I like Windows 8. I won’t deny it, and i’m in a minority, but i think it’s a solid OS. Windows 8.1 has a few more nice tweaks, but i noticed that it’s a chunk slower than Windows 8.0. As far as I can tell, there are a few changes that Microsoft made that added some performance overhead. Every once in a while, my hard disk usage spikes to 100% ( from the System process ) and stays there for a while. With no SSD and a 4 year old laptop, that makes things painfully slow. Searching for apps locally is much slower than before, and seems to take ages to find anything. The main culprits seem to be the integrated Bing search and the auto syncing SkyOneDrive.  This is how I improved the performance. There’s probably more you can do, but this was already a huge step up for me.

Step one, drop the artist formerly known as SkyDrive:

Go to the PC settings app, and disable OneDrive’s sync. Sure, this will kill the nice auto backup feature, but it’ll save your harddrive.

Step two, kill Bing with fire:

Still in the PC Settings, go to the Search and apps.  Then disable the Bing search.

And now your Windows 8.1 should feel as responsive as your Windows 8 was.