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In one of the largest coordinated law enforcement operations, authorities have dismantled Kidflix, a streaming platform that offered child sexual abuse material (CSAM). "A total of 1.8 million users worldwide logged on to the platform between April 2022 and March 2025," Europol said in a statement. "On March 11, 2025, the server, which contained around 72,000 videos at the time, was seized by Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

The openSNP project, a platform for sharing genetic and phenotypic data, will shut down on April 30, 2025, and delete all user submissions over privacy concerns and the risk of misuse by authoritarian governments. [...]

Generative AI (genAI) is quickly transforming healthcare, according to a survey by consultancy McKinsey & Co. released today. The survey of 150 healthcare industry organizations found 85% are exploring or had already adopted genAI.

The organizations, which included insurers, health systems, and health services and technology (HST) groups, found that 40% or more from each group had already implemented genAI. Not surprisingly, HST organizations have the highest rate of genAI implementations at 57%. The least? Healthcare providers with a 40% implementation rate.

GenAI has already been proven in studies using historical patient data to be more accurate at diagnosing illnesses and other conditions. For example, OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo model not only outperformed physicians, but also outdid every single AI system developed for healthcare over the last 50 years, according to the lead doctor in one study at Beth Israel Medical Center in Boston. And it did so without any medical training.

Healthcare stakeholders are also using genAI to explore ways to create value and reduce costs, despite ongoing challenges such as evolving regulations and capability gaps.

Of the respondents that have already implemented genAI tools, 64% reported that they anticipated or had already quantified positive ROI, “suggesting high expectations for genAI technology,” McKinsey said.

Many organizations are also forming partnerships to access external talent while customizing AI solutions, and partnerships with hyperscalers could ensure successful implementations, McKinsey said.

Early genAI use cases have focused on improving administrative efficiency, dealing with IT gaps, and boosting clinical productivity. As capabilities grow, other uses could expand to patient engagement and quality-of-care improvements. Leaders recognize the importance of AI risk management and governance for safe implementation.

Organizations that have developed their genAI capabilities are seeing success with large-scale implementations, b ut future success will depend on a value-driven strategy, strong execution, and effective management, McKinsey said.

Most respondents reported their organizations had implemented or were developing genAI use cases, with more in the implementation phase than the proof-of-concept stage. However, 15% had not started proof-of-concept work.

Other prominent findings include:

• Nearly half (47%) of payers, health systems and HST groups have already rolled out genAI tools. 
• About three-quarters of healthcare leaders believe the technology could help most with administrative efficiencies and clinical productivity — and more than half (55%) believe it has value for patient/member engagement and IT/infrastructure. 
• Sixty-one percent of payers and providers expect to collaborate with partners on building out their genAI capabilities; 20% said they’d build their own; 19% said they’d buy a program. 

GenAI may create “tremendous value” in areas that could fundamentally improve patient experience and streamline operations to generate cost savings, the report said.

A vulnerability in Verizon's Call Filter feature allowed customers to access the incoming call logs for another Verizon Wireless number through an unsecured API request. [...]

US President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order this week creating the US Investment Accelerator office to oversee the CHIPS and Science Act, a Biden-era program to re-shore semiconductor production.

According to a White House statement, the new entity’s mission will be to speed up corporate investments domestically by reducing government regulations and coordinating with federal agencies.

Trump has criticized the bipartisan CHIPS Act, signed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2022, and said he wants to negotiate better deals. The office will also work to make it easier for companies to invest in US semiconductor manufacturing.

In a speech before Congress last month, Trump called the CHIPS Act “horrible” and said he wanted to defund it: “We don’t have to give them money; we just want to protect our businesses and our people, and they will come because they won’t have to pay tariffs if they build in America.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the status of CHIPS Act funding.

In February, reports emerged that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) planned to cut 497 jobs as part of Trump’s federal government downsizing. NIST, a non-regulatory agency within the US Department of Commerce (DoC), helps drive innovation and industrial competitiveness and oversees the CHIPS for America program. The personnel cuts were widely criticized as damaging to the rollout of the CHIPS Act.

In a letter today, nearly two-dozen lawmakers bemoaned the firings of 70 probationary employees at NIST and the ongoing reduction-in-force efforts by the Trump Administration that could target additional probationary scientists, postdoctoral researchers, and other staff authorized by the CHIPS Act.

The letter from 22 members of the US House of Representatives to US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said the potential changes come on the heels of the deferred resignation program, which already is affecting the capacity of the NIST to fulfill its statutory obligations. “Removing national and international leaders from the nonpartisan and professional civil service at NIST would hamper the development of critical standards, threaten industrial and consumer safety, and weaken American leadership around the world,” the letter said.

In 2021, the years-long decline in domestic chip production was exposed by a worldwide supply-chain crisis that led to calls for re-shoring manufacturing to the US. After more than a year of work from the Biden Administration to respond to acute semiconductor shortages, Congress in August 2022 passed the measure.

The Commerce Department, which is administering the CHIPS Act, spent months negotiating with semiconductor designers and fabricators to gain commitments from them and to achieve specific milestones in their projects before getting government payouts.

With the CHIPS Act spurring them on, semiconductor makers including  Intel, Samsung, Micron, TSMC, and Texas Instruments unveiled plans for a number of new plants on US soil. (Qualcomm, in partnership with GlobalFoundries, also said it would invest $4.2 billion to double chip production in its Malta, NY facility.)

The Department of Commerce has been divvying up $52 billion in the hopes of spurring on-shore chip manufacturing. While about $32 billion of CHIPS Act money has been allocated, the funds have not yet been dispersed. It was not immediately clear whether Trump’s action this week could delay disbursement of the monies.

Over 39 million secrets like API keys and account credentials were leaked on GitHub throughout 2024, exposing organizations and users to significant security risks. [...]

Microsoft has announced that hotpatch updates are now available for business customers using Windows 11 Enterprise 24H2 on x64 (AMD/Intel) systems, starting today. [...]

Mozilla has decided to launch a challenger to Gmail called Thundermail. The upstart is a web-based email service based on the open-source project Stalwart, according to technology site Thurrott.

The plan is to eventually add support for calendar and contacts to Thundermail, but when that would happen remains to be seen.

Alongside the new email service, Mozilla is also launching Thunderbird Pro. It offers, among other things, an AI assistant, a file-sharing tool and a planning tool and can be seen as a complement to Thundermail.

Users interested in trying the new services, can sign up for a waiting list at Thundermail.com.

Apple is a hot property, and the big banks all want a chance to grab a piece of the action now that Goldman Sachs has decided to leave retail banking behind. 

We’ve entered the “breaking it down for parts” stage of deal-making now, with banks bidding for both financial network access provision and to be the partner of note for the card.

Apple Card was the future of banking when it launched six years ago. It immediately generated noteworthy public interest, people liked the software that supported it, and the interest rates (which have changed over time) were seen as super-attractive. Apple’s Daily Cash loyalty scheme became popular, too, as did the Apple Card Savings account the company created a little later. The card was supported by Goldman Sachs as the credit partner and used Mastercard as the payment processor.

Following some costly service failures, Apple has been working to leave the first partner, while the deal with the second has expired. And that’s where the action is.

The Apple Card yard sale

Mastercard wants to keep Apple’s business, but is facing fairly aggressive competition from both Visa and American Express. There is clearly value in the business — Visa has offered a hefty $100 million to take over from Mastercard, while American Express is vying to take a partnership position in replacing both Mastercard and Goldman Sachs. Barclays, Synchrony Financia, and JP Morgan Chase have also discussed taking over the credit side of the Apple Card business.

What’s in it for them, of course, is access to Apple’s high-value market of relatively affluent and very loyal consumers. There are more than 12 million Apple Card users in the US with north of $20 billion in balances. These are (mostly, possibly except me) creditworthy people who spend, save, and borrow money. A 2020 survey told us that a third of Apple Card customers had annual incomes above $100,000.

Customers in demand

In an unpredictable economy, customers like these are gold dust — and Apple has them. The opportunity to expand the service into other up-and-coming economies won’t be lost on the banks, either. Banks usually want to follow the money, so once all these deals are done, it will be interesting to see where Apple Card gets introduced.

But that’s not all that Apple brings to the table: Challenger banks — newer, tech-driven services that aren’t weighed down by tradition — have proliferated and improved since 2008 when bankers seemingly siphoned all the cash from the global economy.

Banks responded by improving customer service and developing better B2C and B2B applications and software services. But challengers — including Revolut — have sought and gained banking licenses and pose more competition now than they did then. What’s limiting all these efforts, of course, is software design; the best services offer the best software.

That’s where Apple comes in.

Follow the money

Banks know that Apple is really, really good at software (most of the time). They know that when it comes to usability and platform support, the company is second to none. They read the same research that shows Apple’s products rapidly replacing Windows, and they also recognize that Apple’s commitment to security and privacy is vital — essential, even — to secure and stable financial exchange.

 (This is why the UK really should announce whether it has chosen to sacrifice its financial services sector by breaking end-to-end encryption, because financial firms will be furious when they find their trading system security undermined without any warning.)

Apple has a lot to offer. But for more traditional financial entities such as those talking with the company about Apple Card, the biggest thing it can offer is that it is more than capable of building software and services to compete with challenger banks.

And while many of us might rejoice if those challengers defeat the established order of financial things, incumbent entities will not fold without a fight — hence, the interest in Apple Card. They think Apple could help them thrive in the New World Fiscal Order. They are probably right. 

Deal, or no deal?

This is what’s at stake in Apple’s talks around the Apple Card. Banks want a direct line to the world’s most affluent customers, want to surprise and delight those customers, retain and profit from them, and they believe Apple can help them do it. The only snag is going to be whether Apple gets the deal right, or prices itself out of the market — after all, Apple was a challenger once, and some other service could conceivably replace it.

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, and Mastodon.

​Royal Mail is investigating claims of a security breach after a threat actor leaked over 144GB of data allegedly stolen from the company's systems. [...]

ChatGPT, the famous artificial intelligence chatbot that allows users to converse with various personalities and topics, has connectivity issues worldwide. [...]

Google has introduced a new end-to-end encryption (E2EE) feature in Gmail, enabling organizations to send encrypted emails that even Google cannot read to other Gmail users. Later this year, the feature will be expanded to allow the sending of encrypted emails to any email users, including those from other providers.

E2EE differs from encrypting email communication in transit between email servers, which is already achieved with TLS (transport layer security), or at rest when stored in Google’s data centers. E2EE allows users to encrypt sent messages in a way that only the intended recipients can decrypt and read them.

Continue reading on CSO.

Kidflix, one of the largest platforms used to host, share, and stream child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on the dark web, was shut down on March 11 following a joint action coordinated by German law enforcement. [...]

Most orgs only discover their security controls failed after a breach. With OnDefend's continuous validation, you can test, measure, and prove your defenses work—before attackers exploit blind spots. [...]

A new version of the Triada trojan has been discovered preinstalled on thousands of new Android devices, allowing threat actors to steal data as soon as they are set up. [...]

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a now-patched privilege escalation vulnerability in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Cloud Run that could have allowed a malicious actor to access container images and even inject malicious code. "The vulnerability could have allowed such an identity to abuse its Google Cloud Run revision edit permissions in order to pull private Google Artifact Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Cisco warns admins to patch a critical Cisco Smart Licensing Utility (CSLU) vulnerability, which exposes a built-in backdoor admin account now used in attacks. [...]

Introduction As the cybersecurity landscape evolves, service providers play an increasingly vital role in safeguarding sensitive data and maintaining compliance with industry regulations. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) offers a comprehensive set of frameworks that provide a clear path to achieving robust cybersecurity practices. For service providers, adhering to NIST [email protected]

Windows 11 does a lot under the hood to speed up a PC’s performance. The same PC will generally run faster on Windows 11 than Windows 10. But no matter how zippy your Windows 11 may be, it can run faster. And keep in mind that PCs tend to slow down over time, and you want to make sure that doesn’t happen to yours.

It’s simple to make your Windows PC run faster. Just follow these tips.

Top ways to speed up Windows 11

• Disable programs that run on startup
• Use efficiency mode
• Use automatic Windows maintenance
• Kill adware and bloatware
• Turn off search indexing
• Clean out your hard disk
• Disable shadows, animations, and visual effects
• Disable transparency
• Change your power settings
• Turn off Windows tips and tricks
• Disable Game Mode
• Update device drivers
• Get a burst of RAM with ReadyBoost
• Roll back your PC to a previous state
• Restart Windows

Read on for details.

Note: This story covers Windows 11 version 24H2. If you have an earlier release of Windows 11, some things may be slightly different. If you have Windows 10, see our Windows 10 speed tips.

1. Disable programs that run on startup

Your Windows 11 PC could be a laggard if programs you rarely or never use are running in the background. Your PC will run faster if you stop them from running.

To do it, first launch the Task Manager in one of these ways: Press Ctrl-Shift-Esc, right-click the lower-right corner of your screen and select Task Manager, or type task manager into the Windows 11 search box and press Enter. There’s a lot you can use Task Manager for, but here we’re focusing only on killing unnecessary programs that run at startup.

Click the Startup apps icon on the left side of the screen. (It’s the fifth icon from the top.) It displays a list of the programs and services that launch when you start Windows. The list includes each program’s name as well as its publisher, whether it’s enabled to run on startup, and its “Startup impact,” which is how much it slows down Windows 11 when the system starts up. Note, though, that the screen doesn’t show how much each program will impact your performance after startup, during normal PC operations.

You can use the Task Manager to get information about programs that launch at startup and disable any you don’t need.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

To stop a program or service from launching at startup, right-click it and select Disable. This doesn’t disable the program entirely; it only prevents it from launching at startup — you can run the application after launch. Also, if you later decide you want it to launch at startup, you can return to this area of the Task Manager, right-click the application and select Enable.

Many of the programs and services that run on startup may be familiar to you, like Microsoft OneDrive or Spotify. But you may not recognize many of them. (Anyone who immediately knows what “bzbui.exe” is, please raise your hand. No fair Googling it first.)

The Task Manager can find information about unfamiliar programs. Right-click an item and select Properties for more information about it, including its location on your hard disk, whether it has a digital signature, and other information such as the version number, the file size, and the last time it was modified. (Note that not all programs provide this information when you right-click them — the Properties button may be grayed out.)

You can also right-click the item and select Open file location. That opens File Explorer and takes it to the folder where the file is located, which may give you another clue about the program’s purpose.

Finally, and most helpfully, you can select Search online after you right-click. Bing will then launch with links to sites with information about the program or service. With Task Manager’s help, I easily discovered that bzbui.exe is Backblaze backup software, something I want to run automatically during startup.

If you’re worried about one of the listed applications, you can go to a site run by Reason Software called “Should I Block It?” and search for the file name. You’ll usually find very solid information about the program or service.

Now that you’ve selected all the programs that you want to disable at startup, the next time you restart your computer, the system won’t launch those unnecessary programs automatically, and your PC may run faster.

2. Use Efficiency Mode

Task Manager has another trick up its sleeve for juicing Windows 11 performance. Efficiency Mode can speed up your PC and improve laptop battery life. It lowers the process priority of background applications, among other efficiency tricks.

The term is a bit of a misnomer, because you can’t put your entire PC into Efficiency Mode. Instead, you use Task Manager to put individual apps and processes into it. There’s one caveat: You’ll only be able to use it on some apps and processes.

First launch Task Manager using one of the methods covered in the previous tip. If you’re already in Task Manager, click the Processes icon (three squares in a grid) on the left side of the screen to get to the Processes screen. A list of currently running apps and processes appears.

Click the app or process you want to put into Efficiency Mode, click the Efficiency mode icon at the top right of the screen, then confirm that you want to turn on Efficiency Mode for the app. Note that if the Efficiency mode icon is grayed out when you click an app or process, you won’t be able to use it. Also, some apps, including Microsoft Edge, automatically work in Efficiency Mode by default, and the mode can’t be turned off.

Turning on Efficiency Mode for an app.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

3. Use automatic Windows maintenance

In the background, Windows 11 constantly performs maintenance on your PC, doing things like security scanning and performing system diagnostics to make sure everything is up to snuff. It automatically fixes problems it finds, which helps your PC run at peak performance. The automatic maintenance runs every day at 2:00 a.m. if your device is plugged into a power source and is asleep.

However, that feature may have been accidentally turned off, or it may not have run recently if you shut down your PC at night (rather than putting it in Sleep mode) or you haven’t had your laptop plugged in for a while. You should make sure it’s turned on and runs every day. You can also run it manually if you’d like.

Type control in the search box on the taskbar and select Control Panel from the results to run the Control Panel app. In the app, select System and Security > Security and Maintenance. In the Maintenance section, under Automatic Maintenance, click Start maintenance if you want it to run now. To make sure that it runs every day, click Change maintenance settings, and on the screen that appears, select the time you’d like maintenance to run and check the box next to Allow scheduled maintenance to wake up my computer at the scheduled time. Then click OK.

Here’s how to set a time each day for Windows 11 to run its maintenance tasks.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

4. Kill adware and bloatware

It may be that what’s slowing your PC down isn’t Windows 11, but bloatware or adware that takes up CPU and system resources. Adware and bloatware are particularly insidious because they may have been installed by your computer’s manufacturer. They typically run automatically at startup without you even knowing it. You’ll be amazed at how much better your PC will run if you get rid of it.

Start by running a system scan to find adware and malware. If you’ve already installed a security suite such as Norton Security or McAfee LiveSafe, you can use that. Windows 11’s built-in anti-malware app, Windows Defender, also does a great job. Just type windows defender in the search box, press Enter, and click Scan Now. Windows Defender will look for malware and remove any it finds.

You should get a second opinion, though, so consider a free tool like Malwarebytes. The free version scans for malware and adware and removes what it finds; the paid version offers always-on protection to stop infections in the first place.

Malwarebytes scans for and removes malware.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

Now that you’ve done all that, check for bloatware and uninstall it. A good free anti-bloatware tool is Bulk Crap Uninstaller. You can also go to the website Should I Remove It? — it offers recommendations on what software is useful, and what you can uninstall. There’s a section of the website devoted to advice on how to remove bloatware on PCs from specific manufacturers. I highly recommend going there, because it lists all the bloatware different manufacturers install on their PCs. That section of the site also compares how much bloatware major manufacturers ship on their PCs. It rates Toshiba as having the most and Acer as having the least.

Finally, when you buy a new PC online, check whether there’s an option to leave off trial software and software you don’t need to run your PC. That will stop bloatware from getting on your system in the first place.

5. Turn off search indexing

Windows 11 search performs indexing in your hard disk in the background, allowing you to search your PC more quickly than if no indexing were being done. That’s good for fast searches, but not so good for slower PCs, because indexing can cause a performance hit. You can give a slower machine a speed boost by turning off indexing. Even if you have an SSD disk, turning off indexing can improve your speed, because the constant writing to disk that indexing does can eventually slow down SSDs.

To turn it off, type services.msc into the search box on the taskbar and press Enter. The Services app appears. Scroll down to either Indexing Service or Windows Search in the list of services. Double-click it, and on the screen that appears, click Stop. Then reboot your machine. Your searches may be slightly slower, but you also may not notice the difference. You should, though, get an overall speed boost.

Here’s how to turn off Windows 11 indexing.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

Alternatively, you can turn off indexing only for files in certain locations. In this way, you can still index files and folders you often search for but turn off indexing for the rest of your hard disk. So you’d still get fast searches for files you use often, while increasing your PC’s performance.

To do it, type index in the Windows 11 search box and click the Indexing Options result that appears. The Indexing Options page of the Control Panel appears. Click the Modify button, and you’ll see a list of locations that are being indexed, such as Microsoft Outlook, your personal files, and so on. Uncheck the box next to any location, and it will no longer be indexed.

6. Clean out your hard disk

A bloated hard disk filled with files you don’t need can slow down your PC. Taking a few minutes to clean it can give an immediate speed boost. A built-in Windows 11 tool called Storage Sense will do the job for you.

Launch the Settings app, select Storage, scroll down to the “Storage management” section, and next to Storage Sense, move the toggle from Off to On. From now on, Windows will constantly monitor your PC and delete old junk files you no longer need — temporary files, files in the Downloads folder that haven’t been changed in a month, and old Recycle Bin files.

Here’s where to customize the way Storage Sense works.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

You can also customize when Storage Sense runs and what should be deleted automatically — for example, whether to delete files from the Downloads folder after they’ve been there for more than 30 days. To do it, click the right-facing arrow next to the Storage Sense On/Off slider.

7. Disable shadows, animations, and visual effects

Those who like eye candy are probably big fans of Windows 11’s shadows, animations, and visual effects. They typically don’t affect performance on fast, newer PCs. But they can exact a performance hit on older, slower machines.

If you’ve got a slower PC, turn them off. To do it, in the Windows 11 search box, type sysdm.cpl, press Enter, and then click the sysdm.cpl icon. That launches the Control Panel’s System Properties dialog box. Click the Advanced tab and click Settings in the Performance section. That brings you to the Performance Options dialog box. (Make sure you’re on the Visual Effects tab of the dialog box.) You’ll see a varied list of animations and special effects.

The Performance Options dialog box lets you turn off visual effects that might be slowing down Windows 11.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

If you love to tweak, you can turn individual options on and off. These are the animations and special effects you’ll probably want to turn off, because they have the greatest effect on system performance:

• Animate controls and elements inside windows
• Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing
• Animations in the taskbar
• Fade or slide menus into view
• Fade or slide ToolTips into view
• Fade out menu items after clicking
• Show shadows under windows

However, it’s a lot easier to just select the Adjust for best performance option at the top of the screen and click OK. Windows 11 will then turn off the effects that slow down your system.

8. Disable transparency

To get an even bigger speed boost, go beyond turning off shadows, animations, and visual effects. Also disable the transparency effects in the taskbar and other Windows 11 locations. Windows does a surprising amount of heavy lifting to create transparency effects, and turning them off can make a difference in system performance.

To do it, run the Settings app and select Personalization > Colors, then move the Transparency effects slider to Off.

Turning off Windows 11’s transparency effects can help speed up performance.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

9. Change your power settings

Your Windows 11 PC’s power settings let you balance its energy use with its performance. If you’re using the most power-efficient setting, you’re slowing down your PC, because the setting reduces your PC’s performance to save energy. (Even desktop PCs typically have a power-saving setting.) Changing your power setting to one of the less power-efficient options will give you an instant performance boost.

To do it, run the Settings app, then choose System and click the right-facing arrow next to Power. Depending on whether you’re using a laptop or a desktop PC (and if you’re using a laptop, whether it’s plugged in), you’ll see either a “Plugged in” or “On battery” setting that lists the power mode you’re using. Click the drop-down arrow next to it and choose the setting you want.

Change your power settings to give your PC a performance boost.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

Best Performance gives you the most oomph but uses the most power. Balanced finds a happy medium between power use and better performance, and Best Power Efficiency does everything it can to give you as much battery life as possible. Desktop users have no reason to choose Best Power Efficiency, and even laptop users should consider the Balanced option when unplugged.

10. Turn off Windows tips and tricks

Windows 11 constantly watches what you’re doing on your PC and gives you tips about things you might want to do with the operating system. I’ve never found these tips helpful. And I don’t like the privacy implications of Windows constantly taking a virtual look over my shoulder.

Beyond that, this monitoring can also make your PC run more sluggishly. So to speed things up, tell Windows to stop being so nosy and giving you advice. To do it, run the Settings app and select System > Notifications. Scroll down to Additional settings and click the down arrow. From the options that appear, uncheck the box marked Get tips and suggestions when using Windows.

Turn off Windows’ suggestions to help things run more smoothly (and regain a measure of privacy).

Preston Gralla / Foundry

11. Disable Game Mode

Windows 11’s Game Mode optimizes your PC for playing games. When it detects that you’re playing a game, it prioritizes system resources for gaming, taking them away from other apps and background processes. That’s great for serious gamers, but when you’re not playing games, it can slow down your system because it keeps some system resources in reserve in case you start playing a game. It occasionally causes stability issues as well. So turning off Game Mode may be able to give your PC a quick boost. (You can always turn it back on again when you want to play a game.)

Game Mode is turned on by default, so even if you’ve never played a game on your PC, it’s probably enabled. To turn it off, go to Settings > Gaming > Game Mode and move the Game Mode slider to Off.

Game Mode can sometimes cause stability and performance issues, so turning it off may give your PC a boost.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

12. Update device drivers

Your Windows 11 PC can become a slowpoke if its drivers are old and in the way. Outdated drivers can exact a big performance hit. Graphics drivers are often the biggest culprit in driver-related slowdowns. To check whether yours is outdated, and to update to the latest one:

1. In the Windows search box, type device manager, and click on the Device Manager icon that appears.
2. Scroll to the Display Adapters entry and click the side-facing arrow to expand it.
3. Right-click the driver, and from the context menu that appears, select Update Driver.

You’ll be asked whether to have Windows search for an updated driver, or whether you want to find one and install it manually. Your best bet is to let Windows do the work. Follow the on-screen instructions to get the driver installed.

You can use the Device Manager to update all your drivers this way. That’s time-consuming, so consider asking Windows to do the work for you. To do it, launch the Settings app (pressing the Windows key + I is a good shortcut for doing it) and select Windows Update from the left pane.  Select Advanced Options > Optional Updates. You’ll see a list of all the updates Windows has found but hasn’t installed. Select any of the drivers you want to install, then click Download & install.

Tell Windows Update to update your drivers.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

13. Get a burst of RAM with ReadyBoost

If you’ve got a sluggish PC, the issue may be that you haven’t got enough RAM. One solution is to add more RAM to it, but that can be a daunting task if you’re not comfortable opening up your computer and fussing around with its innards, or if you’ve got a laptop whose RAM can’t be added to.

For a simple, easy-to-use low-cost solution, turn to the Windows 11 feature ReadyBoost, which uses a USB flash drive to essentially boost your RAM by caching data on it. Make sure the flash drive you buy has at least 500MB free and has a minimum data transfer rate of 3.5 MB/s for 4KB random reads and 2.5 MB/s for 512KB random writes. The flash drive needs to be USB 2.0 or above, as does the slot into which you’ll insert it.

To do it:

1. Put the flash drive into a free slot.
2. Right-click it in File Explorer and select Properties.
3. From the screen that appears, select ReadyBoost > Use this device.
4. Click OK, then Apply.

Note that if Windows is installed on a solid state drive (SSD), you won’t be able to use ReadyBoost, because SSDs are fast, and Windows will already be using it as a cache to boost performance.

14. Roll back your PC to a previous state

Sometimes your PC will slow down for no apparent reason, and stay slow. It could be a new driver slowing your system down. Perhaps accidentally you changed a system setting that caused the problem. It can be difficult, and often impossible, to get to the root of these kinds of problems and fix them.

If you’ve noticed that your computer has become sluggish recently, there’s something that might solve the issue: Restore your PC to the state it was in before the problem began. You can easily do this via System Restore.

To do it:

1. Type advanced system into the search box on the taskbar and click the View advanced system settings icon that appears.
2. From the screen that appears, select System Protection > System Restore.
3. On the screen that appears, select Recommended restore and click Next if you want to revert to the most recent restore point. Select Choose a different restore point if you want to choose one yourself, and click Next.
4. Restart your PC. It will revert to its previous state. Note that when you do this, your documents, pictures, and personal data won’t be deleted.

If System Restore hasn’t already been turned on for your system, you won’t be able to revert to a previous restore point. It’s easy to turn on if you want to use it in the future, though.

Go to the System Protection screen as outlined above, and click Configure. Select Turn on system protection and click OK. From then on, your PC will regularly create restore points. If you want to create one right away, back on the System Protection screen, click Create.

Here’s how to turn on System Restore.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

15. Restart Windows

Here’s one of IT’s not-quite-secret weapons for troubleshooting and speeding up a PC: shut it down and restart it. Doing that clears out any excess use of RAM that otherwise can’t be cleared. It also kills processes that you might have set in motion and are no longer needed, but that continue running and slow your system.

If your Windows 11 PC has turned sluggish over time for no apparent reason, you may be surprised at how much more quickly it will run when you do this. I can vouch for it, and I restart my Windows 11 PCs regularly even if they’re not sluggish, just as a precautionary measure.

This article was originally published in February 2023 and most recently updated in April 2025.

[ For more tips, see Microsoft cheat sheets: Dive into Windows and Office apps ]

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on an "auto-propagating" cryptocurrency mining botnet called Outlaw (aka Dota) that's known for targeting SSH servers with weak credentials. "Outlaw is a Linux malware that relies on SSH brute-force attacks, cryptocurrency mining, and worm-like propagation to infect and maintain control over systems," Elastic Security Labs said in a new analysis Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]