Ultimate Windows Tweaker For Windows 8
Tacio Allaire
This tweak/tip guide will be full of caveats. Why? Because tweak guides should be full of caveats, of course. There are always implications and side effects to any choices you make when customizing a system.
I also work with a number of good DAW PC OEMs (companies that build DAW PCs). They tend to do even more for their systems. If you buy a custom DAW PC from a DAW OEM, and they do something different from what I indicate here, I would trust them to know what is the most stable thing for their system. They know the subset of hardware they target, and they know what they need to be able to support over time. They also know which subset of software they support, and how to get the most from it.
Remember, sound travels approximately one foot per millisecond. So the typical stage monitor, for a guitar player, is around 5-12 milliseconds of latency away from them (if not using in-ear). For those of us with studio monitors, they are usually 2-5ms away. Headphones have less latency, but only if wired. Wireless and Bluetooth protocols add their own latency in communications to the headphones.
Additionally, laptops and tablets are very prone to throttling the CPU to reduce heat. The last thing you need while recording is the CPU to slow down. This happens a lot with any consumer laptop that is optimized for size and weight rather than heat dissipation. Note that you can mitigate this a bit with dedicated active cooling pads for your laptop should you need to, but those little fans still tend to be quite loud.
Desktops also tend to give you more options for USB connections, as well as the ability to use wired networking rather than wireless. These are both extremely important for systems that will use many external devices.
There are many professional musicians who have completely different gigging vs home studio rigs. They often have desktops in the studio, and laptops for gigs/road. If you can swing this type of setup, you get the best of both worlds. You can use tools like OneDrive to automatically synchronize your data files between them.
When it comes to memory, I recommend new builders use the memory compatibility list the motherboard manufacturer releases. Most memory will just work, but the compatibility list will remove all doubt and help ensure you are able to get memory that performs to spec in your setup. How much memory you need will depend upon your use, but I personally recommend 32GB if you can, especially if you have integrated graphics and you work with sample libraries. Most everything will work well enough on 16GB, of course. 8GB can be stretching it and will be limiting, but folks still use it with the limitations in mind. I have 64GB in my PC not because I use that much with a DAW, but because some of the other work I do on this PC really benefits from the additional memory.
Your laptop, desktop, or motherboard manufacturer will almost certainly have BIOS updates available. Read the notes and check online forums for problems. If they look reasonable, update to the latest before you even install the OS. Staying with an old BIOS will often mean you lose compatibility with later processors and memory. Many motherboards in the past have required BIOS updates to work with Thunderbolt 3 as well.
Musicians often want to remap keys and have greater control over managing windows on their desktop. The open source Microsoft PowerToys makes those, and more, very easy to do. You can download and install them for free. You can even contribute your ideas (or code!) to help make the product even better.
Finally, if you use a PCIe (or Thunderbolt) solution for your audio interface, and maybe NVMe drives, and you also use a discrete graphics card, you will have to consider processors that support the minimum number of PCIe lanes that you need, or understand the compromises. Note also that some chipsets work well with Thunderbolt, and others, not so much.
The game "Barrow Hill" can be run easily on window using DxWnd, but it has a little annoyance: the game uses two windows, one gets the window border and the other is a borderless window to render the graphic, so when you drag & stretch the game window the graphic stands still at the same place where it was born.
The solution to the problem was to intercept the movements of the first window and replicate them exactly on the second one. To avoid troubles, all is conditioned to the "win:StickyWindows" tweak that keeps the two windows "sticked" together.
But the criteria is general enough to be applied in a general way, I think it may fix many games with video rendering that uses a separate window, so it would be interesting to see if other games could take advantage of this new feature.
Here is the patched v2.05.78.bh2 release.
This is very interesting because I recently dealt with enlarging the game window with the
3-D Ultra MiniGolf (Sierra) game. The old thread about this game is here
=25#5acd
there is a mention of the stretching problem, but no solution.
Unfortunately, this seems to be a different case than "Barrow Hill" and flag can't help with enlarge the window. I'm still trying, but so far it's the same...
It can't work in this case because the condition to set a window as "sticky" is to be a non-child window of the same size and position of the main window (the virtual desktop). In this case the window is smaller, but enlarging smaller windows would pose big problems, like calculating a target size.
Hey there. I am actually trying to get Barrow Hill to run in Windowed Mode right now on Windows 10 using DxWnd version 2.05.91. None of the settings that I choose seem to be able to get it to work properly. I can kinda get it to go into a window on my main monitor but some macromedia projector always ends up in full screen on my second monitor.
The feature is available from v2.05.78 and newer and is in the "Tweaks" configuration tab. If you can't find it, I suppose you didn't set the Expert mode. This is how:
in the titlebar menu, select "Options" and make sure that "Expert mode" is ticked. Then right-click on the game icon, chose "Modify" and note that the configuration tabs are increased. In the "Tweaks" tab search "win:StickyWindows" and double-click on it to activate.
In recent time though, coinciding with the introduction of Windows 7, I have more or less stopped using those programs. While I'm not entirely sure why, it likely has something to do with the near perfect state the operating system ships in.
You can run the program straight away after you have downloaded and unpacked it. The application displays system information on start, and you need to use the left sidebar to access the customization categories that it makes available.
A total of seven groups are listed here, each with an impressive set of tweaks of which most can be enabled or disabled with a single mouse click. Lets take a look at the tweaks offered by the application:
The first batch of customizations change File Explorer, the Modern UI or Taskbar features. While you can enable most manually as well, for instance by right-clicking on the taskbar and selecting properties, it is easier to use the program for that if you need to make many modifications.
The program comes with an option to create a System Restore check point, and an option to restore all values to default. It is highly recommended to create a new recovery point before you start to modify settings made available by the program.
The tweaking software can especially be useful to users who do not know where those changes can be made directly. It may also be handy to run after a new installation to go through all menus in one go and configure the operating system to your needs or likes.
BTW, ALL VIP executives working on Windows 7, the disastrous Windows 8, Surface RT/Pro with dancing tiles , Office with the horrible ribbon, at Microsoft, have been kicked out. Not a single VIP executive remained with Windows project.
More Microsoft exec departures mark end of a Windows era
With Jon DeVaan and Grant George officially retired and most of rest of Windows 8 team out to pasture, Microsoft silently acknowledges complete lack of faith in Windows 8
hello
ultimate windows tweaker is great but i was a bit troubled when i tested all the windows club softwares on virus total and see that some of them were detected as infected (by several antiviruses). UWT7 was clean though
Thanks for the write-up. But I think you used the old version 2.2 of UWT for Windows 7 as a result of which you were unable to access the IE settings. The screenshots displayed too are of the earlier version. Have a look at the latest screen shots here -windows-tweaker-3-windows-8 or here -gallery-ultimate-windows-tweaker-windows-8.
This is a tool that has evolved over several years and achieves much more than just debloating a Windows install. I have expanded it to install the programs you select, which is a bigger selection than ninite. The classic debloat is there, but also includes a tweaks section with quality of life features. To round out everything, I have included my recommended settings for Windows update that I use in a variety of businesses. Misuse of this utility can break your install so please be careful and I do not provide any help or assistance should this happen!
There are four main parts of this utility but I can expand this to an infinite number of tabs if expansion is needed and will probably happen in the future. As of the writing of this article there is 4 main parts: install, debloat, features and old panels, and windows updates. Let me breakdown what each part does and what you should use.
Debloating windows is always a moving target and there are many utilities out there. Many of them are too heavy handed in my opinion. This takes a more minimal approach that should not damage your Windows install. At the top there are three buttons Desktop, Laptop, and Minimal. These are curated selections based on my recommendations
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