There comes a moment every few months when Windows quietly taps you on the shoulder with a new update, and suddenly your PC just… feels different. The system that was running smoothly yesterday now feels heavier, chattier, and strangely intrusive. Settings you turned off months ago have mysteriously turned themselves back on. Your search bar is livelier than you want it to be. The taskbar is whispering news headlines. Even File Explorer wants to sell you something.
If you’ve felt that shift recently, you’re not alone. Microsoft’s 2025 updates have reintroduced several features that many users intentionally disabled long ago. It’s frustrating, and it’s very real. But the good news is that every one of these intrusive or performance-draining features can be taken back under your control. The key is knowing where to look and what to turn off.
So, imagine this article as a friendly walk through your system. We’re going to restore silence, speed, and privacy step-by-step — without rushing, without panic, and without overwhelming you with lists. Just a calm, narrative journey through the settings that matter most.
Before we dive in, consider creating a quick System Restore Point. It takes less than a minute and ensures that if any change behaves unexpectedly, you can roll back without stress. Once that’s done, let’s begin reclaiming your Windows experience, one setting at a time.
Tailored Experiences & Ads: Turning Off Microsoft’s “Helpful” Personalization
Every version of Windows includes a long list of marketing-friendly features with soft names like Tailored Experiences, as if they exist solely to pamper you. In reality, they’re designed to benefit Microsoft far more than the user. They analyze which apps you use, the websites you visit, your habits, your preferences — and all of that fuels ads, recommendations, and promotional nudges integrated into the OS.
But when we look closely, the PC doesn’t run better with this data collection enabled. The experience doesn’t improve in any meaningful way. What does happen is that Windows quietly sends little packets of information back to Microsoft’s servers, compiling a profile of your usage.
To disable this, you’ll travel into Settings → Privacy & Security → Diagnostics & Feedback. Inside this section, Windows exposes the exact type of diagnostic data it wants to send, including optional data that is — by default — switched on for Home users. Switching this off stops Windows from gathering the websites you browse, the apps you prefer, and the internal usage patterns that form a behavioural fingerprint of your daily workflow.
After turning it off, Windows won’t nag you. It won’t complain. And it certainly won’t become worse. What you gain is clarity: a system that isn’t working behind your back for marketing purposes.
Search Indexing: When Windows Searches Too Much for Its Own Good
Search is supposed to make your life easier — a quick way to find documents, applications, or settings. But the trade-off is that Windows aggressively indexes your entire system. Even when you’re doing nothing, the search indexer quietly moves between folders, crunching data, spinning your drive, and consuming CPU to stay up to date.
This is especially noticeable on machines with older SSDs, where disk activity spikes to 100% even while idle. Windows wants to be helpful, but the cost often outweighs the benefit.
The first step toward taming this behaviour is disabling Search History, which collects everything you search for locally. Most users don’t need their search terms to be permanently recorded. With a single switch, you cut off a surprising amount of clutter.
As you move deeper into the Search settings, you’ll find Search Highlights — essentially trending news and suggested content injected right into your search box. Windows treats it almost like a mini internet portal. You may not want that sort of noise in a tool meant strictly for finding files. Turning it off instantly makes the search bar lighter and more purposeful.
The most important step, however, is adjusting Find My Files. Windows offers two modes:
- Enhanced, which indexes your entire system
- Classic, which only indexes key folders like Documents, Pictures, and Desktop
Enhanced mode, while convenient in theory, is extremely resource-hungry. It crawls through every corner of your system constantly. Switching to Classic gives Windows a narrower, more realistic scope and relieves your CPU and SSD tremendously.
If you really want to refine things, you can even add Excluded Folders, ensuring Windows never looks inside them. This is optional, but for folders containing large archives, temporary files, or private materials, it’s a smart way to improve performance and maintain privacy.
All of these steps together transform search from a noisy background process into a quiet, predictable tool that works when you ask — not continuously in the shadows.
Delivery Optimization: When Your PC Becomes an Involuntary Update Server
Now we come to one of the more surprising features hidden inside Windows: Delivery Optimization. It sounds like a harmless improvement to update speeds, until you realize what it actually does.
Windows doesn’t just download updates for your PC. It sometimes uploads those files to other people’s computers to “help the community.” In other words, your upload bandwidth — the same bandwidth you may use for video calls, cloud backups, or gaming — is quietly used to distribute updates to strangers online.
This feature can cause sudden latency spikes, unexplained slowdowns, and inconsistent network performance. Luckily, disabling it is simple.
Head to Settings → Windows Update → Advanced Options → Delivery Optimization, and switch off Allow downloads from other PCs.
The instant you do this, your upload bandwidth becomes yours again. Your router stops juggling mysterious traffic. And the overall network feels cleaner and more predictable, especially if you use multiple Windows devices at home.
It’s a small change that makes a disproportionate difference in how smooth your entire online experience feels.
Widgets: The Noisy Sidebar That Quietly Eats RAM
Widgets arrived in Windows 11 like an uninvited guest at a calm dinner. Not everyone wanted a panel filled with colourful cards displaying breaking news, gossip, sports, stock charts, and weather anomalies — yet Microsoft keeps re-enabling it with new updates.
The real problem isn’t just the distraction. Widgets run continuously in the background. They fetch live data, refresh stories, and keep memory-resident processes active even when the panel is closed. This background activity slowly eats away at system resources.
Turning it off is refreshingly easy. By right-clicking the Taskbar → Taskbar Settings, you’ll find the toggle for Widgets. Flip it off, and the sidebar disappears instantly along with the background processes that keep it alive.
Windows becomes quieter — visually and internally. The taskbar looks cleaner, and your CPU has fewer unnecessary responsibilities. It’s a small breath of fresh air in a cluttered digital environment.
Suggested Apps and Start Menu Ads: The Return of Unnecessary Recommendations
This feature returns so quietly after updates that many users don’t even notice. Windows occasionally injects recommended apps into the Start menu: small tiles representing promotional offers or trial software. They’re not malware, but they aren’t exactly part of a professional operating system experience either.
To get rid of them, go to Settings → Personalization → Start, and switch off the setting that mentions tips, shortcuts, recommendations, and new apps.
The moment you disable it, the Start menu begins feeling like your space again. No colourful intrusions. No nudges toward products you don’t need. Just the apps and shortcuts that matter.
Remote Assistance: Closing a Door You Didn’t Know Was Open
Remote Assistance is a legacy feature that allows another person to connect to your computer for support. While it has legitimate uses, the truth is that most users never use it. It sits quietly in the system like an unlocked door.
Disabling it is a smart security step, especially in a world where remote access scams are growing more sophisticated each year.
Search for System Properties, switch to the Remote tab, and uncheck Allow Remote Assistance connections to this computer.
Just like that, a potential entry point disappears. It’s one of those invisible enhancements to security — the kind that protects you even if you never think about it again.
Optional Windows Features: A Museum of Bloat You Don’t Need
Hidden deep inside the system is a long list of outdated components. Some are harmless. Others introduce vulnerabilities or simply use system resources unnecessarily. When opening Turn Windows features on or off, you’ll find old services like SMB1, Work Folders, Fax and Scan, and legacy media components.
Most users don’t need these. They exist largely for compatibility with older environments.
As you browse through them, Windows will give you descriptions. Anything you don’t use — or don’t recognize — can safely be turned off. Your system boots faster. The attack surface becomes smaller. And Windows loads fewer background services.
This is a quiet kind of optimization — the kind that slowly improves stability over the long run.
Hibernation File: The Hidden 3–6GB Eating Your Storage
Hibernation used to be incredibly useful. Laptops with slow hard drives needed it to quickly resume work without draining battery. But modern SSDs and fast boot technology made it nearly obsolete.
Yet Windows still allocates gigabytes of space for the hiberfil.sys file.
If you don’t use Hibernate (most people don’t), you can remove it instantly through a single command:
powercfg -h off
Run Command Prompt as administrator, enter the command, and the space is freed. Your PC loses nothing essential. Instead, you gain several gigabytes of storage and slightly cleaner memory handling.
And yes, you can turn it back on anytime using:
powercfg -h on
But chances are, you’ll never need to.
File Explorer Ads: Because Even Your Folders Need Peace
At some point, Microsoft decided that File Explorer — the place you store your photos, documents, and downloads — was a perfect location for promotional banners.
These appear as small messages suggesting OneDrive or Microsoft services inside the folder window. They’re harmless but frustrating and intrusive.
To disable them, open File Explorer → Options → View, scroll to Show sync provider notifications, and uncheck it.
Your folder windows instantly feel calmer, cleaner, and more professional. It restores that old Windows Explorer simplicity many users still miss.
Background Apps: The Biggest Silent Drain on Your PC
And now we reach perhaps the most important section.
Many apps installed from the Microsoft Store or bundled with Windows run in the background even when you’re not using them. They fetch notifications, sync data, refresh content, and check for updates. The impact is subtle at first — a little extra memory usage, a slightly shorter battery life — but grows over time.
The frustrating part is that Windows doesn’t allow disabling background activity for all apps simultaneously. You have to do it one by one.
Navigate to Settings → Apps → Installed Apps, choose any app you don’t actively use, click the three dots, open Advanced Options, and set Background app permissions to Never.
Go through your apps gently — not all at once, but mindfully. Disable background access for anything that doesn’t need it.
You’ll notice the difference: quieter CPU behaviour, fewer random spikes, smoother multitasking, and better battery life on laptops.
It’s one of the most transformative adjustments you can make to your system in 2025.
Bringing It All Together: Creating a Calmer, Faster Windows Experience
After going through these ten areas, your PC will feel noticeably different. Lighter. More responsive. Less noisy, both visually and internally. You’ve reduced unnecessary network activity, reclaimed privacy, cut down ads, removed distractions, and closed potential vulnerabilities.
Windows becomes your operating system again — not an advertising platform, not a background process carnival, and not a machine constantly trying to out-think you.
You’ve stepped back into the driver’s seat.
And the best part is that none of these changes break essential functionality. They simply restore balance, reduce clutter, and help your system breathe better.
If you ever feel your PC slowing down months from now, or if a new update resets certain settings, come back to this guide and revisit the sections. Windows changes frequently, but the principles of performance and privacy remain the same.
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