This Simple Windows 10 Tweak Could Reduce RAM And CPU Usage

A new Windows operating system just arrived and with it, a truckload of fresh tweaks that’ll help it run faster, leaner and better. It’ll take a while before we’ve collected all the good tips but for now, here’s one that might make your experience with the OS a little snappier.

With Windows, it’s always best to disable any services or processes you don’t need and the latest update is no exception. As gHacks’ Martin Brinkmann discovered, Windows 10’s Shell Experience Host can eat up abnormal amounts of CPU time and memory with not much to show for it.

Fortunately, you can make it behave with a small change. It turns out the process acts up while trying to tint your windows to match your background. If you can do without this nicety, it’s easy enough to disable:

Tap on the Windows-key, type Settings and hit enter.
Navigate to Personalization > Colors.
Turn off “Automatically pick an accent color from my background”, and select a static color instead.

As you can likely deduce, this tells Windows to use a single colour to tint the user interface, rather than constantly trying to figure out what to use dynamically. Depending on how you’ve personalised your desktop, the improvement you see from this tweak will vary.

Fix Windows Shell Experience Host process using too much memory/CPU [gHacks]


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