bit of speed or your PC isn't that new. You can also disable system restore/system protection. It creates backups of your drivers and things for you if you request it to and when it goes through a major change to quickly undo things but since you can easily still go to "reset your computer" or "reinstall windows" without it in short time or use some other partition imaging software to make whole system backups its not really needed and takes up lots of hard drive space so you can turn it off and delete the restore points if you want a bit more space and speed.
Click start and go to settings, then under the game menu turn game mode off and disable everything basically. Then click start and go to settings and go through the privacy tab disabling most things you find in there but carefully choose your background apps and which windows apps you let use your camera or contacts and calendar and such. An app in the background may be running there so it can be updated like say netflix app you'd want to leave that to update while some other apps like calculator you maybe dont care about it being updated too much.
If you have an antivirus you may want to set it to a gaming profile or exclude it from on access scanning your games folder but leave it enabled for on demand scanning and just run full system scan every once in a while. If you dont have an antivirus its ok you can ignore this.
Next you can click start and go to powershell and right click it and run as administrator.
type "Cleanmgr /sageset:65535" without quotes into the blue window
it may take a while to complete or just wait a few minutes then type in the same blue window
"Cleanmgr /sagerun:65535 (select all)" without quotes
this one really does take a while to finish but it removes lots of unwanted clutter.
After this we will check our systems health in the same blue powershell window as admin
"SFC /scannow" without quotes
it will take a while and hopefully it should run till its complete successfully.
It may give an error in which case dont worry the next steps may help even if theres no error no harm in ensuring windows is healthy so type these next two in and it may take a while to complete but ensure it goes from 0%-100% and says complete for both of these. If it stops or gets stuck at 20% or 89% or something strange you may need to try reboot into safemode by clicking the start button then the power button and holding down shift and clicking restart and finding the option to boot to safe mode from the menu it may have been under advanced my memorys not 100% on that. If it cant complete in safemode to 100% the following commands then you may need to run an antivirus or consider reinstalling windows but first try updating windows to the latest if you haven't already.
You can type "Dism /online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup /ResetBase" without quotes and see if it completes to 100%
following that then try "DISM /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth" without quotes and if they all completed to 100% great your system is healthy and should be running well. Otherwise try updating windows and consider "reseting windows" or "reinstalling". You can now close that blue powershell window and move on.
Once its all been cleared as healthy you can then update windows if you havent and install your latest AMD graphics card drivers.
Then windows 10 comes with many things we dont need to game and we probably dont use very often at all. So lets remove the things we dont want from windows 10 by removing the bloatware
download this sycnex windows 10 debloater script in the zip file then make a new folder called temp in your C:\ and extract it into c:\temp or someplace easy to get to.. then go to the folder and right click the script with the word GUI in it and select "run with powershell" it will say it needs your permission to run so press Y and enter. Then a program window should open and you can customise the debloating settings to choose what it removes or keeps or you can simply click the debloat button.
GitHub - Sycnex/Windows10Debloater: Script to remove Windows 10 bloatware.
Once you're done if you have an SSD drive it likely supports trim so you will want to go to start and accessories menu then find defrag and click it then select your hard drives and click optimise this can make things a little better from time to time for SSD drives or for older drives theres the option to defragment them which can take a very very long time but can speed them up a bit.
Finally I recommend using windows 10 edge browser as it has better audio and visual multimedia support for things like 7.1 audio and dolby atmos or 4k video playback while chrome or firefox were stereo and 720p for the longest time and use a different system to draw fonts and photos which smooths out blocks and edges so chrome and firefox may not show the actual image as it is but altered while edge shows a truer picture. chrome and firefox hurt my eyes to read lots because I do a lot of reading so I download the latest version of edge browser from microsofts website. If you require chrome theres a chromium based version of edge now available for download too but its maybe still being developed and tested in beta but you can still use it, its available right now. Hopefully you're all gaming better and have healthy PC's and are able to install your AMD GPU drivers without receiving an error message.
