How to Speed Up a Slow Windows 11 Startup

First: find out what’s actually slowing you down

Don’t start disabling things blindly. Windows 11 has a built-in way to show you exactly which programs are dragging out your boot — including a measured “startup impact” rating for each one.

Press Ctrl + Shift + Esc to open Task Manager. If it opens in compact mode, click More details. Then click the Startup apps tab in the left sidebar. You’ll see every program set to run when you sign in, each with a Status (Enabled/Disabled) and a Startup impact rating: Low, Medium, High, or Not measured.

Sort by the Startup impact column. Anything marked High is your prime suspect. On a typical slow PC you’ll find entries like these:

• Spotify, Discord, Steam, Microsoft Teams — these love to auto-start and are rarely needed the instant you log in. You can open any of them manually in two seconds when you actually want them.
• Adobe Creative Cloud, OneDrive, Dropbox — background sync helpers that each add seconds. Keep OneDrive if you depend on it; switch off the rest if you don’t.
• Update helpers and “quick launchers” — things like Adobe Updater Startup Utility or manufacturer bloatware (Dell SupportAssist, HP JumpStart) add boot time for barely any benefit.
• Your antivirus — leave this one alone. Don’t trade real security for three seconds of boot time.

One more number worth a look: the Last BIOS time figure at the top-right of the Startup apps tab. That’s how long your hardware spent initializing before Windows even started loading. If it’s over 20–30 seconds, part of your slowness lives in the BIOS/firmware, not Windows — check for a BIOS update from your PC manufacturer and make sure Fast Boot is enabled in your BIOS settings.

For what it’s worth, last month I trimmed my own startup list from 14 entries down to 4. Boot time dropped by nearly half. Most of them were apps I’d installed once and completely forgotten about.

Method 1: Trim your startup programs

This one method fixes most slow startups. For each program in Task Manager’s Startup apps tab that you don’t need at boot:

1. Click the program to select it.
2. Hit Disable at the top of the window (or right-click the entry and choose Disable).
3. Repeat for every non-essential entry. When in doubt, disable it. Disabling a startup entry never uninstalls the program or deletes anything. You can still open the app manually anytime, and you can re-enable it here later.

There’s a second, lesser-known startup list hiding in the Settings app: Settings > Apps > Startup. Some apps register there instead of Task Manager, so check both. And don’t forget the system tray — right-click icons for chat clients and cloud storage apps and look for a “Launch at startup” or “Open at login” toggle inside the app’s own settings. Teams, Discord, and Spotify all have one.

Method 2: Fix (or disable) Fast Startup

Fast Startup is a Windows feature that hibernates the kernel session on shutdown so the next boot goes quicker. In theory, great. In practice — especially on dual-boot machines, PCs with older drivers, or systems with certain SSDs — it can cause slower boots, driver weirdness, and the classic “my PC was slow until I restarted it” mystery. (A restart bypasses Fast Startup, which is why restarting sometimes feels faster than shutting down.)

1. Open the Control Panel and go to Hardware and Sound > Power Options > Choose what the power buttons do.
2. Click Change settings that are currently unavailable.
3. Under Shutdown settings, uncheck Turn on fast startup (recommended), then click Save changes.
4. Shut down (not restart) and power back on to feel the difference.

Boot faster now? Leave it off — the feature wasn’t helping you. No change? Turn it back on; it does no harm on systems where it behaves.

Method 3: Free up space and update what matters

A drive that’s more than about 85–90% full slows everything down — including booting — because Windows has no elbow room for the page file, temp files, and update staging. Open Settings > System > Storage and check the bar at the top. In the red? Do this:

• Switch on Storage Sense and click Configure Storage Sense — set it to run automatically and to clear the Recycle Bin and Downloads folder after 30–60 days.
• Click Cleanup recommendations and remove old Windows update files, temporary files, and unused apps. This alone often frees 10–30 GB.
• Move big media libraries to an external drive or cloud storage.

Two more updates that genuinely move the needle on boot speed: chipset and storage drivers from your PC or motherboard maker’s support page (Windows Update often misses these), and a BIOS update if the manufacturer lists boot-time or stability improvements. And one hard truth: if you’re still booting from a mechanical hard drive, no software tweak will fix that. Moving Windows to even a budget SSD is the single biggest startup upgrade there is — often cutting boot times from minutes to under 20 seconds.