Hey guys, It's TECHOSAUR
and I'm back yet with another tweaking video aiming to improve your Windows
gaming handheld experience. If you've been a PC gamer
for quite some time, you may come across fellow gamers asking
whether to disable XBOX Game Bar and Game DVR, which are two components
of the Windows XBOX app. To put it simply, Game Bar serves
mostly for gameplay recording as well as taking gameplay
screenshots and highlight. While Game DVR assists
in automatic video recording of gameplay with background recording mode
and saves it as per your selection. And as you can imagine, this could
potentially demand high CPU utilization since they are running in the background
monitoring for activity and could even lead to some stutters
and performance loss. the problem seem related to Game
Bar services that keep launching whenever a user runs a game
despite their choice of recording or not. So the scope of this video is guiding you through disabling
both Game Bar and the Game DVR as well as sharing some benchmarks
of prior/post tweaking on the ROG ALLY and the LEGION GO, in order to decide
if it's worth doing or not. I want to note here
that if you are interested in using Game Bar to capture your gameplay,
this tweaking will prevent you from that, but you can still use
third-party ones like OBS etc. instead,
if you are attempting this tweaking, please follow all steps
to make sure it's all applied right. I'm also going to show you how to restore
those changes. Should anything wrong happen
or if you decide to roll-back. So with all said, Let’s
get right in into the real action. The first thing I'll be doing
is creating a restore point in Windows. To do that, go to the start menu,
search for create a restore point here press configure
and turn ON the system protection. hit the apply and press the create button. here you can name it whatever you want. In the end it will notify
you that the restore point was created successfully, which should be useful
to roll-back any negative effect. Now with our restore point created. Go to the C: drive,
then navigate to Windows > System32 and here search for Game Bar. It should return you those 3 files. What we need to do is changing
the GameBarPresenceWriter.exe name to trick Windows into
not being able to run it anymore, but by default
it wouldn't let us change its name. So we need to follow this process
to have the needed permission. Right-click on it and go to properties,
then to security and advanced here for file owner instead of TrustedInstaller,
press change. And here
we need to insert the Windows username. To know which one you have,
go to the start menu, Click on your profile
and then change account settings. Here mine, for example,
is TECHOSAUR, a local username, meaning I didn't have a Microsoft account
to login. If you logged in using your Windows
account, you should write your email
address instead. So in my case, I’ll write TECHOSAUR,
and then press check names and okay. You should see now that the owner
has changed to our username, hit the apply and here it will say that you need to close the object properties
before changing permission. So just close the window and re-open it. Now press the add button and select
a principal. Write your username again, press the check
names and okay, now check the full control permission box to have full permission
to make changes to this file. now press ok, Apply and yes, now that we got the permission we need,
head again to properties security > advanced and change it back
from your username to the original owner which is NT Service\TrustedInstaller,
press check names. Okay. And apply Now on the top bar, Go to view, then show and enable
the file name extension option. So with that done, We can go ahead and change the file
name to anything except its current one, so I'll just add OFF to the end
for instance. Press Enter, Continue, And that's it. Now the first major step is done. On to the the second one, in the start menu. Go to registry editor
and navigate to this folder above that's related to Windows Game Bar. Here we’ll need to change the activation key
from 1 to 0 to switch it off. But also here by default,
Windows will not let us change it. So we need to follow a similar process
to have the permission to modify it. So just right-click on this folder,
go to permissions, select your username from the list
and press advanced. Then go to change owner, write your Username or email if you are logged
in with a Microsoft account, just like I explained before, press
check names, okay and apply now we can deactivate it freely
by typing 0 and press ok so with all that done, We can make other minor changes
to make sure that the Game Bar is totally disabled. Go to start menu
search for game bar controller settings and here turn off the option
for the controller to open the Game Bar, then make sure that the Game Mode
is turned ON, That’s because it would minimize
other processes in the background while you are gaming, now again
in the start menu, this time go to the Game Bar itself,
then go to settings, in the general ones, disable all notifications
and all options found here, in the Widgets, Make sure that record in the background
while I’m playing a game option is unchecked and audio to record
is set to none, optionally here You can also disable XBOX notifications
just if you prefer it. Finally here in the shortcuts, here
you can disable the option to open it
by pressing the XBOX button on controller. Now finally we can close the app. Alternatively to doing those changes on the Game Bar settings, You can get rid of it altogether, but
unlike other apps you install on Windows, this one is only unremovable by default
means if you go to its settings The removing option is greyed out,
so we have to manually remove it, to do so In the start menu, search for Windows
PowerShell and run it as administrator then run this command that I've included
in the video description and it should remove it totally. And now to make life easier, I have prepared some additional registry
keys that can be run to disable Game DVR as well as other processes
related to the Game Bar. Now if you open them in the notepad,
you can see the first one is disabling the Game Bar monitoring
and the second one is Game DVR and Game Bar, so we can apply them
by left-clicking like so. And there are also revert versions if you want to switch those keys
back to their default state. Now with everything done, we can just
go ahead and restart the system For all those changes to apply,
now's the time to do some benchmarking
to see the difference, the GPU driver I'll be using is the latest 780m from AMD website
as of this date, as for the power limits, I have set them as 30w and finally
the game graphics settings I'll be using is the low preset at a resolution of 720p so let's get to it. As we have seen,
there is a fair FPS improvement for both the ALLY and the LEGION GO
in all five titles I could say from as low
as 1 and up to 8 fps during my test. But any gain
even if small is very welcomed here. I also noticed less sudden fps dips in particularly for the case of Borderlands 3. Now here I'll show you the way to revert
all settings to default, in the registry. You can change the Game Bar presence
activation key back to 1 and run the revert registry key versions
for the other ones here, as for the GameBarPresenceWriter.exe
just change its name back to default, for the Game Bar app,
you can re-install it rom the Windows store just like normally
and it would work just fine. So that's it. It's pretty simple. instead you can roll-back
using the restore point we created right at the beginning
by opening the restore options and clicking on System Restore, here
you can choose the restore point, In my case, it's the Game Bar
and it should restore it back. I also need to note if you run in the command prompt,
the command sfc /scannow which is used to fix
any corrupted files in the system. Windows will change back. The GameBarPresenceWriter.exe
back to its original name. So if you run that command,
make sure to repeat the process. So that was it for the Game Bar
+ Game DVR tweak. after watching the benchmarks, Do you think it's a good improvement? Let me know your thoughts
in the comments section and also if you have any doubt
in applying this tweak, please feel free to ask
and I’ll do my best to help out. And you can also connect over
at the TECHOSAUR Discord server for faster communication. I deeply thank you
for supporting the TECHOSAUR, If you found this video useful,
please give a like and subscribe to be updated on future videos and become
a part of our ever growing community. Thanks for watching
and I'll see you in the next one.
