My Windows 10 has become extremely slow

What are some good free tools to help fix the Problem?

What are you doing that seems slow?
How much drive space do you have?

It is slow booting and when I double click for starting my chrome browser

Do you have a spinning media HDD or a flash based SSD or something else? If it’s a spinning media HDD, odds are pretty good it may be suffering in some way and is doing many retries before it succeeds. The best fix for this, honestly, is to replace it with a SSD.

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If you are low on disk space it can slow down Windows, and cause some other issues. You should allow at least 15% free space minimum.

From a command prompt, run as administrator, and use the command sfc /scannow.
This will replace any corrupted system files. It can’t hurt.

Since I’m former IT I’m obliged to ask if you’ve restarted the computer (and not just the applications).

I realize we’ve not explained that slowness can be caused by a host of issues and not one specific issue.
So the answer to your question about a tool is NO.

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You could try a “power wash”, reset the Windows installation, you can keep your user data, but it is probably better to throw out the applications and just reinstall those you need.

Installing and deinstalling applications always makes Windows slower. My 4 year old company laptop is still quick, but I haven’t installed lots of test software on it.

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How does one “power wash” Windows?

I recently converted my Windows machine to an Unraid box. I still can sort of run the Windows drive as a VM. Once I figure out graphics pass through, I’d like to clean out Windows, since I moved the important server apps to Docker.

In the Settings, next to update, you should see an option to reset the Windows installation.

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Love this feature, I second this recommendation. Most of the free tools that are advertised to improve your system will do the opposite, if not outright scam you out of money/time.

I do a full disk format on my personal system twice a year. While I do it manually, I always recommend using the system reset functionality to my less technically inclined friends.

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