dotfiles/windows

Windows Setup

• Desktop: turn off hibernation

  • Open admin cmd prompt: powercfg.exe /hibernate off

• Disable power throttling:

  • Start menu, search for gpedit.msc.
  • Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Power Management > Power Throttling Settings.
  • Double-click the Turn off Power Throttling policy.
  • Select Enabled.

• Enable ultimate power plan (alternatively make a new plan and set the min/max processor speed to 100%)

  • Open cmd as admin, run powercfg -duplicatescheme e9a42b02-d5df-448d-aa00-03f14749eb61
  • Can now select the ultimate power plan in power options.

• Create a power plan for software benchmarking

  • This will disable turbo boost and general lock the frequency to base-ish clock. This can help keep cpu temps stable (hot temps affect clock) and it avoids variable clock changes.
  • AFAIK this only works for Intel CPUs; not sure how to do the same thing on AMD.
  • In the power plan set the processor min/max speed to 99%.

• Optional: disable Windows Defender real-time protection:

  • This can speed up compilation times since Defender will scan every file written to disk. I was able to shave off ~2-5 seconds in a particular project.
    • If you'd rather keep real-time protection active then you can add specific files or folders to the Defender exclusion list in the Windows Security settings, however I did some testing and didn't see any speedup when excluding a project folder.
  • Go into the Windows security settings and disable Tamper Protection.
  • Start menu, search for gpedit.msc.
  • Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Microsoft Defender Antivirus -> Real-time Protection
  • Double-click the Turn off real-time protection policy.
  • Select Enabled (you may have to restart PC).
  • If you want to re-enable then change the policy to Not configured and re-enable tamper protection.

• Disable Enhance Pointer Precision:

  • Mouse Properties -> Pointer Options -> Motion section

• Laptop: change touchpad sensitivity to medium or high in order to prevent mouse movement when palm touches the pad while typing.

  • If using a Lenovo then disable touchpad lock in the Lenovo Vantage app.

• Map caps to left-ctrl using sharpkeys

• Restore classic Windows Photo Viewer app (the default Win10 photos app is fucking awful):

  • Run photo_viewer.reg from this folder.
  • You'll need to change the default app for the various image extensions. Don't change gif types though because photo viewer doesn't support animations.
  • Now run disable-are-you-sure-you-want-to-open-with-the-default-program-dialog.reg to stop it from occasionally asking if you still want to use photo viewer.

• Add custom hosts file

  • Run notepad as administrator
  • Open C:/Windows/System32/Drivers/etc/hosts
  • Add contents of the hosts file from this directory
  • Restart PC

• Disable the WinSAT task which is used to figure out your Windows performance score. It eats up processor time and is generally useless.

  • Open task scheduler.
    • note If you see an error about a selected task {0} no longer existing then you'll need to repair the task scheduler. See https://www.thewindowsclub.com/the-selected-task-0-no-longer-exists-error-in-task-scheduler
  • Go to Local -> Microsoft -> Maintenance and disable the WinSAT task.

• Setup a symbol server:

  • Right-click My Computer -> Properties -> Advanced Tab -> Environment Variables
  • Add a new System Variable called _NT_SYMBOL_PATH
  • Set the value to SRV*c:\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols, replacing the first path to where you want the symbols to live.

• Configure crash dump storage location for projects via the registry.

• Increase TDR setting for GPU Driver

  • TDR determines the length of time that a GPU can hang on a computation until the OS restarts the driver. By default this is set to a few seconds so you can experience app crashes when using GPU intensive software, like 3D modeling or texturing. To increase the duration, follow this guide: https://web.archive.org/web/20191107173337/https://docs.substance3d.com/spdoc/gpu-drivers-crash-with-long-computations-128745489.html

Windows 7 Stuff

• Enable clear text
• Disable Win 7 Fault Tolerant Heap
  • I don't see why you want to spend large amounts of CPU time to hide application instability.
  • https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/Win7AppQual/fault-tolerant-heap
    • Disable on system via regedit: set the REG_DWORD value HKLM\\Software\\Microsoft\\FTH\\Enabled to 0.

Windows 10 Stuff

• Disable the Windows Customer Experience Improvement program via group policy https://www.ghacks.net/2016/10/26/turn-off-the-windows-customer-experience-program/
• Install the Windows SDK https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/windows-10-sdk

Setting up Visual Studio

• Use an install path with no spaces in it /x/programs/vs15
• Select custom install and check off the C++ language support.
• Once installed, open Visual Studio and go to Tools -> Options. Open Debugging -> Symbols and add the path to the cached symbols directory that you set up above under Setup a symbol server.
• Open the Visual Studio Layout folder in this directory and copy the file to %LOCALAPPDATA%/Microsoft/VisualStudio/{VisualStudioInstanceID}. You can now apply the custom layout in VS: Window -> Apply Window Layout -> Campo

Setup up Unix-like Shell

• Install MSYS2 w/ MinGW-w64 to C:\msys64
  • Open C:\msys64\mingw64.exe
  • Run pacman -Syu, then restart the terminal and run pacman -Su.
  • Run pacman -S base-devel mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain git bc
  • Use C:\Users\<user> as the terminal $HOME by editing C:\msys64\etc\nsswitch.conf and changing the db_home value to windows.
• You may need to work around an issue with envsubst.exe - you'll know there's a bug if git displays not a valid identifier line 89: export: dashless or rebase complains about new_count.
  • To patch, cd into /mingw64/bin and run mv envsubst.exe envsubst.exe_backup. Now run pacman -S gettext and verify that which envsubst reports back /usr/bin/envsubst.
  • Bug report is at https://github.com/Alexpux/MSYS2-packages/issues/735
• Switch to the shell C:\msys64\msys2.exe going forward.
  • You can also load the shell with a batch file. This allows you to do some setup work, like run vcvarsall.bat, eg.

    REM saved as shell-64.bat
    @echo off
    
    REM For VS2015:
    call "drive:\path-to-vs2015\VC\vcvarsall.bat" x64
    
    REM For VS2017:
    REM call "drive:\path-to-vs2017\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvarsall.bat" x64
    
    REM For VS2019:
    REM call "drive:\path-to-vs2019\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvarsall.bat" x64
    
    REM Disable CRT heap debug stuff. See https://preshing.com/20110717/the-windows-heap-is-slow-when-launched-from-the-debugger/
    set _NO_DEBUG_HEAP=1
    
    call C:\msys64\msys2_shell.cmd -mingw64 -use-full-path
    exit
    

    • This will launch a 64-bit env. If you need 32-bit then replace x64 above with x86.
    • Now you can make a system32 cmd line shortcut that will be used to launch the batch file. e.g.
      • target: %windir%\System32\cmd.exe /k drive:\path-to-bat-file\shell-64.bat
      • start in: drive:\some-path
• Setup git completions for bash (note: shouldn't have to do this if you ran the install script):
  • curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/git/git/master/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash -o ~/.git-completion.bash

32-bit dev tools

• Load a 32-bit shell
• Install toolchain: pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-toolchain

Setting up dev tools

• Download the Windows 2003 Resource Kit in order to get tools like list.exe (command line hex editor)
  • URL: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=17657
  • Installer will display a compatibility warning. Ignore it.
  • Full list of tools can be found here https://www.technlg.net/windows/download-windows-resource-kit-tools/

Setting up Vim

Compiling on Windows (optional)

• Open the shell with C:\msys64\msys2_shell.cmd -- If you don't do this then vim will not compile.

• Run pacman -S --needed base-devel msys2-devel gawk perl python2 python3 ruby libiconv ncurses-devel libcrypt-devel

• Clone MSYS2 packages: https://github.com/msys2/MSYS2-packages

• cd into the vim package

• Edit PKGBUILD and change the version number to the one you want to build. You can see the available versions at https://github.com/vim/vim

• Run makepkg

• If checksums fail then generate new ones: makepkg -g -f -p PKGBUILD, copy the output, edit PKGBUILD and replace the checksums array with the new values.

  • Run makepkg again
  • If it fails to apply a patch then you'll need to make the fixes yourself:
    • Clone vim (https://github.com/vim/vim), cd into vim/src.
    • Modify the file(s) that they failed patch was changing and make the correct fixes.
    • Commit the change.
    • Generate a patch file with git diff commitid1 commitid2 > newpatch.patch
    • Copy the patch to MSYS2-packages/vim and use the same name as the original patch that failed.
    • Regen the pkg checksums and add them to PKGBUILD.
    • Run makepkg again.

• Once built, install it with pacman -U ${package-name}*.pkg.tar.xz

Configuring

1. Open Vim and run :PlugInstall to fetch all plugins.
2. Create a tmp folder for swap files (i.e. set directory and set backupdir). Place these at ~/.vimrc.private so that the main vimrc file can source it. We do it this way so that you can have a tmp folder path that is specific to your setup.

Setting up Custom Search

• First install Rust. See Setting up Rust below.
• Setup ripgrep:
  • Open an msvc x64 shell and run cargo install ripgrep. Note the last time I did this I got linker errors saying that it was trying to link an x86 exe in a 64-bit env. I had to run the msvc x86 shell instead.
  • Verify it works by running rg in a shell.

Setting up ctags

• Install the latest Universal ctags build: https://github.com/universal-ctags/ctags-win32/releases
• Place it in ~/bin.

Setting up Cygwin

• Can create symlinks to dotfiles using the git bash shell. The cygwin home directory is likely going to be C:\cygwin\home\<username>.
• Build rlwrap

Setting up Rust

• Install rustup: https://win.rustup.rs/

Setting up Go

• Installer: https://golang.org/doc/install

Setting up Clojure

• Install Lein: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/technomancy/leiningen/stable/bin/lein.bat

Setting up Xbox stuff

• Install the xbox controller drivers
• Turn off stats collection
  • cmd-r, msconfig.exe, startup tab, uncheck Microsoft Xbox 360 Accessories.

Turn off various startup processes

• cmd-r -> msconfig.exe -> startup tab

Setting up Wacom tablet

• Install the shitty Wacom driver.
• Preemptively deal with future issues in Photoshop by saving the PSUserConfig.txt file in this directory to %APPDATA%\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop XX\Adobe Photoshop XX Settings (should take you to AppData/Roaming)
• In Wacom tablet settings disable anything having to do with Windows Ink.
• These steps are from FlippedNormals - Fixing All Issues with Your Wacom Tablet and Photoshop

Software

• Install tree: pacman -S tree

• Install Desktop Restore

• Install Android platform tools to get adb.exe:

  • Download Android commandline tools
  • Unzip and place the contents into the folders cmdline-tools/tools/
  • Run the sdkmanager.bat script to install the tools: $ ./cmdline-tools/tools/bin/sdkmanager.bat "platform-tools"
  • You can now add the platform-tools dir to your path if you want, or just symlink adb to ~/bin.

Youtube-DL

• In order to combine audio and video files you need ffmpeg. Download from https://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/ and place the exe's in ~/bin.

Firefox

• If you see jaggy fonts then about about:config and check the value of gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.rendering_mode. Mine was -1 by default. Setting it to 5 removed the bad font rendering.

Spotify

• If you install an older version then you'll need to block the auto updater:
  • Go to %APPDATA%\Spotify and create Spotify_new.exe and Spotify_new.exe.sig
  • Set both as read-only. I did this by denying all permissions to the active user account.
• Spotify caches song data in C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Spotify\Data and this path cannot be modified within the app settings. This is an issue if your main drive is an SSD, as you want to limit the amount of writes to it and you may not have a lot of free space. The simplest way I found to stop this is to change the Data folder's permissions (under the Security tab) and deny all properties for the user account.