How To Make Your Chromebook Faster

After months or years of use, it is customary to see bugs or slowdowns on our Chromebook. Here are a series of simple tricks to put into practice to give back the sprint to our Chrome OS notebook. Even if they struggle to find space in our latitudes, Chromebooks are among the few computers that do not know about a crisis (at least worldwide). Among the favorite PCs of university students around the world, Chromebooks are characterized by a low price list (if you wonder which low-cost laptop to buy, the answer could be a Chromebook ) and good performance. And in both cases, the credit goes to Chrome OS, the open-source operating system developed by Google engineers. Regardless of manufacturer, operating system or model, a slow laptop is always a nightmare for users. 

The constant bugs, slowdowns or unjustified blocks make it impossible not only to work with the Chromebook but also tricky to be able to have fun with on-demand movies or video games. Just like other laptops, Chromebooks start getting slower for specific reasons. For example, accumulating junk files, documents, photos and videos over time begins to burden the memory and make the device slower. But too many unused and installed applications or the many browser extensions we forgot to delete can cause incompatibility and continuous slowdowns. The good news is that speeding up a Chromebook is a breeze. This is an operation that even a user with very little specific knowledge can do without problems. Here’s how to clean up our Chromebook and get it back as snappy as the first day we bought it.

Use The Task Manager To Figure Out What’s Wrong

Like a classic Windows computer, Chrome OS laptops also have a built-in task manager. This tool offers a detailed report of what your system is doing and the computer’s performance when you open applications or surf the Net. This is the starting point if we have noticed incompatibilities, bugs or sudden blocks on some programs over time. From which to start observing to understand what is wrong with our Chromebook.

Where Is The Task Manager On The Chromebook?

Very simple, click on the Chrome menu button, then go to the “Other tools” menu and select the “Task Manager” option in the tab that will appear. The page with the report on the use of each program installed on the laptop will open, and generally, we will have a list of the performance of our Chromebook. You can sort each application by name, memory usage, CPU usage, etc. First, we check the apps that occupy more RAM (usually the ones responsible for the most significant slowdowns of the Chromebook). 

Then we check if there are any anomalies in the use of the CPU by the browser or other programs. Excessive CPU usage could indicate incompatibilities between one or more programs or an attempted hacker attack in progress. If we wanted to have a hand in managing the Task Manager because we are unfamiliar with IT, we could turn to the Cog application, which can be downloaded directly from the Chrome Web Store. This program will advise us on what to do in case of problems with the use of the RAM or CPU of our Chromebook.

Delete Old Apps And Extensions

Most users have the bad habit of downloading many applications or extensions for the browser, and then, even if they have not used them for a long time, they leave them installed on the computer to take up space in the memory. A Chromebook, like any other laptop, with saturated internal memory, will be a slow notebook that will open even the lightest programs with a delay or will tend to have several blocks if we open more than one application at a time. What to do, then? Let’s look at all the apps or extensions we have installed over time and delete all those that seem useless to us. In a few minutes, we will speed up our Chromebook.

Extensions To Speed Up The Chromebook

True: installing many extensions can burden your operating system and slow your laptop, but some are critical and should be installed. Among these, we find The Great Suspender. This is a program that stops unused navigation tabs. If we work with the web, it is normal to have a lot of tabs open in unison. As long as these navigation tabs are open and running, they consume system resources and slow down your computer. The Great Suspender automatically puts cards into “sleep” mode after a certain period of inactivity to remove them from RAM. To reload the card, click anywhere on the static page. Another must-have extension is AdBlock. With this extension, we will automatically block the advertisements on the sites. Ads take up a lot of system resources and can slow down your device. So, by blocking the ads, you can easily prevent the system from getting bogged down.

Pay Attention To The Storage Space

Not all Chromebooks have extensive internal storage. There are also models with just 16GB of internal memory. Once the limit is reached, our laptop will be slow and tend to freeze constantly. And to get 16GB, just a few installed programs are enough. What to do, then? First of all, we delete not only apps and extensions but also files and documents that we no longer need to recover some space and store photos and videos in cloud services so as not to have to delete them and at the same time not to take up space on the Chromebook. Alternatively, we can buy an external microSD card to add to our Chromebook to increase memory. For a few tens of euros, we can buy them with storage capacities between 64Gb and 128GB.

Perform A Factory Data Reset

If you’ve tried everything and your Chromebook still feels very slow, the last resort could be power wash. This is an action to completely clean up your machine, which restores it to factory settings. The classic factory data reset on virtually every notebook in the world. The only thing to remember is to make a backup to save photos, apps, documents and videos. Because as the name implies, the power wash returns the Chromebook to the state it was when we bought it and deleted everything else. To run the Chromebook Power wash, access the Chrome OS Settings menu, scroll down to the bottom of the page and then click on “Advanced”. In the advanced settings page at the bottom, we will find the item “Reset settings” click on it and select the “Power wash” option in the tab that opens. We confirm that we are ready for the reset and are waiting for the process to be completed.

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