Windows 10 PCs may be on their way out, but that doesn’t make them obsolete. Plenty of perfectly good PCs are still locked to Windows 10, and they can live on for years and years with some proper care.

I recently did quite a bit of work on one such PC. It took me a couple of hours, but it went from being sluggish and supremely annoying to being perfectly decent. Here’s how I improved it instead of putting it to pasture.

It looked like a dying PC, but it was just neglected

I’m sure you’ve seen such PCs too

While I moved on to Windows 11 long ago, my mom’s computer is still stuck in the land of Windows 10. She’s not alone. Adoption has been slow, with many users reluctant to move to the new version of the OS, and that’s despite Windows 10 having reached end of life. When it comes to my mom, though, she gets awfully attached to software and operating systems. She’d still be using Windows XP if she could. (Honestly, same.)

Given how much she wants to stick to Windows 10, I knew it had to be serious when she called me one day, asking whether I could come install Windows 11 for her instead. Apparently, her PC became slow enough for her to be tired of it. But it’s an old computer, so I hesitated; it’s true that Windows 11 does better on newer PCs, and even if you surpass Microsoft’s requirements and force it onto an older computer, it’s not the ideal solution. Plus, if her PC was that bad, there could be a bigger underlying issue to deal with first.

Well, it turns out that her PC wasn’t dying. It was just neglected beyond belief.

The zero-dollar deep clean started with actual dust

Your PC doesn’t love choking on dust

Credit: Ismar Hrnjicevic / How-To Geek

Before I started fiddling with Windows, I decided to open up the case. And yes, it was dusty. Giving your PC a thorough clean is actually the best upgrade you can give it, but I’ve neglected my mom’s. (I do neglect my own, too, but I’m definitely more regular with that one.)

Dust had built up around the vents, the fan intakes, and every little gap that was there to help the system breathe. The cooling system had a much harder job as a result, and that alone can make a PC throttle, feel slow, or even crash.

I started with the easy stuff first: powering the PC down, unplugging it, and blowing dust out of the vents, filters, fan grills, and rear exhaust with an electric duster. If you’re doing this yourself, hold the fan blades in place while cleaning so they don’t spin wildly, and pay extra attention to any mesh panels or intake areas that look even slightly clogged. You don’t need to fully rebuild the computer to make a difference, because sometimes the biggest airflow problem is just years of fluff stuck in the obvious places.

The cleanup alone didn’t miraculously turn her old PC into a beast. Still, it was enough to, one, fend off disaster (because I’m sure it’d only get worse with all this dust), and two, improve the temperatures, getting rid of thermal throttling.

Then there’s all the stuff you can’t see

Windows is notorious for clutter

Credit: 

Corbin Davenport / Microsoft

This likely won’t apply to you, but my mom is one of those people who downloads everything and has a minimum of 100 tabs open at any given time. So, I knew that I’d find some interesting stuff once I moved on to digging through Windows 10.

Sure enough, the PC was loaded with startup apps, old downloads, random utilities (some of which I’d never want anywhere near my own PC), and browser extensions. This is precisely why I keep a couple of “abuse drives” at home: I don’t want all of that clutter to be slowing down my PC.

The first thing I tackled was startup. I disabled anything that didn’t need to launch with Windows, removed apps that my mom didn’t need or that were downright dodgy, and cleared out temporary files. I set up an external drive for her, transferring all the random junk away where it doesn’t slow down her main SSD. I also cleared the browser cache and uninstalled some useless extensions.

Next, I took care of all the outdated maintenance checklist items, such as installing new drivers. We’ve now tackled the two main problems that make a PC feel sluggish: dust and software bloat.

The PC got better, but I had to be realistic

The biggest problem can’t really be fixed

Credit: Lucas Gouveia / How-To Geek | Andrey Suslov / Shutterstock

Once all of that was done, both my mom and I had to admit that the PC improved. It was less of a nightmare to use, and I felt pretty confident that it’d live on for a good few more years.

Considering that the whole thing cost me exactly zero dollars and maybe two hours (half of which was spent trying to talk my mom out of using 100 Chrome tabs at once), I’d say the whole rescue mission was a big win.

There’s only so much you can do

In the end, there’s no workaround for the fact that Windows 10 has reached end of life. Many people haven’t upgraded, my mom included, but even this operating system will one day fade into obscurity. Luckily, all those old Windows 10 PCs can make a perfectly good NAS.