ASUS ROG Ally Setup Guide (9 Essential Tips)

[Music] hey everybody this is Russ from Metro game core the Rog Ally just released this past week and some of the most frequent comments I've seen around the internet have to do with setting this device up after all this is a Windows based handheld and the setup process is not quite as seamless as it will be on other operating systems so my goal in this video here is to help you get set up with those first few hours with the Rog Ally and even if you already have the device set up I'm hoping that the nine tips we're going to go over here might help you out anyway and since we're covering the basics right here I'm going to try to keep this short and sweet and so without any further delay let's go ahead and dive in foreign [Music] there are a couple accessories that I think will enhance your experience with the Rog Ally the first thing to bear in mind is that because we're using an operating system that is tailor-made for a mouse and keyboard instead you're going to be tapping the screen a lot and as a result you're going to have a lot of fingerprints and so if you don't already have a microfiber cloth I would recommend picking one up personally I use these ones right here from a company called care touch I think these were initially made for eyeglasses but they work really great on electronic screens as well and I'll have all of these resources linked in a written guide in the video description below another thing to keep in mind is that the Rog Ally comes with 512 gigs of internal storage and while that does sound pretty impressive it's like half a terabyte all the same many PC games especially the more modern ones have larger file sizes and so you may want to consider supplementing the internal storage on your ally the easiest way to do that is with a Micro SD card I recommend using one from SanDisk or Samsung in particular I would look for the ones that have the u3a A2 speeds and the size of the card is going to depend on your needs but I would recommend getting at least 512 gigabytes and if you want the highest capacity possible it's going to be one terabyte I recommend this one here from SanDisk but bear in mind that it is quite expensive usually on sale you can find it for about 125 bucks another option is just to replace the internal storage on the device itself for example you can upgrade to a one terabyte internal storage here for about 110 bucks or if you wanted to go all the way to two terabytes it's going to cost you about 220 altogether so if you do plan on playing more modern or AAA games on your rot Ally I do recommend checking out either SD card storage or an upgraded internal one and while we're at it let's go ahead and do a quick tutorial on how to change out the internal storage in case you're interested in doing this to start the disassembly here is pretty easy all you need is a small Phillips head screwdriver but one thing to bear in mind is that some of these screws are not the same so for example the center bottom one right here actually stays within the shell and it's much more shallow either way once you've unscrewed those six screws the next thing is to open up the case I recommend using a plastic spudger or a guitar pick between the shoulder and Trigger buttons and then just kind of rotate it to unsnap it and after you do that on both sides the shell should just come right off and swapping out the SSD is super simple as well the only thing you really need to disassemble is the battery cable right here and underneath this flap right here to the left you will see that solid state drive again you're going to use that small Phillips head screwdriver to unlatch this and then replace it with the other one it's a little bit tricky to get this out you just kind of have to pinch it and pull it straight out after that you just need to put in that new drive and then put it all back together and it's as simple as that to upgrade your storage the only other thing to bear in mind is anytime you unplug and replug in the battery connector you have to charge the device just slightly before you turn it on so just go ahead and plug it in wait for the orange light to show up on the top and you're good to go but one thing to bear in mind is that you have to reinstall the Windows operating system when you get a new drive and so in the next step I'm going to show you how to install the operating system from scratch this is something you'll have to do if you upgrade the internal storage but then also if you just want to start over from a clean slate let's do that right now now for this step we need a USB keyboard I'm just going to use this small Wireless one right here and it's plugged into the top of my Rog Ally from there all you have to do is just start up the machine and as soon as you see the boot logo start pressing the escape button on your keyboard that's going to bring you to this prompt right here to select the boot device go into the enter setup section and once you press enter here it's going to take you into the bios of the machine what you want to do here is press the Y button to show the advanced mode right here and then press the right key to go over one Tab and the first option right here is going to be called Asus Cloud recovery and the setup here is going to be super handy as well all you have to do is press enter and then it'll have you reconnect to your local Wi-Fi after that you get a prompt to go into the cloud recovery tool and so what's going to happen here is it's going to download and install an image that's going to have everything you need on it including the Windows operating system and all these special software that comes with the Rog Ally so I don't want to spend a ton of time going through this process here other than to say that yes you just kind of go through the prompts and it'll take about an hour or two altogether it's really going to depend on the internet speed in your home and then also how much the Asus servers are being used either way just kind of let it go through its process you'll see a bunch of different Windows there'll be a couple times where you have to press ok but for the most part you just kind of let the machine do itself it's going to reset itself a few times and you'll know everything's good to go when you get to this screen right here which is the introduction of the windows 11 system and so now that we're actually here let's go ahead and get into the next step which is going to be the initial setup for Windows Now setting up a Windows machine is kind of self-explanatory you basically just have to follow the prompts but there is one point I do want to make within this step because this is the first time you're probably going to have to use the on-screen keyboard now theoretically when you tap on a text box it should bring the on-screen keyboard up however if it does not there is a hotkey that you can use to bring up the keyboard at any time and what you have to do here is just press any of those two black buttons on the back of the device and then up on the d-pad that will both bring up and take down the keyboard if you ever need to use it another step that's part of the initial Windows process is setting up a fingerprint scanner this is actually a really handy tool to be able to log directly into your Windows device without having to tap in any sort of pin so this is definitely something I would recommend setting up but one thing to bear in mind is that it doesn't recognize my finger very easily now this may partially be because I play the bass guitar and so because that I have calluses on my right index finger so if you run into any problems here with the scanning you can always do this in the Windows settings later on anyway once you have all that stuff set up it's going to do a couple restarts and then updates on your Windows machine and then after a few minutes you will see the windows 11 front page like this and so now we have our first Windows desktop experience the next thing we want to do is make sure that all the software is up to date and so in this section here I'm going to talk about all the different ways that you need to update software on the Rog Ally now when you first started up the first thing is probably going to pop up here is going to be the Armory crate software this is the software suite used by Asus that is basically a front end for the Rog Ally and so initially you have to go through the prompts here it's going to show off a couple of the features but honestly we're going to go over this later in the video and so you can kind of skip through this if you'd like the biggest thing here is we want to get to this main page which will show the three tabs game Library settings and content and the first place we want to go is into the content Tab and within here there's something they call the Armory crate Update Center and this will give you updates for certain drivers as well as the Armory crate software itself so what's going to happen here is it's going to check for updates and then you're going to want to update to whatever is available at the time and to be honest this software has been updating almost every single day which is a great sign that Asus is showing a lot of support but all the same it can be kind of a pain in the butt that you have to update your device every time you turn it on regardless what I would recommend doing is going through the update process and then also going back to the update Center to make sure there aren't any other updates on top of those other updates especially that first time that you set this up you may have multiple stages to this process anyway once this is all set up you are done with one of the many ways that you can update the Rog Ally so let's go ahead and move on to the next step and this is going to be under an app that should be within your taskbar here called my Asus now if you don't see this within your Windows machine then you can actually just download this from the Microsoft store it is going to ask you to log in you can either set up a username and password right here or if you have a Google account you can go ahead and sign in VIA that as well when you first have this setup it's going to scan the system and tell you whether or not there are any updates available and chances are there are going to be some system updates that you can do and specifically within the my Asus tool it's going to have updates for your bios and firmware so these are more like system updates as opposed to the software updates we found within Armory crate now one thing I do want to note is a development that just kind of came out today is that the most recent firmware actually has a reduction in performance quality and so as of at least making this video right here updating to version 3.19 will actually give you worse performance than if you stay on 3.17 so that's totally going to be up to you and I expect that probably within a week or so we're gonna see a bunch of fixes but if you are concerned about making sure you get the best performance possible I would recommend maybe Googling the firmware version that it wants you to update to just to verify that the firmware you're updating to is actually going to improve your experience either way once you're ready to update this system software the first thing you have to do is plug the device in and then go through the prompts here to update the firmware and the BIOS and it's going to be a similar story here you'll have to go through the prompts and it'll also probably tell you to restart your computer once it's done and same thing like with the Armory crate software updates that we did earlier I would recommend going back into here and seeing if there's another layer of updates after you've already updated anyway once those two are done we can move on to the next updates that we can do which are going to be within Windows you can find these by going into the Windows start menu and then selecting these system settings from there on the top right you should see a Windows update option again this is going to check the servers to make sure there are any updates available and the very first time that you set this up there's going to be a bunch so just go ahead and let it go through this process here it'll probably take maybe 10 20 minutes after that it's probably going to prompt you to restart your machine again but after that Windows should be fully up to date okay so after we've updated the Asus software as well as the system firmware and then finally windows we only have one more thing that I recommend updating and that's going to be the graphics drivers on the device itself now the AMD software suite should already be pre-installed on your device so again all you have to do is go into the Windows start menu and then type in the words AMD from there it should bring up the adrenaline software it'll give you a quick tour right here and after you're in the main window right here you will see on the right a driver and software section and within here I would recommend checking for updates okay so now that everything is set up we are ready to start personalizing our Windows Experience and I think the Asus team did a pretty good job of trying to make everything seamless out of the gate but there are a couple things that I would personally like to change for example within certain apps like the AMD software right here you will see that there are no buttons on the bottom for the taskbar it's basically hidden and so to bring up the windows start menu you have to swipe from the bottom and you might like this this feature but personally I don't and so I want to see the taskbar at all times so to get to it we have to go back into the Windows settings and within here on the left side you'll see a bunch of different options but the one we want to choose here is called personalization and within that there's going to be a taskbar section so go ahead and tap on that and here you can make some changes to the taskbar itself for example I don't like seeing the chat and widget options so I turn those off every time also near the bottom you can see there's a section called taskbar Behavior so let's go and check that one out here and within here there's an option that says optimize the taskbar if you're going to use it as a tablet and this is the function that's hiding the taskbar so I'm going to turn this one off so I can actually see everything here on the bottom again this is all personal preference but this is something that I like to do on all my windows PCS now another thing that Asus set up is that a single click on anything will open up that program or folder and so it's kind of the opposite of when you're using a mouse where I would usually double tap on something you only have to tap it once but for me personally I found that this actually creates more problems than it fixes and so next what I want to do is remove move this option so that I have to double click on everything and to do this you want to open up any file explorer window like you see here and then click on those three dots on the top right from there you can go down to the bottom and there's an option section and about halfway through the window right here there's an option to change it back to double click and so that's what I'm going to change it to here and so now when I tap on a folder it's not going to open it instead it's going to highlight it and for me personally this is exactly what I want finally another thing you may want to consider is making the apps and icons a little bit bigger on this small screen to do that you want to long press on the desktop to bring up this menu here and then select the section that says display settings and then finally about halfway through this settings window right here there's going to be a scale option by default it's set to 150 percent but if you like you can set it to 175 percent and so that's going to make the text and everything else a little bit bigger personally I don't mind 150 but this is where you would change it alright so those are some of the window settings that I like to adjust next we're going to talk about Armory crate to bring it up you just want to press the button that's below the start button here on the right and initially it's going to be a little bit Bare Bones but there are some things that are pretty handy within here for example under the control mode section and then Gamepad mode you can do things like map your keys but you can also adjust things like the dead zones of your analog sticks and these dead zones are a Hot Topic within the Rog Ally Community right now and that's because for some people they find the analog dead zones to be way too big now personally I don't really feel a dead zone with my analog sticks I'm not sure if this is because I have a review unit but all the same if I just barely touch the joystick it moves my character and that's exactly what I want either way if you want to make adjustments to your dead zones you can do that within the software right here and I've also read on Reddit there are some third-party fixes and so if this is something that bothers you I'd recommend checking out those articles either way some other things that you can do within this Gamepad mode section are adjust the trigger sensitivity of your analog triggers and you can also adjust the vibration strength as well right here another thing that's probably really handy for early users is to adjust the lighting of the LEDs around the analog sticks and you have quite a few options here like a single color or maybe a cycle through all the different color options but personally I really like the rainbow one so I'm going to keep it at that you can also adjust the brightness here but I wish there was a little bit more granular control right now you can either turn them off or 100 and then there's a one-third and two-thirds setting personally I think these lights would look best at about 10 percent and so hopefully this will be a software change in the future now the next tab over here is going to be the content section this is where we can update the software but then this is also where you can launch various game platforms and as you can see Xbox and steam are already installed and then of course the very first tab is going to be our game Library we'll talk about that more later in the video now one other aspect of the Armory crate software is what they call the command center and within here you can do things like adjust your power profile in order to give more juice to the game in case it's not running at full speed and another thing worth mentioning are the two different control modes that we have within the software and here we have the GamePad or the desktop mode now the GamePad mode we've already kind of talked about it's going to be what you use to actually play your games but within the desktop mode you can actually control a mouse which can be pretty handy what you'll do is use the right analog stick to move the mouse cursor around and then you will use the right bumper as a left click and then the right trigger as your right click so if you do need to navigate around the system and you need something with a little bit more granular controls than touching on the touchpad this might be a better option and of course if you switch it back to the GamePad mode none of these buttons are actually going to work within Windows it'll only work within games now one handy feature about the command center is that you can actually customize it to whatever you'd like you can find this within the Armory crate software under the settings tab and so here what I recommend doing is basically removing them all from this window and then you can add whatever you'd like back but in the specific order that's going to make the most sense to you anyway now that I have that set up let's bring up the command center and as you can see right here I have all these options exactly where I'd like them and the real-time monitor is really handy if during a game you want to see how much battery life you have left or if you want to see how many frames per second you're getting I also like the middle row which I can change my resolution and the refresh rate on the the screen now another aspect to discuss are going to be the hotkeys like I mentioned before you just have to press on one of the buttons on the back and then up on the d-pad to bring up the keyboard but there are some other options for example if you press the left button on the d-pad that'll bring up your desktop but another option if you press on the right button is to bring up the quick looks additionally if you press the down button on the d-pad while pressing on the back button it'll bring up the task manager so this will be handy if you want to quit an app that isn't responding very well and finally a couple of the things that are really handy within the command center if you press on this bottom left button right here you can actually put the device to sleep or shut it down and so I found this is the quickest way to turn off your machine when you're done using it also on the left you can adjust the volume and brightness really quickly too and finally another handy feature if you hold on to the command center button for a few seconds it'll bring up the control alt delete menu right here okay now that we have a feel for the overall software experience let's go ahead and start installing some apps and games I found one of the easiest ways to install some very common apps is to go to a website right here called ninite.com and within here you can install some of your favorite apps without having to go and download them each individually so for example if you want to install Chrome or Firefox or if you wanted to install something like Skype or Discord or maybe Dropbox Google Drive all these things are going to be right here and same thing with some other utilities like 7-Zip so I would recommend just clicking on all the things that you want to actually install and finally on the bottom there's a button that you can press on this is going to download a small exe file and finally when you open up that exe file it's going to go to all those websites and then download those apps for you in addition it's going to install everything and it's a super simple process anyway that's always the first thing I like to do with a new Windows machine so I recommend checking that out but now let's go ahead and start installing some games now like I mentioned before Steam and Xbox are already installed so opening these up is super simple we're going to start with steam all you have to do is press on the button right here and it'll take you to the Steam login page so here you just want to add your username and password after that you're going to be greeted with this Steam OS homepage so this is very similar to how it is on the steam deck now before we start install calling games you may be interested in adding an SD card if you are let me show you how to set that up really quickly first thing press the B button to get the menu on the left and then go to the power section within here there's an option to exit Big Picture Mode we're going to click on that now within this steam interface here we want to go to steam and then settings then finally under the storage section you will see there's an option to add a new drive and so what I would recommend doing here is add your SD card and then you should see it within the drop down menu I'm just using a small 128 gig card right here just for an example after you've selected it you have the option also to make it your default drive so that way every game is going to be prompted to install into that SD card instead of your internal storage anyway once you're good to go with that you can press the top right button right here to enter into Big Picture Mode again and now we can navigate through and find a game and then install it and as you can see here it gives you the option of where you want to install it but by default it's going to show my micro SD card and that's really about it in terms of installing a game now the easiest way to look through the games that you already own to find something to install is to press the B button to get into the side menu again and then go into the library section there's a bunch of different tabs here but the very first one is called all games and within here is going to be a listing of all the games that you already own within Steam now if you're brand new to steam there's also a store within here and so if you want you can purchase and download your games directly from here as well either way once you've got a game installed all you have to do is just click on it and then press the play button and that first time that you start up a game it's probably going to run an installation script and so it might take a little bit longer than usual and now once you're within a game you can press that command center button to bring up this side menu and that's going to be really handy for example here we can turn on that real-time Monitor and then also adjust the TDP to get the best frame rate too anyway that's really about it when it comes to playing Steam games it's a pretty simple process and once you're done with steam you can actually go down to that power section again and you have quite a few options for example you can actually turn off the Rog Ally directly from here or you could just exit steam so that you can get back to that Windows interface okay next up we're going to try out Xbox now you can do this either directly from the Armory crate software or you can press on the Windows start menu here to tap on the Xbox button and that very first time that you set it up it's going to ask you to log into your Microsoft account and of course if you don't have one you can set one up right here now once you're in the main interface it's probably going to tell you that you need to update the gaming services so all you have to do here is just click on this button and it's going to download and install those services for you and this will probably take maybe 5 or 10 minutes altogether after that you can explore the Xbox PC catalog or if you have Game Pass you can actually just start downloading games directly I think this is a really great service it's 15 a month but it'll give you access to hundreds of games so for example if you're browsing through the Game Pass Library you can see right here once you click on a game it's going to give you the option to install and another thing you can do if you have game passes you can actually just stream games directly onto your Ally and you're going to find a list of over 100 games that you can stream right then and there and so say if I click on this game right here Hi-Fi rush you can see I have two different options I can either install the full game or I can just play it directly on the cloud and I think this is a great option if you just want to try out a game before deciding whether or not you want to take up that precious internal storage space either way if you have game pass this is going to be a great option once you have a game installed it's going to be very simple all you have to do is just press on the play button and the game should just start right up like this so I would say between the various ways that you can play computer games on the Rog Ally I've always found that Steam and the Xbox app are the two easiest to use however there are quite a few other options so for example if we go back into the armor crate software and we go into the content section let's go ahead and try out one of these other software stores we're going to do the Gog Galaxy one now when you tap on this it's actually just going to open up your browser and take you to the Gog website and so if you want to install Gog games what you want to do here is go into the about section and then select Gog Galaxy this is the name of the software app that they use to browse through and install your games so all you have to do here is just download this app and then open it up it's going to go through and install everything for you and then after that once you're in the Gog Galaxy app you're going to see it's going to function very similar to the Steam app so here's a list of all the games that I already own within Gog of course you can also shop around and purchase games within this app as well and the process here is going to be very similar you can go ahead and install any of the games that you already own and it'll give you an option of where you want to actually install it too another thing to mention is as you install all these games they're going to start showing up in your Armory crate software if they don't show up immediately what I would do is swipe down from the top and then you will see them start to populate right here it also downloads some fancy art for you and it looks pretty nice and within this section you can sort these apps by various parameters and you can also delete and add specific apps as well personally I like to sort these by platform that way I can see all my Steam games then my Gog games and Xbox and so on and of course you can launch all of these games directly from here as well which is super handy alright and believe it or not we're actually in our final section this is going to be the advanced options once you start getting more acquainted with the Rog Ally now first things first I've heard that there are are some optimizations that have not been set for the Rog Ally under the default Windows 11. now in my review unit my device was already optimized and so this is something that's probably a software glitch right now either way I'm going to have this Microsoft article linked in my written guide which will be in the video description below and really what this comes down to is two settings within Windows 11 that Microsoft recommends turning off in order to get the best gaming performance so I think it's worth your time to go in and make sure that these two things are turned off ahead of time additionally if you really want to get into the Weeds about performance there are options within Armory crate for example under settings there is an operating mode section down here on the bottom left and within here there's options to create manual performance settings on top of that you can create multiple profiles as well now I think these options are pretty Advanced so I'm not going to go through them here but I think over time people are probably going to optimize some of these manual mode settings too so I would search for these on Reddit or the Rog Discord either way this is where you would make those adjustments you can also adjust the fan curve manually as well another thing I think is really handy is that you can adjust per game settings so for example with an Armory crate what you want to do is press the x button while hovering over a game this will give you the ability to personalize any of these settings specifically for that game so for example if you want special key mapping you can do that here Additionally you can make per game configurations for your analog sticks as well as your trigger and vibration too and finally probably the most important part is the configuration section here on a per game basis for example this one here is called the operating mode AC and this is going to be the performance mode when you have it plugged in so for this game in particular you could set it to go into turbo mode when you have it plugged in because you don't have to worry about battery life but then also under the DC section you can change it to whatever you'd like as well if you know this game works best under silent or performance mode you can set that and then anytime you start up the game that's what's going to start Additionally you can adjust the RGB lighting specific to any game and there are also different display settings that you can adjust as well next in addition to the Armory crate software there are some other third-party tools that have already started popping up the first is going to be handheld companion this one has been around for years but they're also starting to introduce Rog Ally configurations as well now currently these features are still in beta and so if you want to access them you have to join the handheld companion patreon page but if you want to be on the very Cutting Edge of trying out some of these apps this might be worth checking out there's a Reddit article that's been released by the developer that goes over some of the features that are available right here and so I'll also leave this Linked In the written guide in case you want to read more about it now another app that's also working on Rog Ally compatibility is one called handheld control panel and I feature this software in other videos before but basically this will give you a lot of control over your system software just directly from a quick menu access so this is another one to keep your eye on and I'll also have it linked in my written guide and then finally if you want an easy way to set up emulation then I would recommend checking out emu deck and their Windows support is still in the works and so because of that the same thing like with the handheld companion this is going to be behind their patreon page but if you want to check out an easy way to set up emulation access for about three bucks this is a pretty handy tool and I'm currently working on a guide for me deck and I'm hoping to release that next week now finally it's not all about performance there may be some other things you want to tweak with your Rog Ally one thing that I recommend checking out is within the my Asus app there's an option here for what they call the battery care mode essentially what this does is it limits your charge to only 80 percent of the battery capacity this will give you a longer Lifetime on your device in case you plan on using it for many years to come this is also going to be really handy if you plan on playing with this device in a docked mode very often so if it's going to be plugged up a lot then this might be something worth considering and then finally there's a bunch of great articles from Asus themselves about the Rog Ally so if you are looking for some written guides to kind of walk you through some of these processes I think this is a really handy tool right here and as you've probably guessed I'll have this linked in that written guide down below anyway that's really about it for this video here I'm trying to keep it as short as possible and just show you all the very various things you can do with the Rog Ally in the first few days that you actually own it in the end setting up the Rog Ally is very similar to setting up any other Windows PC but it is a little bit trickier given the fact that we don't have a keyboard mouse in the end I'm hoping this video helped you at least get started with the overall process and I plan on making some other guides in the future and so if you have any other ideas of things you'd like me to walk you through please let me know in the comments below because I'd love to hear that as always thank you for watching and be sure to like And subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy gaming [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 98,638

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Id: ZAS34k_6KHE

Length: 27min 28sec (1648 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 16 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/VAblackbelt2005]

i just shared this too lol, very helpful video!