you did it you finally built or bought a brand
new gaming PC except there's one small problem right now it's the most
expensive paper weight you own how do you make the computer
compute well doing it right takes more than just plugging her in and letting
her rip like ooh what's this button do
and what the heck am I looking at here how do I get past this well for starters
you're going to have to get past today's sponsor thorum it's Valentine's Day do you know
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the link down below and use code LT to get 20% off our goal in making this
video was to be as comprehensive as possible so while we would recommend
watching it all the way through the first time we've added convenient
chapter markers if you ever want to come back for a topic specific refresher
we'll begin with the physical things that you need to set up starting with
location now obviously easy access to your ports
is critical so depending on your case you might prefer it on the right or on
the left but what's less obvious is that
your PC's position can have a big impact on future maintenance requirements the
main way that dust enters your case is by being sucked into the front or the
bottom intake fans keeping those off the floor means that your system will
require far less frequent cleaning this is especially true for carpeted flooring
which not only acts as a pet hair magnet but can also starve your power supply of
fresh air depending on its orientation if you must have your system
on the floor though at least do yourself a favor and put it under the edge of
your desk even with top exhaust fans a
shocking amount of dust can settle down into your system if you have an open top
grill if your system has an antenna it should be in line of sight with any
Bluetooth peripherals that you intend to connect later and it should be clear of
anything that might block the signal to your Wi-Fi access point like a dense
concrete wall or granite countertop or
even the PC's chassis itself I mean you know what they say distance makes the RF
signal stronger now you're ready to plug in and the first cable is going to be
power this ensures that your equipment is grounded and protected from
electrostatic discharge as for the other end of the cable well good PC power
supplies can handle a wide range of power conditions before supplying
anything to the rest of your PC but plugging into the wall or into a dumb
power strip can stress it if your wall power is noisy or prone to voltage
sagging and brownouts this is especially true when other high power appliances
are running like say an air conditioner a UPS or premium search protector can
help clean that power up a bit before it hits your PC or display but failing that
I'd recommend at least a basic surge protector which can help protect your
computer against voltage spikes from things like a lightning strike for
desktop peripherals I'd recommend plugging your keyboard and your mouse
into the slowest USB ports that are connected directly to your motherboard's
chipset they're not going to use the extra performance of a faster Port
anyway and plugging them into secondary controllers or into addin cards can
sometimes cause them to stay inactive until the system is finished booting or
experience delays and hitches you can check the block diagram for your
motherboard if you're unsure which ports are connected to what the same is true
by the way if you're using a USB headset or a desktop dck and amp pretty much
every time I've seen someone report issues with these things it's because they're connected through a hub or
something do yourself a favor connect directly now if your audio device uses
an old school headphone jack you can either use the front panel ones if your
case has them or you can use the ports on the rear they'll usually be
colorcoded green and red for the headphones and mic respectively or else
they'll have symbols next to them some Modern motherboards will actually prompt
you for what you've plugged in and they'll work regardless of where you plug things in but they may not work
optimally on that subject some cases and
laptops might not have two separate three-pole Jacks but rather have a
single four-pole Jack in that case you're going to need to get a y cable
like this one unless your headset includes one in the box next up is
display most gaming PCs come with a dedicated GPU installed in a PCI Express
slot and you should always plug your main display into that rather than the
ports on your motherboard's IO panel those ones are routed to your onboard
Graphics instead now with the right UEFI BIOS configuration we'll touch on that
in a moment your system May support connecting extra monitors to both of
them at the same time but if you run your game off of the wrong ports it will
have a negative impact on your gaming experience as for which cable to use
HDMI DisplayPort or USBC that boils
down to what your monitor supports and what your graphics card supports when in
doubt DisplayPort is usually the more
correct choice for PC thanks to its generally higher bandwidth and broader
support for extras like variable refresh rate gaming but you should also refer to
your GPU and display manuals to see exactly which features are supported one
last thing if you're using a desktop with built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and
you intend to use it please make sure you screw in your antennas unlike
laptops desktops often don't have integrated antennas and while you might
be able to see nearby networks you will almost C ly struggle to stay connected
to them it usually doesn't matter which one screws into where if you've got
wired Ethernet instead then you'll often have one place to plug it in and you're
good to go but if you have to it's probably worth checking your
motherboard's manual to find out what's what sometimes they're the exact same
thing and completely interchangeable but other times one will use a slower but
maybe more broadly supported controller while the other might use a multi- gig
controller that's faster but requires additional drivers once distributed into
Windows these multi- gig ports can be a huge boom to creatives and to storage
enthusiasts who have network attached storage devices or actually even Gamers
who have balling out internet plans but if they're plugged into a typical
Network that has gigabit ports everywhere else they're going to be
limited to gigabit speeds anyway with everything plugged in and in place now's
a good time to tidy up your cables you can use zip ties in a pinch but hook and
loop cable ties are a better solution for future maintenance LTT storage
also we have something even better coming soon sign up for an instock
notification for our cable management arches at the link below now that that's
done it's finally time to fire it up flick the switch around back on your
power supply give it a second and then hit the power button if nothing happens
you can refer to our last PC guide you'll ever need for some helpful
troubleshooting tips before you do that though make sure your surge protector is
plugged in and turned on too it's actually a more common mistake than you
think is it going to power on first try
oh crap oh power bar needs to be on oh
even for us now that fan spin is achieved it's time to game right not yet
nearly every modern computer has what we still refer to incorrectly as a BIOS the
more modern term is UEFI but we're old school so BIOS is the screen you go to
when you power on your PC and it usually has the logo of the manufacturer it's
not just an ad though there's a whole menu buried in here if you press the
right key before your operating system starts to boot up sometimes the you need
to press to access it is listed on the screen but it'll usually be delete F2
F10 or F12 if you're unsure check your manual feeling that just Mash all the
above that usually gets the job done the
exact layout of this setup screen will vary a lot depending on the manufacturer
and model year of your system there are DIY motherboards from a decade ago with
full graphical interfaces while some Modern machines have almost retro
looking interfaces with no mouse support whatever the layout the first screen
usually has information about the hardware installed the date and time and
sometimes the order of the storage devices the PC will check for an
operating system to boot before continuing make sure that everything is
showing up as expected missing RAM for example could mean you need to receip
the module or the CPU itself even if you've been around the block a few times
you should check the manual to familiarize yourself with the layout
before changing anything after all new platforms bring new features and new
features bring new headaches it's at this point that you might want or
sometimes need to upgrade your BIOS to the latest version on your motherboard
or PC manufacturer's website the exact
steps for this vary greatly by manufacturer and by Era but the gist is
this turn off the PC download the BIOS
from the manufacturer and unzip it to a flash drive which often must be
formatted fat 32 once that's done eject
it plug it into your PC again on a motherboard chipset Port get
back into the BIOS and usually you'll find an option in here with flash in its
name nine times out of 10 this is what you want select the flash drive choose
the file you downloaded confirm then kick back and hope that the power
doesn't go out your system May reboot a couple of times during this process
which is normal but if It suffers a power loss it's quite vulnerable it's
being bricked so if you have a battery backup of some sort kicking around
please do use it there are sometimes ways to recover without this backup but
the exact details VAR by vendor and you do not want to find out that yours
doesn't have one after the fact read your motherboard's manual to be sure
once it's done it should say the BIOS was updated and settings were reset
allowing you to enter setup to continue now there are a few options of
particular interest inside the BIOS starting with XMP and Expo the memory
overclocking standards that were also previously L known as docp on older AMD
platforms the location of this setting does vary a little bit but many
motherboards will have it on the main page because it is such a common thing
for enthusiasts to enable if you've got RAM That's rated for highp speeds this
is a one touch way to hopefully reach
those speeds enabling it will correctly set all of the relevant settings in your
Motherboard BIOS including voltages and something called the memory ratio you
don't need to fully understand what that means but for best performance 1: one is
ideal on Intel and on AMD you often want to see the F clock match half of the
memory speed don't worry too much if it doesn't line up though fast RAM is
usually better than the alternative now this is technically overclocking though
so it's worth noting that this might not work in every configuration if you have
very fast memory or if you have more than two modules for example your CPU
may have trouble running at the rated speeds if you're worried about stability
you can go ahead and leave this step till last then when your system is fully
set up that way you could even Benchmark the before and after if you happen to be
a turbo nerd like me if you do enable XMP and find that your system fails to
boot or is occasionally unstable manually dialing back the memory speed
or slightly increasing the voltage might make the difference worst case scenario
you can disable memory overclocking entirely and everything should work
normally if it doesn't you could be looking at a warranty replacement next
up if you've got a beefy enough cooler some bioses let you toggle a setting
like core enhancement or Precision boost
enhancement this can help e a little bit more performance out at the cost of
additional heat and power draw by making your CPU turbo more aggressively or for
longer this one is less likely to harm stability but again if you experience
problems I'd recommend just turning it off our next stop will be resizable bar
a feature that boosts GPU performance by giving the system more efficient access
to its onboard memory this is usually going to be somewhere in the advanced
section often under a heading for PCI devices if you don't see it it's
possible your motherboard doesn't support it but it's also possible that
you need to enable above 4G decoding in order for it to show up unlike memory
overclocking this setting has no real downside so you might as well enable it
it won't do anything if your GPU doesn't support it and on some Modern gpus it is
basically essential for proper performance to the point where the very
newest motherboards as of writing might ship with this on by default another
option we want to make sure is enabled is virtualization on Intel this is often
called VTX while AMD calls it svm along
with letting you run virtual machines if you want to with very little performance
penalty virtualization technology is used by operating systems to enhance
security by sectioning off parts of the system which is generally considered to
be a very good idea TM this is often
buried inside inside the CPU configuration settings section and like
resizable bar the newest motherboards may ship with this on by default a
related setting is the trusted platform module or TPM Windows 11 mandates it as
the second part of its virtualization-based security feature
and for improving Windows hello biometric login and bit Locker dis
encryption security for that reason it's usually best to keep it enabled or
enable it if it isn't already otherwise no Windows 11 for you at least not
officially anyway you'll also officially get no Windows 11 if you don't enable
secure boot which helps guarantee that nothing malicious slipped in between the
BIOS and loading the operating system this could be a simple toggle or you
might need to select the option to install the default Keys like on this board from ASUS but if that option
doesn't show up anywhere it could be that CSM or compatibility support module
is enabled which puts the computer into a sort of old school boot mode and
secure boot doesn't roll that way so unless you know that you actually need
it it's usually best to disable CSM one hot tip that might save you some
headaches later is to determine what onboard Hardware you don't need for
example motherboards with built-in Wireless secondary land ports or any
other extras will have them all enabled by default and they can sometimes be
excessively chatty this often manifests as stuttering or hitching even when the
system isn't even close to fully loaded because the CPU has to drop whatever
it's doing to listen to your Wi-Fi cargo blah blah blah about the signal strength
of your neighbor's Wi-Fi that you're not even using so take a moment and disable
anything you're 100% sure you don't need just remember you did it so you're not
tearing your hair out later trying to figure out why your serial Port drivers won't install there are a handful of
other features you might wish to play around with for example you might want to reorder your boot devices or set up
custom fan control if your board supports it but for the most part you should leave the rest of the stuff in
here alone especially voltages unless you're sure you know what they do and
accept the risks for now if you built your own PC it's time to install your
operating system or if you bought a pre-built it's time to install your
operating system I mean I mean you don't strictly speaking have to but since so
many machines come with bloatware pre-installed on them it may actually
take less time to just load up a fresh one than to sanitize what you've already
got step one then is to download your OS
we're going to use Windows 11 as our example but most of this also applies to
Windows 10 Microsoft provides a free tool to download an ISO that can either
be saved so you can burn it or used to automatically build a USB installer
we're going to have that linked Down Below download it grab your USB flash drive and make sure
that anything you care about on it is backed up cuz this is going to wipe it
clean go through the prompts the recommended version is almost always
what you want and choose USB flash drive
select the drive and it's Off to the Races while you wait for this to finish
I would strongly recommend downloading your Hardware drivers from the
manufacturer's websites in particular you are definitely going to want your
network driver and some systems might also need the storage driver in order to
get Through the Windows setup process I usually just grab it all cuz storage is
cheap and I'm not doing anything right now anyway once the Windows flash drive
is finished unzip the drivers to it I like making a driver's folder with
individual folders for each driver to keep them easy to find then eject it and
pop it into your new pc and restart it it should boot right into the installer
but if it doesn't you should be able to choose the installer from the BIOS or
through a boot menu which is usually accessible by mashing f8 or F2 12 on the
bio screen fun fact did you know that you can open a command prompt at any
time during Windows setup by holding shift and pressing F10 a fun little Pro
tip is if you do this and then type dis part right at the beginning and hit
enter Then list disk you can see all the
drives that are installed on the PC that way if your storage device isn't showing
up it's a faster way to know and you can quickly reboot the system and
troubleshoot it and if it is showing up you can type select disk followed by the
number next to it it and type clean to remove anything from that drive if you
want to be really sure and you have some time to kill clean all will crawl the
drive and directly set every single bit to zero which is basically a secure Ras
though that takes a while especially with higher capacity drives once you're
done type exit twice hitting enter both times to close the command window then
proceed through the prompts if you come to the part where you need to select
where to install Windows and nothing is there it's time to put that storage
driver to use click load driver then find the folder on the flash drive that
you unzipped your storage driver to with any luck the driver will pick up your
drive and you can proceed as normal in some situations by the way Windows does
a thing and splits your install across two drives most often if one of the
installed drives has an existing Windows partition on it so if you have an old
drive that you're planning to copy data from that has an operating system I
would strongly recommend shutting down the system and removing it until you
finished the setup process now most people will want to select the
unallocated space for the drive you want to install Windows on and continue but
if you only have one drive and you want to separate Windows from your documents
Games Etc so that you can wipe Windows clean without worry later then you can
create a new Partition for just that with this button this will steal the
amount of storage capacity you choose for it from the Windows drive so you'll
have to make the call on how much to assign to Windows and to your storage
Drive based on what you expect to need installed on your Windows drive you can
then click the remaining unallocated space to install Windows to it it'll set
up everything on its own when you're satisfied click next and make a sandwich
quickly though because this shouldn't take too long on a modern PC after a
reboot or two you should see the screen to get connected to the network and
download updates if nothing comes up here this is where those network drivers
come in press shift and F10 again then
Dev management. MSC and hit enter find
the unknown devices called Ethernet controllers rightclick them and click
update driver again browse to where you extracted the drivers to your USB drive
and it should pick them up unfortunately Windows doesn't give you an easy way to
know which one is which so there might be a bit of trial and error with
selecting the right driver for each controller if you have more than one or
if you get bored of this monkey business entirely you can just bring the command
prompt back up and type UB back/ bypass
nro and then you can just deal with the network drivers once you hit the desktop
fun fact this also removes the requirement for an online Microsoft
account if you're successful installing network drivers however your yellow
exclamation point should disappear from device manager allowing you to proceed
that's the end of the hard part so we're just going to mostly skip over the rest
just noting that we would suggest turning off most of the analytics
options and oh make sure you take a note of that restore from backup option if
you did use a Microsoft account you're going to learn what that's for later now
that you're on the desktop then now what
well first order of business is drivers some systems will offer to install them
automatically using built-in software and some of those let you thankfully
disable that feature in the BIOS if you don't like software you can't control
lurking inside your system but more importantly it can also lead to extra
bloat being installed on your machine for now you should install all the
drivers you downloaded previously which might take a couple of reboots before
you get through them all but should be fairly straightforward for most driver
packages nowadays if all you have is a cab file and an INF file you might have
to go to the device manager and use that update driver trick that we showed you
earlier but that shouldn't be a big deal once everything's installed and your
yellow exclamation marks are gone go ahead and grab Windows updates until
there aren't anymore then right click the taskbar go to taskbar settings then
remove search cuz it's pointless and left align the start menu because you
are a man or lady of culture now you're ready to start getting settled in if if
you have any Bluetooth devices that you want to connect you can do that through the Bluetooth icon in the system tray
just click add device choose Bluetooth and make sure that your device is in
pairing mode it should show up in a few seconds and then all you need to do is
Select it and follow the instructions on screen some devices will connect right
away While others may need you to press a button or key in a code to confirm
once the device is connected it should reconnect automatically every time it's
turned on if you later pair it with another device though and it no longer
works with your PC just look for it in the license list click the three dots to
forget it and go through the pairing process again once you're satisfied
everything is connected it's time to check your network config Windows has a
firewall built in to protect your PC from unauthorized access from your
network but it has two modes that Define how strict it will be the first nowadays
the default is public which treats all incoming connections with suspicion
unless you specifically allow an app to accept them this is great for connecting
to unsecured public Wi-Fi at your favorite coffee shop but if you have a
home network and you'd like to share files you'll want to change over your connection to private which relaxes
security to allow connection from your local network you can change this by
right clicking the network icon in the system tray then clicking network and
internet settings click on the network connection you want to change then toggle either private or public as
desired the next thing you'll want to do especially if you're sharing files on
the network is to set up your power options in the settings app under system
then power here you can set when your PC goes to sleep when your screens go to
sleep and how aggressively your PC should try to optimize for performance
or power using by default Windows will set your PC to
sleep after 10 minutes but if you're a fan of accessing your PC remotely
through an app like team viewer parsec or tail scale or sharing files like we
mentioned earlier it'll be inaccessible while it's asleep without some very
specific steps in that case you might want to set your PC to never sleep
though that does mean you'll be missing out on those sleep power savings you can
however tune that power draw by searching for edit power plan in the
start menu and clicking the change Advanced power settings Link in the
vintage window that pops up there are a bunch of settings here ranging from when
to turn off spinning hard disks and how many power saving features are enabled
for your Wi-Fi USB and PCI Express devices as well as the ability to set
the minimum and maximum performance of your CPU these options can also be
useful for troubleshooting things like periodic dropouts and disconnections for
example if your USB cable is good and the port is good try turning off USB
selective suspend or if your Wi-Fi is unreliable you can try setting it to
maximum performance now that your devices and core settings are set up you
want to tweak some of the more common user settings for example most Gamers
don't like Mouse acceleration and the easiest way to find this is by typing
Mouse in the start menu search and then selecting change the mouse pointer
display or speed in this window click pointer options then uncheck enhance
pointer Precision if it's enabled you should generally leave the cursor speed
where it is and use DPI switching that's built into your mouse or Mouse software
for that instead you can change the other options here to taste or lack
there of but for now just hit okay it's a good idea at this point to
set up some File Explorer settings by hitting these dots here and opening up
the options window here among other things we can choose whether to see the
default home view with recent documents or the this PC view where only drives
attached to the system are shown if you'd like to avoid getting duped by the
way like when we had our Channel hacked recently you should then go to view and
uncheck hide extensions for known file types I will never understand why this
is enabled by default there are some other options in here like showing
hidden files uh restoring previous Windows when restarting and so on and so
forth so go ahead and modify to suit your tastes or click on restore defaults
if you can't find that one option that you changed that you ended up not liking
one more thing you'll notice in this window is the apply to folders button
what's that do well if you rightclick empty space in an Explorer window you're
going to see a view option with a bunch of different layouts here's what each of
them looks like and here's the available columns to sort with the details view
regardless of the view you can sort or group Group by these criteria grouping
by date by the way is a great way to sort your downloads and your photos if
you get it set up just right and you want to use that layout as the default
for all folders on your PC that's what the apply to folders button does if you
want a specific folder to show large icons or thumbnails you can set it
separately which is pretty neat right and don't worry if you mess something up
the reset folders button is always there to help you speaking of folders did you
know you can change the location of these main folders here just right click
on them click properties and then look at the location tab click move and
you'll be able to choose a new spot for them it doesn't work very well with one
drive but if you've got a separate drive or a partition that you'd like to use
for your files while keeping Windows separate this is for you when you click
okay it'll even ask if it should move any existing files over to the new
location which is super handy if you're doing this on a system that you've
already kind of moved into of course
there's a more fundamental way to personalize your PC if you rightclick
the desktop and click personalization you'll find options to change the
background colors and more you can even have a group of background pictures that
will change periodically if you use slideshow under colors you can choose
whether you're on the light or dark side enable or disable the mic transparency
effect on some Windows and manually select an accent color if you don't like
what Windows chose to match your background oh and you can choose whether
it should apply to the taskbar and to Windows too a special note here is the
contrast themes section this can be really helpful for people with visual
impairments or just to look cool if you dig the aesthetic because it applies
everywhere and you can edit the colors that it selects yourself there's some
other useful stuff in the accessibility section of the settings app too for
example you can make scroll bars always show if you hate the autohide stick you
can turn off Windows animations for faster navigation you can change the
size and style of your cursor and importantly for people who don't use
them you can disable the keyboard shortcuts for sticky keys and filter
Keys oh that toggle Keys function can be helpful too it plays a beep whenever you
enable caps lock num lock or scroll lock so you don't have to look down at your
keyboard to see if they're on a common problem for monitors is that either HDR
or high refresh rate aren't set up correctly by default even though your
display supports it you can fix that by right clicking on the desktop and
clicking display settings HDR settings can be found in the brightness and color
section and clicking on it gives you the option to enable HDR as well as Auto HDR
which will cause non-HDR games to pretend their HDR with um honestly mixed
results you can also adjust how SDR content will appear when you're in HDR
mode using this slider which will also affect the brightness of the desktop if
you have multiple HDR monitors congrats you fancy pants you uh you can adjust
them independently of each other also HDR or not if you you have multiple
monitors and they're not in the right order and you haven't already fixed it
yourself because of how infuriating it was you can drag them around in the
display settings window like this and even rotate them if you like having one
in portrait or even one upside down using the display orientation drop down
you can see which is which by using the identify button to make this a bit
easier and you can choose which one is your main display so the one with the
system tray using this checkbox here one little Pro tip by the way is that if
your cursor jumps As you move between the displays you can tweak the alignment
in this menu like so if your monitors are different sizes and resolutions
you're not going to be able to get it absolutely perfect but it'll at least
help smooth things a little bit for refresh rate you're going to need to
scroll down to Advanced display from here you can choose each of your
monitors individually up top and then select the refresh rate down below now
Windows is usually okay about selecting refresh rates but overclocked monitors
including monitors with overclock functions right out of the box will
often report the non overclocked refresh rate as the best one and that is just
factually incorrect so if you still don't see your refresh rate you might
need to use your GPU's Configuration utility or try a different cable another
thing Windows guesses at sometimes with comically bad results is the size that
you might prefer for your Windows and for your text if you want things larger
or smaller just look for scale about halfway down the display settings window
a 20 7 in 4k monitor will typically be set to
150% which is roughly equivalent to how big things would look if it were
1440p if you were to set that 4K display to 200% it would look like if it was
1080p at that size just sharper and so
on and so forth if you've got multiple monitors you can select each one
independently at the top of the window and then choose different scales so for
example 100% for a 1080p gaming Monitor
and 200% for a secondary 4K content
consumption monitor could make things on screen appear to be the same size
assuming that they're the same size physically you're going to have to experiment with it a little bit and see
what you like and it's worth noting that you might have to log out and log back
in for it to take effect in every app rather not enter your password again
well good news if you're using a Microsoft account you can enable Windows
hello what's it do it enables you to use your fingerprint a pin or your face with
a compatible camera to log in without your password why would you do that
first forgetting your password sucks and getting locked out of your PC sucks more
second it can actually be more secure because typing out your password means a
key logger or a particularly nosy housemate might be able to read your
keystrokes this way Windows hello makes it so someone gaining access to your PC
doesn't also gain access to your Microsoft account to secure your PC even
better than a password alone Ever Could you can use bit Locker bit Locker
encrypts your entire drive and while by default it will only protect against
someone cloning or removing your storage device you can optionally lock it down
with a pin a password or USB flash drive key that's required before your PC ever
gets to the login screen it's best to enable bit Locker shortly after you
install Windows so the encryption doesn't take forever but once it's
encrypted it's super fast to encrypt and decrypt on the fly on Modern Hardware
your apps will barely even notice speaking of apps how do you install them
well you could go every website and download the installers individually
like some kind of cave person but you could also use tools to make things
simpler a classic is Nite which lets you batch download and install a wide
variety of apps in one shot it's a huge timesaver here's some of the stuff that
we might select for ourselves for a new install just one pro tip here please
don't install multiple anti-malware Shields if you value your sanity or your
performance one is fine though there are some other great options for managing
software too one of which is to use the Microsoft store and I know I know before
you say it I know it's loaded with crapware and requires a Microsoft
account but there are plenty of normal apps on there including a lot of the
ones installed By Nite and as a bonus they're updated automatically along with
all your other store apps so you don't need to keep on top of app updates
individually here's a bunch of our commonly installed apps that are
available on the Microsoft store another bonus is that they're automatically
redownloaded if you have to reinstall which is pretty sick if you have more
selective taste in software or you just want to install everything in one place
you can make use of a little known Windows feature called wind get we
brought this up previously along with a thirdparty alternative chocy but with
either of them you can search for the software you want copy the exact name
and shove that into a batch file with commands to install or update them that
can be a little tedious to maintain but the upside is you can keep that batch
file on a flash drive or cloud storage so the next time you need to install
Windows you can get back up and running extremely quickly and like with the
Microsoft store you can schedule it to automatic check for updates for you
steam is a special boy though it's like an app store all on its own once
installed you've got steam Library folders that contain anything that you
download to them and if you have a separate drive that you'd like to use
instead of your Windows Drive whether it's a partition or a physical one
you'll need to go to steam settings then storage click the plus next to your C
drive select your other drive then click add it's going to show up right next to
your C drive click the three dots and select make default to make sure that
steam install software to that drive instead of your main one by default then
you're off to the races which is great and all I hear you say but I've got
these peripheral things and my RGB is out of control what do I do well many
peripherals these days do come with driver software but if you want my
humble opinion you should be asking yourself if you really need it before
you click that download button even the most reputable vendor software can be
very re resource intensive and if you're not married to a single brand for all
your peripherals you could end up with three or four different programs just to
control your devices but okay if you've got to have
them what you can do to help with this is to install them then disable them
from starting automatically using task manager built-in startup item section
just fire up task manager there's a few different ways to do this listed here
but the pro mov is of course control shift escape and then with this method
method you can for example set up your mouse DPI switches and all of your
lighting save it to the mouse's onboard memory then close the software for
maximum gaming performance and only run it when it's necessary to make your
stuff work it's actually a good idea by the way to check this list from time to
time and disable anything that you don't want or need the same goes for companion
software that's installed by your Hardware drivers this stuff can add up
I'm talking sound control panels temperature monitors I mean the list
goes on and let's be real they're usually not very polished despite the
alleged R&D budgets of these companies so maybe try some third party software
like the peace equalizer APO goey or Hardware info instead which can give you
much greater granularity and aren't tied to specific Hardware oh since we're on
the subject by the way Hardware info is a great tool for double-checking that
all your devices are actually showing up and for making sure that you didn't make
any mistakes while you were installing your cooler a simple combination stress
test like cinch and furmark while monitoring your CPU and GPU core
temperatures will quickly reveal any critical errors in your build hopefully
before they become a long-term problem anything under 90° here is probably fine
but we'd like to see 70 to 80 though of
course there are exceptions like some high performance CPUs for example are
going to Target 90 to 100° or more
whether you like it or not speaking of like it or not
RGB it's there and I think the one thing
we can all agree on love it or hate it is that the Control software is a CPU
hog for best performance then I would recommend leaving that RGB alone either
rainbow bar or off but if you must
adjust it there are alternatives to the many vendor specific RGB control apps
that are out there and Windows 11 even recently got control for this albeit
with limited compatibility as of writing but if you want to try and consolidate
your RGB into a single app just try open RGB or signal RGB open RGB tends to be
lighter but less flashy while signal RGB is more capable but will make your CPU
work for it like the others will like we had to work hard for this segue to our
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