10 Ways to Make a Lenovo Laptop Faster

I love my old Lenovo laptop, but not when it was running slow. Sometimes, it froze up to death and I had to give it a hard reboot. After some trial and error, I learned some speed lessons. And today, I’m here to share with you the best tips on how to make your Lenovo laptop faster again.

Note: this troubleshooting guide is for those who are experiencing performance issues like or similar to these situations:

• Your Lenovo laptop runs extremely slow on Windows 10 or Windows 11.
• It freezes randomly on startup.
• Applications become unresponsive and freezing.
• Web pages take ages to load.
• The internet is very slow.
• It’s slow to boot up or shut down.
• Windows crashes randomly.

Note: if your laptop can’t start up or Windows shows blue or black screen, stop using it immediately. Call Lenovo support or take your laptop to a local computer shop for further diagnosis.

Why is My Lenovo Laptop so Slow?

The possible causes may vary. It’s hard to make a general conclusion here without a deeper diagnosis. Nevertheless, most “culprits” fall into the following categories:

• Malware or virus infection.
• Windows system problems.
• Third-party software issues.
• Bad using behaviors.
• Outdated or failing hardware.

Is there a universal solution to fix it? Probably not.

I’ve heard people say reformatting Windows and having a clean reinstall would help, but that is simply not correct based on my experience. And it’s too many hassles especially when you’ve used your Lenovo laptop for a while and have stored many files and applications. The cost of a clean reinstall can be huge.

10 Steps to Speed up Your Slow Lenovo Laptop

I’ve sorted out a list of quick fixes (as seen below) — some techniques may work better than others. Therefore, try out those you feel might work. You don’t have to take all of them and it’s very unlikely you’ll be able to do so.

1. Talk to Lenovo Support If Your Laptop Is Brand New

If your new ThinkPad/Ideapad/Yoga starts to act up, there could be quality issues. Therefore, I highly recommend you contact Lenovo support and let them handle the situation for you. Possibly they will replace it, saving you time and energy once and for all.

I’ve had the chance to contact their customer success team and they were incredibly supportive. So go ahead and give them a call (visit this official page for more support information).

Pro tip: before you hand off your laptop to them, avoid anything that may endanger your warranty (e.g. open the computer case, install another operating system other than Windows, etc).

2. Remove Bundled Third-party Programs

I don’t know if it’s still the case in your country, but Lenovo was criticized for its unethical pre-installation policy for its laptops. Most likely you won’t use these pre-installed applications. Removing them for good or preventing them from auto-starting up is recommended.

You can also do this manually by going to Control Panel (or All Apps in Windows 10/11), finding these unused applications and removing them. See this Microsoft guide for how to uninstall a program step by step. Not only removing these programs helps speed up startup times, it also releases a decent amount of free disk space.

3. Make Sure Your Laptop Is Free of Malware

All Windows PCs are prone to malicious software or viruses. You probably have heard about the damages of virus attacks done by hackers. Be aware that many harmful malware actually starts with dragging down your laptop performance.

That’s why we are used to installing security software on our PCs. I have to warn you though, that some resource-hungry antivirus programs use more system resources than they should, which results in a more sluggish PC.

Pick a lightweight security app and run it to check your Lenovo laptop on a regular basis. Bottom line — keep your laptop away from any harmful threats.

4. Disable Auto-Startup Apps or Services

You want your Lenovo laptop to start up fast, unfortunately, there could be some programs or services competing to join the fun the moment you press the power button. This is typical if your Lenovo laptop is loaded with bloated software, or you forget to uncheck the box “run on startup” when installing new apps.

Keep your eye on some programs that have been given permission to start automatically. To do so, go to Task Manager -> Startup to find and disable them. If you are new to Windows, see the step-by-step instructions from HowtoGeek.

5. Less Gaming Time or Multitasking

Playing PC games on a non-gaming laptop could “burn” it — when you run a large game, lots of system resources (CPU, memory, graphic cards, etc) are allocated to ensure a smooth gaming experience, thus taxing your laptop’s overall performance.

Meanwhile, computers are like humans, multitasking will simply make you inefficient. The more programs you run simultaneously, the slower your computer will be.

6. Lighten Your Web Browser (Edge, Chrome, Firefox)

Modern web browsers are powerful, but they can drag down your Internet browsing experience if used inappropriately, for example, opening too many tabs or windows at once, viewing heavy pages loaded with video ads, installing tons of plug-ins or extensions, etc. All these will add more burdens to the browser, causing it to run slower or become unresponsive — even worse, crash!

How to fix that?

First, remove or disable those unneeded plugins. If you can, also clear the browsing history, caches, etc. which can take quite some disk space. Also, try not to open too many tabs at once; once you complete viewing the content in a tab, close that tab right away.

7. Perform Disk Defragmentation

Warning: this operation is for Lenovo laptops with a magnetic hard disk drive (HDD) ONLY. If you are already using a new Lenovo that’s loaded with a speedy SSD (solid-state drive) or you’ve replaced your Lenovo hard drive with an SSD, DO NOT defragment the disk as it does no good to the SSD.

According to Microsoft, defragmenting a hard disk can improve your computer’s performance. Because it rearranges fragmented data stored on the hard disk thus making it work more efficiently.

Depending on the Windows version your Lenovo laptop is running, you may schedule disk defragmentation in advance. Watch this video for how to perform defragmentation on Windows 10.

8. Clean up Hard Drive

Nothing slows down a PC more than having an almost full hard drive (or solid-state drive). Though it’s hard to define a certain percentage of free disk space you need to keep, the more the better!

There are usually three ways to free up your Lenovo laptop hard drive. One is to run the Disk Cleanup (in Windows 10/11, right-click the Windows icon on the bottom left -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Disk Cleanup), select the disk drive you want to clean, and continue.

You can also manually check the “Pictures”, “Videos” folders (or other places) where some large duplicated files usually exist. Either delete them directly or transfer them to an external hard drive. In addition, uninstall those large programs that you rarely use as they can take quite some precious disk space as well.

9. Test Hardware Issues

If you are using an old Lenovo laptop, chances are outdated hardware is the culprit. A five-year-old hard drive will surely slow down your PC, as well as cause many other potential issues.

Fortunately, Lenovo has developed a free hardware diagnostics tool, which allows you to perform quick tests on various hardware components including HDD, CPU, RAM, and so on.

10. Upgrade RAM and Hard Drive

This can be costly, but you get what you pay for — a real performance boost. If you are using an old Lenovo laptop, I highly recommend you do so, after all, you still pay less compared to getting a new laptop.

Replace your laptop HDD with an SSD, add more RAM (memory), or do both if possible. You can go to Crucial or Amazon to shop for a desired SSD and/or extra memory chip. Then follow the guide for installation.

That’s it for this guide. A faster Lenovo laptop is better than a slow one. Due to the nature of computer hardware and software, it’s sometimes inevitable that your Lenovo is going to run slowly over time. However, like a car, with proper maintenance, it can still run strong. I hope you find the above tips helpful.