Ten minutes. That’s roughly how long it takes before a brand-new Windows 11 machine starts nagging you about OneDrive backup, suggesting apps you’ve never heard of in the Start menu, and quietly enrolling you in “tips and tricks” notifications you never asked for. None of that makes the PC faster, safer or more pleasant to use, and a fair bit of it works against you. We’ve set up enough new machines, for ourselves and for mates who bought a gaming rig off the back of a Cyber Monday deal, to know the default Windows 11 settings are built for the broadest possible audience rather than for you specifically.
The good news is none of this takes long, and most of it is a one-off job. Think of it like tuning a controller’s stick sensitivity before you start a competitive match. You could play on the factory settings. You’ll just be fighting the system the whole time instead of the actual game.
Power and performance settings that actually matter
The single biggest change we make on any new Windows 11 PC, laptop or desktop, is swapping the power mode out of “Balanced”. Head to Settings, then System, then Power, and you’ll find a slider for Power Mode. Balanced is fine if you genuinely need to stretch battery life on a laptop doing email and spreadsheets. But if you’ve bought a machine with a discrete graphics card, even a modest one, Balanced mode can quietly throttle performance you’ve already paid for.
On a desktop plugged into the wall there’s no reason not to run Best Performance. On a gaming laptop, we’d set it to High Performance while plugged in and accept the battery hit, because the whole point of a gaming laptop is the games, not the laptop. If you’re shopping right now and want a sense of what hardware is worth that trade-off, our rundown of the NVIDIA RTX 50 series options in Australia is a decent starting point before you even get to software tweaks.
Worth saying plainly: this setting resets more often than people expect, particularly after a driver update or a Windows feature update. We’d check it every few months, not just on day one.
Game Mode, hardware scheduling and why the defaults are half right
Here’s a mildly unpopular opinion we’ll actually stand behind: Game Mode, buried in Settings under Gaming, does less than Microsoft implies but it’s not useless either. It stops Windows Update from installing updates and rebooting mid-session, and it deprioritises background tasks while a game is running. That’s worth having switched on. What it won’t do is turn a middling frame rate into a great one, and we’ve seen plenty of forum posts treating it like a magic performance toggle. It isn’t.
More useful, and less talked about, is Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling, found in the same Gaming settings under Graphics. On newer graphics cards this can shave a small amount of latency by letting the GPU manage its own memory queue instead of leaving it to the CPU. The gains are modest and vary by game and by card, so we won’t pretend it’s transformative, but it’s on by default on most new systems now anyway and there’s rarely a reason to turn it off unless you’re troubleshooting a specific driver issue.
Privacy and advertising ID settings
Settings, Privacy & Security, General, is where Windows hides a handful of toggles that are all switched on by default and all worth switching off. The advertising ID lets apps build a profile of you across different software for targeted ads. Tailored experiences uses your activity to suggest content inside Windows itself. Neither does anything useful for you as the user; both exist to serve Microsoft’s advertising business.
While you’re in that section, check App Permissions further down, particularly Location, Camera and Microphone. New PCs ship with a long list of apps that have blanket access to all three, and most of them have no legitimate reason to want it. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner publishes plain-English guidance on what reasonable data collection looks like, and it’s a useful yardstick when you’re deciding whether some random pre-installed app genuinely needs your webcam.
If you’re the sort of household that’s also dealing with scam calls or dodgy text messages on the phone side of things, our piece on scam calls and robocalls in Australia covers the current tactics, and the privacy habits overlap more than people expect. A PC that leaks less data is one less thing scammers have to work with.
Storage Sense and startup apps
Storage Sense, under System, Storage, is switched off by default on most fresh installs, which seems backwards given how often Australians run into a full drive warning on a laptop with a 256GB SSD. Turning it on lets Windows automatically clear temporary files and empty the recycle bin on a schedule you set. It won’t fix a drive that’s genuinely too small for your library of games, but it stops the slow creep of junk files that nobody ever remembers to clean out manually.
Startup apps are the other quiet performance killer. Task Manager’s Startup Apps tab shows you everything set to launch the moment Windows boots, often with an “impact” rating next to each one. We routinely find three or four things with High impact that have no business running automatically, voice assistants for headsets nobody’s wearing yet, update checkers for software that gets opened once a month, chat apps set to launch before you’ve even logged in. Switching the unnecessary ones off genuinely improves boot time, and it’s one of the few changes here you’ll actually feel within the first week of owning the machine.
If storage is the real constraint rather than just clutter, it’s worth looking at what a decent external drive costs before assuming you need a bigger internal one. We’ve covered the current options in our guide to external SSDs and portable storage, and for anyone running a Steam library that’s outgrown a laptop drive, an external SSD is usually the cheaper fix.
Notifications, Focus Assist and the attention economy problem
Windows 11 ships with notifications on for nearly everything, including apps you haven’t opened yet. Settings, System, Notifications is where you trim that down, and we’d be ruthless about it. Turn off “suggested” notifications about tips, Microsoft 365 promotions and anything with “offer” in the description. Leave on the things that matter to you, calendar reminders, security alerts, messaging apps you actually use.
Focus Assist, which used to be more prominent in earlier Windows versions and is now folded into Notifications settings, is worth setting to automatically activate when you’re playing a game in full screen. It suppresses pop-ups that would otherwise appear over the top of your game, which matters more than people think when you’re mid-match in something competitive and a Windows update notification decides that’s the moment to interrupt you.
Windows Update timing and why we don’t disable it
We’ll push back on something we see recommended in gaming forums constantly: disabling Windows Update entirely. Don’t. It’s a bad idea, full stop, and it leaves a PC exposed to security issues that get patched specifically because they’re being exploited. The Australian Signals Directorate’s Cyber Security Centre is consistent on this point across its consumer guidance, and we agree with it completely.
What you can do instead is control when updates happen. Settings, Windows Update, Advanced Options lets you set active hours so updates won’t force a restart during your usual evening session, and you can pause updates for up to five weeks if you’ve got a tournament or a big single-player release you don’t want interrupted. That’s a reasonable middle ground between “always up to date” and “never gets pwned by an unpatched vulnerability.”
This matters more now than it did a year ago, given Microsoft ended free support for Windows 10 in October 2025. Anyone still on Windows 10 without the paid Extended Security Updates programme, which now runs through to October 2027, is on borrowed time. If you’ve just bought a new Windows 11 PC you’ve sidestepped that entirely, but it’s worth checking our Windows 11 compatibility guide if you’re helping an older relative decide whether their current machine is even eligible for the upgrade.
File Explorer tweaks nobody tells you about
Small thing, but it adds up: File Explorer defaults to hiding file extensions, which is how a lot of people get caught by scam attachments disguised as PDFs. Go to the View menu in File Explorer, then Show, and turn on File Name Extensions. You’ll immediately start seeing the difference between a genuine “invoice.pdf” and a considerably less genuine “invoice.pdf.exe”. It’s a basic habit the ACCC’s Scamwatch flags repeatedly in its guidance on malicious email attachments, and it costs nothing to switch on.
While you’re there, switching File Explorer’s default view from “Home” to “This PC” saves you a few clicks every single time you open it, and it stops Windows surfacing recently accessed files from other people if you share the machine with family.
Are these Windows 11 settings actually worth the hassle
Honestly, yes, and it takes less time than setting up a new controller’s button mapping. None of these Windows 11 settings will turn a budget laptop into a gaming rig, and we’re not going to pretend a software tweak replaces a graphics card upgrade. But the combination of power mode, privacy toggles, startup app cleanup and sensible update scheduling adds up to a machine that feels noticeably snappier within the first session, not months down the track.
Our contrarian take, for what it’s worth, is that Game Mode gets both too much credit and too much blame in equal measure. People expect it to fix frame rate problems it was never built to fix, then dismiss it as pointless when it doesn’t. Used for what it’s actually good at, stopping interruptions during play, it’s a small, genuinely useful setting rather than the headline feature Microsoft’s marketing sometimes makes it sound like.
Set these once, check the power mode occasionally after major updates, and you’ll spend a lot less time fighting your own PC and a lot more time actually using it for whatever you bought it for in the first place.
— Josh Tannenbaum, Gaming Writer, Tech Geek
Featured image: AI-generated illustration.
