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How do I speed up Windows 10 and stop it using all my bandwidth?
By default Windows 10 can send everything you enter to Microsoft, it downloads news and weather update and other items to distract you from the job in hand. Microsoft want you to use their cloud storage.
This takes processing power, and slows your machine starting, and eats up your bandwidth.
Stopping it takes a while but shows how much gets sent, which will use up your bandwidth and slowing your Internet connection for everything else. Most of what you need to do is shown on the tabs below
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When you first get your new Windows 10 PC out of the box, DO NOT just say OK to Express set-up or use a Microsoft Account.
- Select "Customise settings" button, on the fist page, except for SmartScreen at the top, you can turn all the rest of these off , and think carefully what you want “on” on the second page.
- When asked for your Microsoft account login, click "Create a new account" and then "Sign in without a Microsoft account" on the next page. Then your PC doesn’t need to verify your
details with Microsoft ever time it starts.
- Once started, click Settings and click the Privacy button. If you are reading this on a PC running Windows 10, then you can make the changes in a) now.
- At the bottom of the Privacy applet, click Feedback. Set the Feedback frequency to "never," which should stop Windows 10 from reporting some data back to Microsoft.
With Windows 10 Home "Feedback options" only be set to "basic" but there is a way around that, see the 'Feedback' options tab.
Disable Cortana
- Press the Start button. Type a few letters and the Start screen will be replaced by a grey search window. Click the cog icon to show Cortana's settings and then set the toggle to "Off".
- Remove the Cortana Search box at the bottom of the screen, right click on the task bar and untick the option
Remove Tiles
Turn off all the tiles which are downloading news / weather / etc – right click and remove
Feedback Options
If you have Windows 10 home then the "Feedback options" can be disabled in the Registry details as follows:
Use Registry Editor to set the telemetry level
Use RegEdit to manually set the registry level. If a management policy already exists, such as Group Policy or MDM, it should be set there instead.
- Open Registry Editor, and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\DataCollection
- If there isn’t an AllowTelemetry entry, right-click DataCollection, click New, and then click DWORD (32-bit) Value
- Type AllowTelemetry, and then press ENTER
- Double-click AllowTelemetry, set the value to 0 for None, and then click OK
- Optional - Click File > Export, and then save the file as a .reg file, such as C:\AllowTelemetry.reg. You can run this file from a script on each device in your organization
OneDrive
If you don’t use OneDrive then get rid of it
- Right click on the task bar, select Task Manager
- Click on Start-up Tab, look for OneDrive – note impact on start-up is “High” right click & disable
- Right click, show file location, work up file tree until you see OneDrive rename OneDriveX
- Restart PC, one restarted Right click on the task bar, select Task Manager
- Right click, show file location, work up file tree until you see OneDriveX Delete
Others
If you don’t use OneDrive then get rid of it
- Don’t install the Dropbox app in the system tray – it is syncing all the time.