If you're expecting a quick and short guide, you better run now. For the rest who have patience, you better hold on to your butts as there's a lot of reading ahead.

This is a guide with some arbitrary Windows tweaking that I've been testing over the years and have used to keep my PC working as smoothly as possible. These settings serve to try to maintain the computer responsive and less prone to stuttering / choking while playing video games.
Keep in mind that what might be good settings to some, might not be for others. So check the descriptions and see if it's something you're interested in.

I do not take any responsibility for any issues you come across while following this guide, you'll be able to find powerful tools listed here that if you don't feel comfortable enough on changing them or don't know how to change them back, then simply do not change them at all. So if the cat explodes or your aunt gets aroused, don't complain about it.

This guide has steps that will disable or change certain features of Windows and Nvidia that
some of you might not want to disable, pay attention to the description and if you're not sure if
it's something you want or need, simply don't do it.

I will not be covering certain things such as:

• ATI/AMD specific settings. (because I don't own their products)
  
• Windows 10 specific settings. (Windows game DVR should be all you need to disable)
  
• Laptop settings. (only Power settings)

Personally I do not use Geforce Experience but I can understand that it's convinient for lots of people and others only use it because of Shadowplay. Although keep in mind that it will make some impact on your overall performance in games as its constantly doing something in the background. One of those extra things, would be the Nvidia Telemetry container service. This is always present even if you choose to not install GeForce Experience. Although it's not a big resource hog, it's still using resources unnecessarily.
Apparently as of recently, this service has been merged with another critical Nvidia service and can't be disabled on recent drivers. I'll still leave it up as someone who uses older drivers might find it useful.


If you want to disable it:

1. Go to Run command and type services.msc
   
   
   
2. From the Local services, find NVIDIA Telemetry Container and double click on it to open its properties.
   
   
   
3. From the General tab, set the Startup type to Disabled.
   
   
   
4. From the Recovery tab, select Take No Action on all the failures.

You'll need to do this everytime you install new drivers as this service is reinstalled and reset to default.



I'm not going through the whole set of options here, just 3 that I find to have the biggest impact on performance for games.


Yes I have the meme card, pls no bully.
PhysX is a physics handling tech that is present in several games, it uses a good amount of processing resources on the games that have this tech enabled. By default it's set to Auto-select which can allow the CPU to work this tech instead of the graphics card. Sounds good on paper as you can have the graphics card pulling the most out of graphics and have the CPU working out the physics. The problem here is that Physx is made to work with the graphics card much better than it does with any CPU. Having a game work out Physx with the CPU will cause you to have a bigger hit on performance everytime anything Physx related appears on the game. This option basically only exists for the sake of games that used this tech when it was called Ageia (back in 2002) and owned by another company.


Self explanatory, lets the graphics card use the maximum amount of power so it can work the fastest it can. Bear in mind that unless changed back, you'll have the graphics card ready to work in overdrive even if you're only watching memes online.







For lots of people who play competitive games, this one is probably a bit controversial.
You have the option to set up to 4 frames to be ready ahead of time (courtesy of the CPU) at the expense of some input delay. The bigger the number, the bigger the delay but the smoother the image output is. If you find that your games tend to stutter from time to time, this simple setting will likely help reduce them as the load is eased off of the GPU and shared with the CPU making a smoother output. The values 1 or 2 should be optimal.

Graphics card drivers can lead to considerable performance problems when older versions are not properly uninstalled and their remnants are still present. In more than one occasion, my performance severely dropped after a new driver update and I couldn't pinpoint the why of it, I just knew that it was caused by the newest driver.
After reading through several sources, I kept seeing people claiming that these issues were caused by the manufacturer to deliberately "gimp" the card through drivers in order to sell their newest models and that people should go back to the previous driver version or even an older version in order to fix the performance drop.
While this might work for some, it is not the best way to approach the problem. Each time a new game comes out, drivers need to keep up in order for the game to run properly or even actually run. So using older versions of the graphics card driver, will eventually bite you back if you want to play games that were launched after that driver date.

After a considerable amount of time spent on testing my "gimped" card through different driver versions and settings, I was about to format Windows and just start from scratch, when I decided to try DDU which I have known before but thought it wasn't going to do anything significantly better than the own graphics card driver uninstal option.
I was wrong. After running DDU and installing the "gimped" driver yet again, the games would run more stable and some were even faster than before.
Upon seeing these results, after installing 2 new driver versions, I do a DDU and install the latest driver version available.

Instructions and download of DDU can be found here:
https://www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstaller-download.html

Windows Power settings determines how much power the computer is allowed to use and for how long for each particular hardware you have. This will directly affect your computer performance (specially on Ryzen CPUs) and setting it to high performance will allow the computer to use more power and thus getting better performance. Although, this particular setting will drain considerably more battery if you are using a laptop that's not plugged in via the AC chord.

You can change this setting by going to:

1. Run command and typing powercfg.cpl
   
   
   
2. Power plan to high performance

Bear in mind that this will change the computer sleep mode settting and make an impact on the overall CPU lifecycle. If you leave the computer idle, it will still be ready to work at 100% power usage, so be weary of that when you leave it on for the whole day for whatever reason.


This feature exists to save your current state of Windows so when you come back to it, it will load everything faster (depending on the speed of the Hard Drive) and as you left it.
My main issue with this, is that asides of not needing it because everything already loads up quickly, all the information from Hibernate is written on your Hard Drive. Which causes the information to be either delivered back slower if you have a slower HDD or give unnecessary use on your SSD, helping reduce its lifecycle.

You can disable it by:

1. Open CMD with Admin rights
   
2. Type powercfg -h off
   
3. Restart the computer

CPU core parking makes certain cores of your processor to go into sleep mode to minimize power usage. While this is useful for laptops and computers that have an big uptime (time without shutting down or restarting the computer), it is something that is more of a performance nuissance as the computer is constantly managing the CPU and RAM usage and wont give you a stable and streamlined experience as you might want, specially while playing video games.

Just like Windows power settings, this is something that by changing, it will have an impact on the power usage. The more speed is used and constantly, the more power is required and it will make an impact on the battery of a laptop, electricity use and overall CPU lifecycle.

You can check if your computer has Core Parking enabled by going to:

1. Run command and type resmon
   
   
   
2. Go to the CPU tab and on the right column you'll see the individual CPU core usage.

If any cores are parked, the description of the CPU will show: CPU # - Parked
If you want to change those parked cores, you'll need to use the Windows registry editor.
You can do so by going to:

1. Run command and type regedit
   
   
2. Follow the folder tree
   
   
   [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\54533251-82be-4824-96c1-47b60b740d00\0cc5b647-c1df-4637-891a-dec35c318583]
3. Double click on the "Attributes" registry, this will bring up a new window.
   
4. On this new window, select the Hexadecimal Base and set the Value data with all 0 (zero) (eight zero's total)
   
   
   
   "Attributes"=dword:00000000
   - Click OK, restart the computer.

Windows saves certain information to your RAM based on what you use the most and tries to antecipate that you're going to use it and tries to pre-load that information for a smoother experience. Again, cool on paper but different in reality. Games or applications that use a considerable amount of RAM will be in conflict with this feature, as both Windows system and the game are constantly loading and unloading information in the RAM, creating extra load on the overall performance of the computer.

You can disable this by going to:

1. Run command and type services.msc
   
   
   
2. Find Superfetch service and double click on it
   
   
   
3. From General tab, Startup type to disabled
   
   
   
4. From Recovery tab, Take No Action for all failures

When you don't have enough available RAM to run something, Windows uses your Hard Drive(s) as if it's RAM in order to run whatever you're trying to run. RAM is extremely fast in comparison to even SSD so when you reach the RAM capacity, everything will be considerably slower to load and run. This if a trade-off in performance to keep the application running and not crash. This setting is kind of subjective due to the amount of RAM you might have, games you play and if you're willing to take a hit on performance. If you have 8GB or more and you know that you won't reach the limit of available RAM, you can disable page file which will cause the RAM to always be used instead of your Hard Drive. If you have under 8GB or even with 8GB but reach up to 80% usage frequently, I can't advise you on disabling Page File.

To change the Page File values, go to:

1. Run command and type sysdm.cpl
   
   
   
2. From System Properties go to Advanced tab
   
3. Go to Performance Settings
   
   
   
4. Go to the Advanced tab
   
5. Virtual memory, press Change
   

From here you can select the drives you want to change the page file, in my case with 16GB and knowing that any usage I give the computer, I'll never reach the limit, I set no page file for all of my drives.

By default, Windows locks the network performance within a certain value to prevent the CPU to be overworked on processing packets, but nowadays the majority of Ethernet adapters can process packets much faster and more effeciently than the CPU can. You can remove this limitation and allow for a larger packet transmission that ends up being beneficial for several online games that rely on large or fast packet transmission.

1. Run command and type regedit
   
   
   
2. Follow the folder tree
   
   [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile]
   
   
   
3. Double click on the "NetworkThrottlingIndex" registry, this will bring up a new window.
   
4. On this new window, select the Hexadecimal Base and set the Value data with all f (eight f's total)

Windows network monitoring application, this one tends to be the responsible for your available RAM to hit near or 100% usage for no reason. At times it can become unable to flush itself, piles up information into the RAM until it's filled to capacity and then the whole house comes down. I'd like to give more information about NDU but I'm pretty sure not even Bill knows what service this does. Unless you really want Microsoft to take a peek at your panties, or have RAM randomly being filled up, you can disable this by:

1. Run command type regedit
   
   
   
2. Follow the folder tree
   
   [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\Ndu]
   
   
   
3. Double click on the "Start" registry, this will bring up a new window.
   
4. On this new window, select the Hexadecimal Base and set the Value data to 4

I'll try keep to keep it short and simple as network troubleshooting will make you want to slap someone right in the eyes. Having a fast internet connection doesn't mean it will transmit all the information flawlessly all the time. or having slower data transmission doesn't mean it will fail constantly. Rule of thumb is: if you find that you're the only one having issues then it's something between your computer, connection or your ISP. If it's an issue on the game server then everyone gets affected the same way at the same time; no exception.

is the measure that shows the travel time of the connection in milliseconds between two (or more) PC's (or server) the higher values usually mean the physical distance is farther away, the information is transmited through are small fragments of information that complete a whole message once all packets reach the destination.

Network information is transmited as Roger Wilco / Ping Pong. The receiving part needs to notify the sender that the packet was received so the sender can continue sending the rest of the packets or be ready to receive packets back as a response. If there is no response from the receiving end, the sender will repeat the packet until it gets the confirmation that it has been received. If enough sent packets miss the arrival in due time, the receiving computer will not notify the sending computer and this causes a delay in the information between you and the server.

This is where it gets ugly: packet loss.
We've all seen it at some point in time while playing some games online, weird and unfair things can happen because of it. This can happen because of so many reasons, such as:

• Game server acting up
  
• Your network usage being high
  
• Using wifi and having interference at the time
  
• Your ISP (Internet Service Provider) acting up
  
• Your computer having severe performance issues the moment, which places network at the bottom of the to-do list until it recovers
  
• Windows settings, router settings, firewall, the list goes on

Assuming that the ISP and game server are working fine (not like you can do anything if they are not) you can do simple things to try and fix network issues on your side.

• Power cycling the modem/router: unplug the power cable and wait 30 seconds before plugging it back again. Several routers start to act up when they have a very long uptime and doing a power cycle can resolve certain network issues.
  
  
  
• IP reset: open CMD with Admin rights and type: netsh int ip reset
  
  
  
• Flushing DNS: open CMD with Admin rights and type: ipconfig /flushdns

IP or DNS conflicts may occur as there are only a limited ammount of IP addresses that can exist at a time. Resetting them can solve certain conflicts.


This determines who handles your network transmission, from where it goes and comes from. If you find that you're being unable to connect to certain services online or having overall network inconsistency, changing the DNS might help. I would advise for you to primarily use the DNS of your ISP but in certain situations, public DNS servers might work better.

1. Run command and type ncpa.cpl
   
   
   
2. Right click your active network adapter and select properties
   
   
   
3. Find Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) and double click on it
   
   
   
4. Select Use the following DNS server addresses:
   
5. Type in the DNS server numbers
   
6. Check the Validate on exit option and press OK.

From here you can use your ISP DNS server settings (you'll need to contact them to know what their DNS is) or you can go for one of the major DNS public servers:

Cloudflare - 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1
opendns - 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220
Google - 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

is a handy service that will allow you to see the details of how an application crashed. Even though this will not give you a direct solution to that crash, it will give you information on what caused the crash. This is information that in some cases you can make an internet search for the error code or reason and be able to find a solution for it. Worse case you can't find anything to fix the crash but you get information that you can send to the support of the company who made the game to help them figure out some solution.



Run command and type eventvwr


From Event Viewer (Local), open the Windows Logs tree and select Application

You'll be able to see the log of all applications that crashed. By clicking on Level it will sort the by type of log (in case you have other logs such as information displaying first). Clicking on each error will give you information about which application failed, shown below on the General tab.


I can see that Steam.exe crashed and have the information about the crash, by double clicking on the Error Event it will bring up a new window with the details of the application crash, where you can click on Copy to save that information to the clipboard in case you want to send it to the company who made the program.