How to Make a Slow Dell Laptop Faster

“My three-years-old Dell Inspiron has been running slow more often recently. When that happens, the whole system froze up randomly. Also, I can hear the fan running out loud when I watch videos on YouTube. Sometimes when the laptop froze, I had to wait 20 seconds or so. Worse yet sometimes I had no choice but force reboot the computer. My Inspiron is with Windows 10, 64 bits.” — from a Dell laptop user

You want to get things done fast, but your Dell laptop just lags. I can feel the disappointment.

You understand over time all computers will run slowly sooner or later, and by then you’ll probably have to buy a new laptop.

If your Dell laptop runs very slow on Windows 10 and it starts to affect your work productivity, it’s time to find the problem and fix it.

Why is My Dell Laptop so Slow?

There are a number of possible causes out there, and the real reason can vary from case to case.

General slowdowns can be resulted from a lack of hard drive space, running multiple programs at once, malware infection, laptop overheating, etc.

If your Dell is slow while browsing the Internet, it could be the Internet browser you use is too heavy — loaded with too many third-party plugins, caches, and so forth.

If your Dell has been a couple of years old, the main culprit could be outdated hardware — for example, inadequate RAM, hard drive under-performing, etc.

If your Dell laptop is brand new or relatively new, the performance issue is probably related to Windows 10 itself, or a third-party program you just installed.

How to Speed up Dell Laptop

Here are a few fixes in general. The performance increase you can get may vary.

1. Health Check Your Dell Laptop

Viruses and malware can cause your Dell laptop to run slowly as well as some other serious issues.

We recommend getting BitDefender Antivirus Plus and running a thorough scan of your computer to see if you are caught by any viruses or malware.

We recommend this antivirus program because it’s widely viewed as the best antivirus software out there as of this writing.

2. Optimize Windows 10 Startup

If your Dell laptop is brand new, make sure you’ve uninstalled that bloatware that could have been pre-installed on your computer because they are useless most of the time.

Then manage and optimize startup items, i.e. applications or services that automatically boot when you turn on your Dell, you can use the built-in feature called Task Manager on Windows 10 to disable them.

This video shows you how:

3. Clean Dell Laptop Hard Drive

A fragmented or cluttered hard drive can also cause performance issues, especially if you’ve saved tons of files and applications to your Dell laptop main drive.

The more data you store to the main drive, the harder Windows 10 is going to work.

To clean up a PC hard drive, you can use this lightweight app called CleanMyPC to have a quick scan, then it may help you free up a decent amount of disk space by removing system junks, unused programs, and other unnecessary files.

4. Fix Registry Issue

Windows OS has a collection of system files that serve different functions. It’s possible these files become corrupted — with symptoms like annoying Windows errors, registry issues.

To fix that, try CCleaner — a free tool that can quickly find all registry issues in your Dell and cure them once for all.

5. Upgrade Hardware

If your Dell laptop is quite old and you still don’t want to recycle it yet,  then it’s probably time to upgrade the hardware.

You’ll get a real performance boost from hardware upgrades.

Need more power to handle software requests? Get an extra 4GB RAM like this.

Is the hard disk drive running slowly? Replace it with an SSD like this.

Final Words

A slow Dell laptop is definitely annoying, and there are plenty of possible causes such as overloaded startup programs, system junks, viruses/malware, outdated hardware, etc.

I hope you’ve fixed the issue your Dell laptop is facing. Don’t forget to back up your PC just in case!

If you have any questions or feedback regarding this topic, feel free to share in the comments.