Windows

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Keyboard Shortcuts

• Win + Ctrl + Left/Right switches virtual desktops.
• Win + Home will hide all windows except the focused one.

Setting Up a New Machine

Keyboard stuff

I use an odd keyboard layout, primarily because I was brought up on my Dad's second-hand Mac Mini and Apple has some oddities.

I use UK ISO, with a large enter key and an extra key inside the left shift, but I set the keymap on my devices to a US version of QWERTY because I prefer the arrangement of the quotes: single and double quotes are on the same key, like in ANSI layouts, and @ is above the 2. It also puts grave and tilde on the new key next to shift, which is more natural than the weird extra escape key that most keyboards don't have. This is the way Apple does it on their British keyboards.

I also like to have my CTRL key where the Command key usually is, one left of the space bar. I then put the Windows key on the outside. For my keyboards, is very simple because I just program exactly what I like, but for laptops with built-in boards, I use SharpKeys to change them, which just writes remappings directly to the registry.

It's the best, simplest and most low-level tool I could find. It's not as powerful as something like Kmonad, but it does work everywhere and doesn't add another service to the system. With this, my laptop has the same base layout as my QMK keyboard, with the modifiers swapped around and the grave/tilde in the right place.

Bypass online/Microsoft account login on startup

As soon as the installation process switches to the Windows 11 branding, hit Shift + F10 and type —

oobe\BypassNRO

The PC will restart and you'll be greeted with a slightly different OOBE process that smoothly allows you to skip connecting to the internet and set up a local account.

Note: the most recent time I tried this, oobe\BypassNRO had ceased to work. However, I'm informed that the following now does work, though I have not tested it.

start ms-cxh:localonly

Startup Items

Open the startup items folder with shell:startup.

Power buttons and settings

On modern Windows laptops, I set the optimum performance mode for battery power — because Microsoft has literally never heard of battery performance so you need to give it all the help it can get — and then set a regular performance profile for wall power.

You can also specify what the power buttons do in both modes, which is something I wasn't aware of until recently. If you're a workstation-class laptop user this could be super useful to you, but for my little one I just have it set to sleep on lid close and hibernate with the power button, which matches my behaviour: I only want it asleep when it's out on the desk with me or in my hands, but I hibernate it whenever it goes in a bag or overnight, which saves power while I'm not using it and curtails any Windows S3 sleep stupidity without me actually having to think about it or play whack-a-mole after Windows updates.

Chris Titus' Windows Utility

I use this as my debloat/cleanup tool of choice. I tend to mostly focus on the basic reductions, like disabling Telemetry, Activity History, Recall, Copilot, etc. I also it to modify the Start menu, removing the 'recommended' section (why? who thought we needed this?) and those horrible ad-riddled web search results that pop up instead of the thing you were actually searching for.

Turn off sounds

Search for the old system sounds pane and set system sounds to off. No sounds. None.

Turn off notifications

Yep. Turn 'em off globally. No one is allowed to notify me with a pop-up in the corner of my screen. Believe it or not? Straight to jail.

If something does want to tell me something, it can put a badge on the taskbar, which is how I know I've got a message or other such query.

Disabling animations, random VFX and drop-shadows

I hate fancy graphical effects in my OS. I want it to snap without animation or translucent gaussian-blurred windows or any other pomp and ceremony, instantly, to the task it was instructed to do.

In Windows 11, you need to search for the 'Enable Animation' toggle in the modern Settings app. This is the first port of call.

After that, rather than trying to hunt through whatever the latest system and settings menu devolution is, you can just search for the actual settings pane —

SystemPropertiesPerformance.exe

(This isn't quite the latest version of this checklist because I took this screenshot a while back, but this is a pretty close match. In Windows 11, text rendering is... closer to being good... so you can now usually disable drop shadows on text, but it also depends how bright your wallpaper is.)

For the easiest means of accessing all of the little configuration utilities, create a new shortcut on the desktop and modify the target to be this exact string —

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

System Components

Under Settings > System Components, open the advanced options for most items and set them to never be allowed to run in the background. Most of them have no business being there at all, let alone deciding they can spin up every few minutes on a power plan.

Firefox / Librewolf / Zen

I believe this to be a predominantly Firefox problem, but I also don't experience the issue on non-Windows platforms: media key hogging. Firefox just constantly tells Windows that it has media key focus and Windows inexplicably allows it to do this.

I fix this by just disabling Firefox's access to media keys in about:config (even though I do actually want my pause key to work on videos playing picture-in-picture).

media.hardwaremediakeys.enabled      false