Brad's Hacks

Announcement

I just received my 2019 MateBook X Pro from China tonight. I will be doing a livestream Q&A while testing and disassembling the laptop! Tune in at noon PDT on 5/22 (Today!). We will also be discussing the Huawei ban!

Watch here: https://youtu.be/Sxf_bU6OZXE

These are the tweaks I use every time I set up a Windows laptop, to make it faster, more power-efficient (better battery life), and less annoying. Some of these are pretty standard and well known; but the tweaks get more nuanced or hardcore as you go down the article.

Fresh Windows Installation

Benefits: Skip OEM bloatware altogether and start with a clean slate. YOU decide what OEM packages you want to install back. For example, on my MateBook, reinstalling Windows and never installing back Huawei PC Manager allowed Windows Update to naturally take care of driver and BIOS updates (like it should and does on most other computers), instead of the error-prone Huawei cringeware. If your laptop has this kind of bullshit too, get rid of it; you'll feel refreshed.

1. Back up your files. If your laptop comes with a display calibration profile (like Razer Blade), then find the ICC file in Windows\system32\spool\drivers\color and back it up.
2. Use the Windows Media Creation Tool to make an installation USB drive.
3. If you want features like Group Policy Editor (helpful but not absolutely necessary for some tweaks below), you'll want to install the Pro version instead. In this case, download this ei.cfg file (right click, save link as) and put it in the \Sources folder of the created install disk. You'll need a Pro license (or some less lawful equivalent) to activate Windows 10 Pro.
4. In the installer, make sure you choose the "Custom" option instead of "Upgrade", and delete all the partitions.

Reduce Startup Programs

Benefits: Make Windows start up faster by not allowing unnecessary programs to automatically launch.

1. Open Task Manager (you can press Ctrl+Shift+Esc).
2. Go to the Startup tab and disable any programs you don't need to automatically self-launch every time you turn on the computer.
3. You can also do the same thing for many programs like Spotify and Skype from within the application's own settings page.

Disable Intel's Cringe-worthy Graphics Features

Benefits: Does the brightness or color of your display change by itself from time to time? Intel's "image enhancement" is probably messing with you. All these "enhancements" do is make the image worse and inconsistent.

1. Right click on the desktop and open Intel Graphics Settings.
2. Go to the Video section.
3. In "Color Enhancement", disable Total Color Correction.
4. In "Image Enhancement", disable Skin Tone Enhancement, Contrast Enhancement, and Film Mode Detection. All of these mess up the color content.
5. Go back to the Power section.
6. Disable Display Power Saving Technology. This one fucks with your display brightness.
7. Anything you change in the Power section gets reset with every Windows version update, so set them again when that happens.

Disable Panel Self-Refresh

Continue reading →

You can prevent Windows from automatically installing or updating a specific device or driver using the “Prevent installation of devices that match any of these device IDs” Group Policy, but what if you’re using Windows 10 Home and don’t have Group Policy Editor? You can do the same thing using Registry Editor.

• For convenience, we can edit this template REG file to our needs and install it, instead of manually creating each registry in Registry Editor.
• Once you’ve downloaded the REG file, right click on it and Edit. We’re going to replace the Device ID in the template with the correct Device ID of your device.

Continue reading →

This is the AutoHotkey script I use to type common special characters, including Spanish accented letters, superscripts, math and science symbols. I’ve also included shortcuts to simulate the media control keys.

You can copy and paste the script, or download a precompiled version that doesn’t require AutoHotkey to run.

You can put it in %appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup to have it automatically run at Windows startup.

(‘!’ means Alt, ‘+’ means Shift, ‘^’ means Control so !a means pressing ‘Alt’ and ‘A’ together.)
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If your CPU frequency is being reduced under load, even at low temperatures, you’re probably experiencing power throttling. On many laptops, you can get rid of it by disabling the Intel Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework and then setting a higher power limit in the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility.

Your laptop may have an option to disable DPTF in the BIOS menu. If not:

1. Install NoDPTF.reg to prevent Windows from automatically reinstalling DPTF.
2. In Device Manager, find all the devices whose names start with “Intel(R) Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework”. They may be in the “System devices” list. Right click on each and “Uninstall device”. Check “Delete the driver software for this device” whenever available.
3. Now you can use ThrottleStop or Intel XTU to raise the power limits.

Warning: if your computer can’t cool its CPU VRM properly, then raising the power limits may cause it to suddenly shut down. If that’s the case, you need to give the VRM more cooling like I did here.

If any DPTF devices are still present, please tell me their hardware IDs in the comments. (To check hardware ID: right click on the device, Properties, Details, select “Hardware Ids” in the drop-down menu.)

A lot of laptops have further Power Limits controlled by the EC, which is much harder if not impossible to change.

Reversion Instructions

In Registry Editor, delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\DeviceInstall\Restrictions.