Tweaks

Once Windows is setup and programs have been installed, it’s time to tweak. First Windows OS, followed by the various programs

Windows Tweaks

Set display refresh rate:

Right click desktop -> Display Settings -> Advanced Settings -> Display Adapter Properties -> Monitor Tab and max out the refresh rate

Disable Cortana (I personally don’t do this)

Uninstall obnoxious Windows apps from the control panel

Disable creepy Windows tracking

My personal settings for tracking disabler

Remove OneDrive from the Navigation pane of File Explorer

Enable SSH command line support

2. Application Tweaks

Starting off with ShareX:

These are my preferred after capture tasks, but some may want to use the “Upload image to host” feature as well. Tweak as you see fit

This one’s easy since the UI makes it simple to access the settings.

Vivaldi:

This is a tutorial on how to set up Facebook Messenger as a web panel app in Vivaldi. Feel free to add more.

Click the + on the left side of Vivaldi and enter “messenger.com”. Hit the left + and you’re good to go. Messenger, and some other apps, won’t work because the web panel opens the pages as mobile websites. To disable this, right click the app icon and uncheck “Show Mobile Version”

The end result: Messenger along regular browsing

Rainmeter:

This one will take the most customization. It has a learning curve and finding skins is sometimes difficult but reddit and Google are both your friends. For simplicity, I’m uploading my theme and my custom launcher script. Right click the skin and hit “Edit Skin” to edit entries or look at the source.

The final result

Extract the Rainmeter.7z folder and drop it in your Documents file. Go into the folder and open “Nader’s Layout.rmskin”. This will Install my custom layout and load it up.

You can download Rainmeter.7z here

EdgeDeflector:

EdgeDeflector is another tweak that will allow you to use Cortana/Windows Search to use your preferred web browser instead of forcing you into Edge. Simply install it and set your Default Browser setting by hitting Start and searching for “Default Apps”.

After installing EdgeDeflector, download a browser extension like Chromtana to direct searches through your preferred search engine.

Winaero Tweaker:

One of the last tweaks, Winaero Tweaker is an extremely powerful Windows tweak tool. There’s a massive number of tweaks, so feel free to explore and set to your preference. For reference, I’ll list my preferred tweaks.

If it’s not mentioned, it’s not tweaked:

Behavior:

Disable App Lookup in Store

Disable Error Reporting

Context Menu:

Remove unused Windows Context settings

File Explorer:

Disable automatic folder type discovery

Remove any of these that you don’t use

Windows Apps:

If you’d like, Disable Cortana

Privacy:

Disable Telemetry

Glary Utilities:

For the final tweak, we go to Glary Utilities. First, make sure to go to settings and stop Glary from starting with Windows. Second, open up the “Context Menu Manager”

We’ve installed a few applications and now get punished with a huge context menu for files and folders. We’ve already removed some of the excess Windows entries, but let’s remove the excess applications.

Before

Uncheck every single application you don’t think you’ll use. If you’ve only been following this guide, you can do what I do: uncheck every entry except the 7zip entries.

After all the tweaks and changes, restart your PC and behold your new, simple Windows context menu.