Windows 10

My first laptop was given to me on my tenth birthday, my formal introduction to owning a computer. And like most laptops of the time, it came pre-loaded with good old Windows 10. My laptop however, is absolutely a budget computer, and so, I had to learn a thing or two about optimizing my operating system. Here's a showcase of the steps I took to optimize my laptop, as well as some other things.

The first big step was to remove the bloatware that came with my install, as well as the apps that my parents had installed onto it during the initial setup. Quite a tame, yet time consuming process, but one that teaches a lot about using uninstallers and navigating the computer's file system to allow for brute-force removal of some less cooperative apps.

There are plenty of features enabled in Windows by default that once disabled, drastically improved performance. Disabling apps that load on startup, turning off desktop transparency effects, and in the case of a laptop device, enabling high performance mode in the control panel. Listing every single little change that can be made to benefit performance would take a while to list, but it took a week of off and on working on things in order to get my device to work in a way that was desireable.

Defragmenting the hard drive every once in a while is an easy way to help its overall performance, and improves read speed. Going into task manager and changing app priorities is another way of improving performance in certain scenarios, however it can be damaging to performance in others, so it's definitely something worth experimenting with in order to find out both its benefits and its shortcomings.

Beyond just optimizing the operating system, I have experience in using terminal-based software to load apps, and using utilities that run within the Windows command prompt, learning these substantially aided in learning how to use the Linux terminal later on, and learning how to build apps via MSYS2 and install apps via Python on Windows was absolutely a worthwhile experience.

As of late, I only use Windows 10 when absolutely necessary, as my primary computer uses Linux as its operating system, however there's no denial of the integral role that Windows 10 and "The Little Laptop That Could" played into my learning about the usage and maintanence of a traditional computer.