Improve performance of your Windows 10 PC with this Fix

Since the Specter flaw was revealed a major concern has hit PC users since it affects processors sold for decades with many of them still in use. In turn, to make its users safe, Microsoft has released an update for Windows 10, which in spite of making the machines safer, also brought performance problems.

This update that came in the Build 1809 of Windows 10, fortunately, has a trick to soften these performance problems. Here’s how to enable Retpoline fix to bring your computer back to normal.

Important

This failure of the Specter does not reach Intel’s newest line of processors, which use the Skylake architecture or higher. In this way, only perform the following procedures if you still have a Broadwell line processor or older.

If you are in doubt about your processor, you can use a program such as CPU-Z, which already contains all the information about it, including its architecture. In addition, in the “Run” Windows, run the “winver” command to verify that you are in version 1809 of Windows 10.

How to apply the performance correction for Retpoline

To correct the computer performance issue caused by this update, you must make a change to the system registry with some instructions passed by Microsoft. First, check out how to apply this fix on the more common versions of Windows 10, such as Home or Enterprise:

1. From the start menu, look for the “Command Prompt” and run it as an administrator;
2. Now enter the command: reg add “HKLM \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ Session Manager \ Memory Management” / v FeatureSettingsOverride / t REG_DWORD / d 0x400;
3. Still in the “Command Prompt”, perform this action again: reg add “HKLM \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ Session Manager \ Memory Management” / v FeatureSettingsOverrideMask / t REG_DWORD / d 0x400;
4. Restart the computer.

If you use Windows Server and need to apply this fix, the process to be done is pretty much the same, however, the values to change in the registry are different. Look:

1. From the start menu, look for the “Command Prompt” and run it as an administrator;
2. Now enter the command: reg add “HKLM \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ Session Manager \ Memory Management” / v FeatureSettingsOverride / t REG_DWORD / d 0x400;
3. Also in the “Command Prompt”, perform this action: reg add “HKLM \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ Session Manager \ Memory Management” / v FeatureSettingsOverrideMask / REG_DWORD / d 0x401;
4. Restart the computer.

If you want to confirm that the process really worked, Microsoft still provided a script in your Github to run on PowerShell. Information on how to use it can be obtained at this link.