How to Fix Lagging Chromebook: 5 Tips to Improve System Speed

Having problems with your Chromebook? After a few years of use, many users complain about longer boot time, slower app response, and even audio stutters. Fortunately, there are five tips available to fix your aging device.

Note, however, that you must check your internet connection before trying out the fix suggestions. If you are suffering from a poor internet connection, then it is advised to turn off the connection completely. This is because syncing data could cause massive delays in the repair process.

How to Fix Lagging Chromebook

5. Deactivate Offline Sync

Trafera pointed out that Chromebook is useful because it can save data to the cloud server. However, be warned that the feature also takes up a lot of system resources. At times it consumes a large amount of bandwidth and processing power, which causes device lag.

To deactivate this, you should head over to "Google Drive" and open "Settings." Then under "General," uncheck the option "Sync Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drawings files to this computer so that you can edit offline."

4. Move Files to Cloud Storage

Aside from system resources, be warned that excessive load on device storage can also cause lag. To resolve this issue, you are advised to load multimedia files like documents, pictures, video and audio to the cloud storage. Moreover, it is also better to delete any excess copies or unnecessary files from the device.

Taking all of this into consideration, it is recommended to be mindful whenever they download new content, so they do not have to repeat the purging process.

3. Limit Apps and Extensions

Similar to the previous suggestion, go through downloaded apps and extensions so you can delete any unnecessary program. You can try installing three tools that can help optimize the device's performance.

These three extensions are Data Saver (compresses the file process), The Great Suspender (puts device to sleep when it remains idle for too long), and AdBlock (clears up webpages with unwanted advertisements).

2. Enable Hyper-Threading

If the last few suggestions didn't work, then it is best to optimize the device software and program. You can do this by following the steps provided by LaptopMag.

Note that if the Chromebook runs on an Intel chip, then you can push the CPU to double its processing capacity. By default, this feature is off, but you can easily turn it on by heading to Google Chrome.

You should input the command "chrome://flags" on the address bar and press Enter. Then scroll down and search for the option "Scheduler Configuration." Lastly, select the "Enables Hyper-Threading on relevant CPUs." Restart the Chromebook to finish the process.

1. Enable GPU Rasterization

Lastly, you should offload some CPU processes to the GPU on the Chromebook. Doing so consumes a lot of energy or battery, but it will greatly improve the device processing performance.

To do this, you should still input "chrome://flags" on Google Chrome address bar and press "Enter." After which, scroll down to search for the "GPU Rasterization" option. Open the dropdown selection and click "Enabled." Restart the device to finish the process.

Hopefully, these five tips should help you restore or improve system performance on an aging Chromebook!