Brad's Hacks

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.

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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 %username%\AppData\Roaming\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.