We would all love to see an operating system that doesn't need any kind of optimization. The latest versions of Windows have come a long way in that regard, and some old tricks that boosted performance can no longer be applied today, but we still have room to turn the factory configuration into something much more effective. Windows 10 does not escape this, and with the help of a new freeware tool, we're going to study how we can improve it.
Beyond the constant debate about privacy, terms of use, data transmission, and other technical issues, Windows 10 is an operating system, and that places us once again in front of the task of optimizing it as much as possible. This is a good point to remember that Windows 10 has good tolerance for hardware specifications. Starting with Windows 7, Microsoft managed to stabilize and even reduce the requirements for its operating systems, so today we can say with some certainty that any computer running Windows 7 should be able to upgrade to Windows 10 (although obviously, there will always be exceptions). Those users with some experience can transfer most of their tricks for Windows 7 and Windows 8.x to the new system, however, another thing that brings us together here is the fourth version of the famous Ultimate Windows Tweaker, which we have mentioned in the past. Its latest edition added support for Windows 10, and with that said, let's see what it offers.
Exploring Ultimate Windows Tweaker 4
The first step of Ultimate Windows Tweaker 4 is the creation of a restore point. If something goes wrong along the way (we can't rule out that possibility), going back to the previous state will be enough to correct the course. The first section gives us general information about the operating system, including exact version, edition, and amount of available RAM. The Personalization section lets us change aspects like the size of previews, remove icons from the notification area, restore items in Power Options (Hibernate is one of them), and add elements among which the access to system properties, folder options, and screen settings stand out. Personally, I think the most useful thing about this section is removing the so-called 'integrated folders' that appear inside 'This PC'.
The User Accounts section has parameters that generally don't need to be modified, but I'd like to highlight the fact that you can force the user to enter their account name during login, adding an extra layer of security. To be honest, the Performance section doesn't offer much. The main options modify how long Windows 10 should wait to finish pending tasks and services. Unfortunately, I've also detected the presence of a couple of 'fake tricks' like increasing IRQ8 priority and unloading DLL memory. Both tricks belong to the 9x era, and somehow managed to survive all these years. The other options are more interesting: interrupting tablet input services, print queue (if you have a printer, don't touch it), and time synchronization free up a modest amount of resources, and then there are the cases of Prefetch and Superfetch. If your hard drive works too hard, disabling both services should help. The same applies to the search index, however, Cortana users need to keep that option enabled.
"Security and Privacy" is by far the strongest aspect of Ultimate Windows Tweaker 4. The security subsection is excellent for limiting user access to certain sensitive places of the operating system, like the Registry editor and network options. If necessary, more drastic actions can be applied here, including stopping Windows Defender, Windows Update, and OneDrive. In the privacy tab appear all those things that bothered hundreds of thousands of users in recent days. Cortana, telemetry, advertising ID, handwriting, Bing Search, Windows Feedback, the extra bandwidth for Windows Update... all of that and more can be disabled from this part.
Finally, the rest of the sections have greater utility in operating systems prior to Windows 10. The section dedicated to Internet Explorer takes a back seat to the new Edge browser, and in the 'Additional' group appear functions like autoplay control, cursor blink speed, and secondary network settings. In summary: When it comes to optimizing Windows 10, Ultimate Windows Tweaker 4 is a good starting point, portable and clean (it doesn't bring adware or anything like that). Although there were isolated reports from some antivirus, running the executable through VirusTotal gave it a perfect score against 56 different solutions. Even so... I said 'starting point'. Swap file, service control, animations... all of that should be supervised in a more manual and direct way, if you want. Good luck!
