How To Fix Slow Chromebook

How to speed up a dull Chromebook

Acer Chromebook 715 (Image credit: Laptop Magazine)

Chromebooks' lightweight software ensures that they last years — even on upkeep hardware. But even the best Chromebooks have an expiration date, and at some signal, Google Chrome's demanding tasks will take a toll on their performance. The effects of such a slowdown are even worse if you're too running Linux programs and Android apps. Fortunately, y'all tin speed up your Chromebook'southward performance in just a couple of steps.

Similar whatever traditional computer, you can optimize your Chromebook to prioritize polish performance over efficiency. At that place are several ways you can push its CPU beyond its default limits, such equally automatically suspending tabs you're not actively working on, and freeing up resources for your nigh essential processes. Here'south how to become started.

All-time Chromebook in 2022
Chromebooks with the best battery life in 2022

Bank check what's slowing downwards your Chromebook

Your starting time step to boosting your Chromebook's operation is to rails what's bogging it downwardly. You can do this from Chrome Bone's task director. Printing the Search and Esc keys together to launch it.

Inside the job managing director, yous'll find a list of all the active apps and processes on your Chromebook. Click the "CPU" column to sort the list past the highest CPU usage. The entries at the top are consuming nearly of your Chromebook'southward bandwidth. If you lot spot whatsoever app or activity that's drawing an unusual amount of power and is non important to you, left-click information technology, and hitting the "End process" button to stop it.

How to ameliorate your Chromebook's CPU functioning

Enable hyper-threading

If your Chromebook runs on an Intel chip, there's a hidden way to go more than out of the CPU. It'southward called hyper-threading, and it allows your computer to run multiple processes adjacent on a core.

By default, Chromebooks send with hyper-threading turned off. This means each core on your motorcar is simply treatment i task at a time. It'due south disabled because hyper-threading makes your Chromebook more vulnerable to security threats. Only, if yous're fine with taking a fleck of extra precaution around what sites yous visit or which apps you download, y'all should enable hyper-threading.

Go to the Google Chrome browser, punch in "chrome://flags" in the address bar, and printing enter. Search for an particular called "Scheduler Configuration," and in the dropdown next to it, select "Enables Hyper-Threading on relevant CPUs." Restart your Chromebook, and you're all set up.

Enable GPU rasterization

On your Chromebook, yous likewise have the selection to offload some of the CPU's load onto the GPU. Since this technique exhausts more energy, it's turned off out-of-the-box on your Chromebook. Yet, if your Chromebook has been struggling to keep up lately, you tin consider activating it.

Visit the "chrome://flags" folio on Google Chrome and look for "GPU rasterization." Switch its dropdown selection to "Enabled" and reboot. Once enabled, Google Chrome will burn upwardly the GPU to return graphics on a web folio so that the CPU is free to handle other demands.

Automatically suspend inactive tabs on Chromebook

As a Chromebook owner, there's a adept chance open up tabs and windows account for the bulk of your workload. So naturally, the most constructive method to fix your estimator's sluggish performance is to limit your browser'southward active threads. Thankfully, to accomplish this, you don't need to cut dorsum on the number of tabs you can have — just append them for a while.

With a free browser extension titled OneTab, yous tin can suspend all the tabs you don't currently need with a click of a button and save tons of retentivity for the ones you do. When you wish to restore them, OneTab allows you to go through the list of suspended pages and retrieve what you're specifically looking for without overwhelming your automobile.

Free up Chromebook storage

Your Chromebook regularly depends on the temporary data information technology creates for instantly loading your most accessed apps and websites. In case it's low on space, its local storage may be due for a cleanup. There are many means to free up storage on a Chromebook.

Open your Chromebook'south Setting app and navigate to the "Storage management" section. It volition feature an overview of what'south congesting your estimator'south storage. You can take action based on your results.

For instance, if there'south besides much browsing data accumulated, click "Browsing information," and on the following pop-up, bank check the "Cookies and other site information" and "Enshroud images and files." Select the timeframe to decide how much of your recent browsing data you'd like to remove, and click "Clear information."

Similarly, you can go into "Apps and extensions" and uninstall whatever programs yous no longer need. To handle an unruly pile of local files, you can either connect a deject storage account and motility some items at that place or mountain an external SD carte on supported Chromebooks.

Install a lighter Bone on Chromebook

If none of these solutions did the pull a fast one on for you, try replacing Chrome OS with CloudReady, a lighter Chrome-based culling. CloudReady is owned by Google and is designed on the same architecture equally Chrome OS. It offers a stripped-down experience, which ways you won't accept admission to some of the latest Chrome OS features, such equally Android and Linux apps. However, for browsing the web, you'd exist difficult-pressed to tell the difference. The upside is that it needs far less bandwidth to run smoothly, and therefore, it's ideal for Chromebooks with outdated hardware.

CloudReady is gratis, and you lot can observe its installation guide hither.

Shubham Agarwal is a freelance technology journalist from Ahmedabad, Bharat. His piece of work has previously appeared in Business organisation Insider, Fast Company, HuffPost, and more. Yous can reach out to him on Twitter (opens in new tab).