Always Do THIS with a New Laptop

New Laptop Setup Guide

So you just bought a brand new laptop, and you’re wondering what are some of the things that you could do to make sure that it runs at its best setting, but most importantly, fits your preference.

Getting Started

some of the things that I mentioned may sound familiar to our hardcore audience. But we wanted to create this guide for those who are beginning to get used to a Windows laptop.

Updates to Windows

The very first thing that I tackle is checking to see if there are any updates to Windows. Now, since most laptops shipped with Windows 11. These days, it is important to make sure if there are any security patches or essential driver updates, so that your laptop would run at its best setting.

Steps

If you’re interested to do this, all you have to do is click on the start button Search updates, and a pop-up window will show up letting you know what needs to be downloaded. You will need to be connected to an internet connection for this to happen.

Removing bloatware apps

The second step is to get rid of all the bloatware apps installed on your PC. Most laptop manufacturers peel their devices with trial versions of McAfee antivirus, or Norton, or it could be something else like Amazon Alexa that’s installed on this excuse 15, which we don’t really need. I mean, it’s just useless. So these applications can take valuable system resources, which would affect performance.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be running antivirus, it’s just that there are better applications out there compared to what comes standard on these laptops and another site of it is this is that you can actually disable certain startup applications that don’t matter to you when you boot up your PC. This can actually help speed up boot-up times.

Steps

To do this you can hit up start or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl Alt Delete and navigate to Task Manager. Then under the startup tab, you can start and select and disable the apps to your preference.

Display settings

The next thing to do is optimize your display settings. And this mostly has to do with resolution scaling. Most laptops come with a display scale up to 125% including 1080p panels. Now, this isn’t a terrible setting since people who struggled to look at icons might find this comforting. But if you want more screen real estate, scaling it back to 100% can give you more room for applications.

Steps

To do this, all you have to do is right-click on the desktop home screen click on Display Settings, and then navigate to scale under scale and layer options and choose 100%. Now if your laptop comes with a QHD or 4k display, you might have to play around with that percentage value to ensure you’re comfortably able to see icons and text while having more room for applications.

MUX switch

The next step is to know how to use a Mac switch if your laptop has one. MUX stands for multiplexer and it’s a switch that lets you disable the integrated graphics that comes with your CPU and runs the display off of the discrete GPU. By default, most gaming laptops with a dedicated graphics card have either Nvidia advanced Optimus or AMD smart shift. If you have an Ultrabook or a thinner line device without a discrete GPU, this step is essentially not even necessary.

The system uses integrated graphics to preserve battery life. Whereas if you switch to something that’s GPU accelerated, like gaming, or any sort of creative work, the system utilizes the more powerful discrete GPU. The only problem with Optimus is that it could result in latency since the frames or data that are being pushed out from the discrete GPU go through the integrated graphics chip before reaching the display, and that could cause a bottleneck affecting frame rates and games.

So that’s where a MUX switch comes into the equation because it allows the user to run the display directly off of the discrete graphics card by eliminating those latencies.

Steps

To enable this, it varies from one laptop manufacturer to another. For instance, Legion uses hybrid mode through Vantage software, Razer has a specific option in the GPU mode through the synapse. Alienware has a hybrid mode that can be accessed to the bios, a  Asus can be done through Armory Crate.

Disable the Windows lock screen

The next thing I do is disable the windows lock screen with the time and date prompt. This is the first thing that shows up on the screen. And when you boot up the laptop, it comes with a nice wallpaper and some quotes. If you have a password setup, you either have to press the Enter key or the space key to get to the password prompt screen. Now disabling the lock screen lets you jump right into the prompt section without having to press any keys. So all you have to do is enter your password and you’re off to the races. It saves a little bit of time.

Steps

To do this, hit up start, type in gpedit, and then under computer configuration and navigate to administrative templates, then control panel and then personalization and double click on do not display the lock screen. Click on enabled, click Apply.

Group Policy Editor is only available on Windows 11 Pro.  So, If you’re using a home, you might need to do a few registry tweaks. But that’s not officially supported by Microsoft.

Enable file extensions

Next up, knowing the type of file is crucial for users’ workflow is very important, and we are sure it’ll help many of us as well.

 

Steps

To do this Open File Manager, click on the three dots that bring up the pop-up menu, click on Options, navigate to view, and then uncheck the option that says Hide extensions for known file types. And click Apply. As you can see, the pictures and music formats show their types. This feature actually can help us a lot

Set up desktop icons

The last thing that can be done is to set up desktop icons because we need quick access to my computer and other apps.

Steps

So in order to do that, I just right-click, click personalize and then head over to themes. And then just scroll all the way down to desktop icon settings. And then checkmark computer user files, network, Control Panel, hit Apply.

And as you can see, those are all right over there. So yeah, that pretty much wraps up things that you need to do when you’re setting up a laptop.

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