Always Do THIS with a New Laptop

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 now i've been following a checklist of items every time when i get a laptop here in the studio so i thought it would be cool to share some of the things that um i do with you guys now some of the things that i mentioned may sound familiar to our hardcore audience but i want to create this guide for those who are beginning to get used to a windows laptop so without any further ado let's get started the very first thing that i tackle is checking to see if there are any updates to windows now since most laptops ship 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 i actually did a separate video covering the performance difference between the earlier versions of windows 11 and the latest build and the results were really really interesting so you can check that out right over here if you're interested to do this all you have to do is click on the start button search up updates and a pop-up window will show up letting you know what needs to be downloaded i should also mention that you will need to be connected to an internet connection for this to happen um as you can see i do have quite a few updates for this dell xps 15 so i'm gonna download them which may require a few reboots and we'll take it from there i should also mention that windows 11 has slowly started taking over updates that oem manufacturers handle for example a few years ago you would have a separate utility software provided by the laptop manufacturer to check new bios's or firmware updates for the hardware but that's not the case anymore because windows 11 has just taken that matter into its own hands and whether you like it or not it's coming to you personally i'm not a huge fan of this change because i like having that control over what manufacturers offer but yeah let me know what you guys think about that in the comments 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 xbox 15 which i don't really need i mean it's just useless so these applications can take up valuable system resources which would affect performance i've actually done a separate video going over this and the results are truly eye opening and look 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 another side tip while we're at 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 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 the nzxt capsule microphone get the best airflow for your vocal experience with a modular pop-out chamber to simplify installation on and off the base control the gain for best volume rpm in a package that looks this good with usbc and headphone input io with a true unbox plug-and-play solution for your loud thoughts to shine the capsule sounds pretty neutral as you can hear plus it's a good place to start if you plan to overclock with eq later check out the nzxt capsule black or white down below the next thing to do is optimizing your display settings and this mostly has to do with resolution scaling you see most laptops come with the display scale to 125 including 1080p panels now this isn't a terrible setting since people who struggle 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 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 layout options and choose a hundred percent 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 for example 4k on a 13 inch laptop at 100 is literally impossible to read you'll essentially in a microscope for that this razer blade pro 17 for instance comes with a 17 inch quad hd display and scaled to 150 by default out of the box which as you can see wastes so much space so dialing it back to 100 makes a world of a difference a side tip that goes along with this step to help you with your productivity is to take advantage of windows virtual desktops it's essentially a feature for laptops or anyone using a single monitor where if they find the applications to be taken up too much space or feel like they're cluttered this is where you can sort of offset and organize them all you have to do is use your four fingers to swipe up using the trackpad and then select one of the apps and then drag it to the bottom where it says new desktop and just like that you'll have both applications running separately and you can switch between them by swiping left or right with your four fingers it's a great way to avoid cluttering the next step is to know how to use a mug switch if your laptop has one for starters 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 shifts if you have an ultrabook or a thin and light device without a discrete gpu this step is essentially not even necessary a good example of a laptop with a discrete gpu is when you're casually browsing the web or doing general tasks the system uses the 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's being pushed out from the discrete gpu goes through the integrated graphics chip before reaching the display and that could cause a bottleneck affecting frame rates in games so that's where a muk 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 to enable this 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 synapse alienware has hybrid mode that can be accessed through the bios asus can be done through armory crate it's all over the place so you just have to look through the primary utility software that comes with your laptop the only downside which i think is a pretty big deal is enabling mux with just the discrete graphics will significantly affect battery life uh if you're plugged in sure it's not a big deal but make sure you disable it when you go on battery mode it would require system reboot so keep that in mind the next thing i do is disable the windows lock screen with the time and date prompt now this is the first thing that shows up on screen and when you boot up the laptop it comes with a nice wallpaper and some codes if you have a password setup which you should 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 to do this hit up start type in gpedit and then under computer configuration 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 and that's it now as i'm making this video gpe or group policy editor is only available on windows 11 pro if you're using home you might need to do a few registry tweaks but that's not officially supported by microsoft so keep that in mind next up i enable file extensions since i work with a lot of png jpeg psd and a lot of music formats so knowing the type of file is crucial for my workflow and i'm sure it'll help you guys as well 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 helps me a lot with my organization the last few touches are pretty straightforward i just go ahead and install all my commonly used applications like the creative suite from adobe davinci resolve studio spotify whatsapp and a bunch of other apps i also enabled dark mode which is something that i'm fond of and i also start browsing for wallpapers now i use wallhaven which is my primary source for all the wallpapers that you guys have been asking for so there you have it oh and the last thing that i do is set up desktop icons because i need quick access to my computer and if i need to go into settings it's just right there so in order to do that i just right click click personalize and then head over to themes and then click on i just scroll all the way down to desktop icon settings and then i check mark 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 i might have missed a few things that maybe you guys might do when you set up your own laptop so feel free to chime in the comments down below if there's anything that i missed but yeah these are some of the things that i do when i get a new laptop here in the studio so i hope you guys enjoyed this one thank you so much for watching and i'll talk to you guys in the next one

Channel: Hardware Canucks

Views: 1,587,233

Keywords: best laptop 2022, best laptop setups, budget laptop gaming setup, budget laptop setup, hardware canucks, hardwarecanucks, how to speed up windows 10 laptop, increase laptop battery life, laptop gaming setup, laptop performance, laptop performance hacks, laptop performance increase, laptop setup, laptop setup tips, laptop tips and tricks, laptop tips and tricks for beginners, things to do after buying a new laptop, windows 11 setup tips

Id: XEEcxYzNOfI

Length: 9min 19sec (559 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 06 2022