Best Tips For Setting Up And Maintaining Your New Gaming Desktop PC Or Laptop
Removing Third-Party Antivirus
Thus, to uninstall your antivirus solution, you will want to search for “Add or Remove Programs,” and click the Settings option that appears. In this new window, you can search for the pesky pre-installed AV solution or other bloatware, for that matter, and nuke it from your device.
Registry Tweaks For QoL
Sadly, not all quality-of-life features can be changed through an easy settings menu in Windows, as Microsoft has locked some stuff away. However, these settings can still be changed, although it may take some extra work. For example, if you wish to restart or shut down your PC but notice that it isn’t killing programs, that is technically a “feature,” but an annoying one nonetheless.
To fix this problem of system shutdowns or restarts not killing programs and forcing an interaction, you will need to search for “regedit” and open the Registry Editor.HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop AutoEndTasks=1
Once the Editor is open, navigate to “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop” and find or create an AutoEndTasks DWORD (32-bit) Value. You will change or set this value to 1, and from there, your PC will restart or shutdown, force killing tasks along with it. Of course, this could come to bite you in the future, so just remember how you changed this.
Beyond that, another useful registry key to add is in “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows.” Here, you will add a key called “Explorer,” within which you will make a new DWORD (32-bit) value named DisableSearchBoxSuggestions, which you will set to 1. This will stop the new search menu from pulling stuff from the web, making your search experience a little better overall.
Word of warning: Mucking around in the registry can break things, so proceed with caution. It's also a good idea to backup your registry settings beforehand.
Install All Your Favorite Apps In One Package
If you are on a fresh device or just reinstalled Windows, it can sometimes be a pain to get everything that you want installed easily. One of the lifehacks that will help with this, though, is called Ninite. This is a tool that allows you to pick and choose what apps you want to install and bundles them into one handy installer interface. Of course, you will have to go and do individual app setups yourself, but this will cut down your overall installation time.
Update Drivers
Another thing to install that won’t be bundled with Ninite is your collection of drivers, both for the CPU and GPU. For NVIDIA GPUs, you can grab the GeForce Experience utility, and for AMD GPUs and CPUs there's the AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition utility, both of which will detect your hardware and suggest the relevant drivers. If you happen to have an AMD processor and NVIDIA GPU, you will end up needing both bits of software.
Disable Notifications
If you are immersed in a game or do not want to be bugged when doing something, another good tweak is to turn off notifications. You can do this by searching for “Turn App Notifications On Or Off,” which will open a menu in Windows Settings. From here, you can disable notifications wholesale or select which notifications you want to keep and which ones you do not.
Change Your Power Plan (Laptops)
On laptops, a good setting to change to help get the best performance out of the device is the Power Plan. Setting the High Performance plan will keep your CPU’s clock speed high, which has the trade-off of battery and power consumption but will be more performant overall. This is not generally recommended for desktops, though, as there is little need. To change your power plan, you can search for it with “Choose A Power Plan” and change it in the Windows Control Panel.
Dark Mode
This is more an aesthetic choice than anything, but did you know Windows has a dark mode now? You can search for “Color Settings,” which will bring you to Personalization in Windows Settings, where you can choose dark mode and different accent colors. The thing to note here is that apps like Wallpaper Engine can also control this to blend your theme with your desktop background, which might change your manual settings.
Check Your Display Settings
This may be one of those things that people completely whiff on if they get a new monitor or device, though it seems to be getting better. In any event, it is worth checking to make sure that your monitor is running at the highest refresh rate that it can. To ensure this, you can search for “Advanced Display Information,” which will take you to a menu where you can select the refresh rate for your monitor(s).
Turn off Enhanced Pointer Precision
Enhanced Pointer Precision is like a mouse acceleration feature that adjusts DPI on the fly, which is bad for gaming. Therefore, it would be worth turning this off by searching for “Pointer Options” and clicking the first result. This will open a Control Panel menu where you can toggle and apply the change to “Enhance pointer precision.”
These are a few things you can do to improve your quality-of-life on Windows 10 or 11 with a new or freshly wiped device. Of course, hundreds of other tricks are available, so if you find one useful, let us know about it in the comments below, and best of luck configuring Windows!
