Window’s 10, you either love it, hate it or simply don’t have an opinion of it. Despite all of growing pains, I feel that the OS is a major step in the progression of Microsoft’s operating systems. It’s fast, it’s clean, just it’s lacking something that I’ve been asking for since Windows 7. What’s that, you ask? A gaming mode, it’s lacking a gaming mode.
I’m talking about a mode or service that stops all announcements from popping up on my screen, or that takes the focus away from the game and forces me back to the desktop for one reason or another. I simply hate this and is easily one number one pet peeve when it comes to PC gaming. Typically what I ended up doing in the past was making a new user account and creating a batch script that kills all unneeded services and applications. For the most part, it worked, but that was back during Windows 7 and not everybody has that level of skill to accomplish this feat. It’s also something that’s increasingly more difficult with all the intertwined dependencies anymore.
With the Xbox App firmly in place, why haven’t we gotten something that is along the lines of what I’m suggesting? Something that doesn’t just incorporate Xbox gaming, but also every type of gaming known to man. What’s surprising to me is that Microsoft claimed that gaming on Windows 10 would be better than ever, yet there’s nothing that stops this. Sure there’s a quiet mode in Windows 10, but it doesn’t stop everything and is only catered towards notifications. I want everything stopped! No auto updates, no notifications, no background tasks, nothing. All I want running is the game that I’ve launched, the required drives and that’s it. I’d be happy if we had to reboot into a game-only mode, even if it involved virtualization – just as long that there’s no performance hit or not much of one. Not only does this make sense but imagine how much less memory and CPU overhead would be in use since nothing else would be fighting for resources. That could also mean for lower requirements for games as well.
Fellow PC gamers, we need this! So, let’s make Microsoft aware of this by contacting them by any means possible – email, twitter, smoke signal, whatever works.
C’mon Microsoft, I know I can’t be the only one asking for this.
