All posts tagged: disabling

My Samsung TV’s picture looked wrong for months — disabling these defaults fixed it immediately

My Samsung TV’s picture looked wrong for months — disabling these defaults fixed it immediately

Published by skeptic

Samsung makes some of the best OLED and LED TVs with excellent picture settings to match. I’ve personally used Samsung LEDs for the longest time and recently got a new 55″ LED 4K TV, except that the picture quality didn’t look right out of the box. After living with washed-out colors and inconsistent brightness for months, I finally dug into the settings and realized the problem wasn’t the panel itself. Samsung ships its TVs with several defaults turned on that look impressive in a showroom but hurt picture quality at home. Once I disabled a handful of these and adjusted a few simple settings to extend my TV’s lifespan, the difference was immediately obvious. Turn on Filmmaker Mode Get a cleaner, more accurate picture The first thing I changed was the picture mode. Out of the box, my Samsung TV was set to Standard, which pushes a cooler, blueish white and adds sharpening, motion smoothing, and aggressive contrast processing. It looks punchy, but it’s far from accurate. Filmmaker Mode strips all of that away. It …

Windows 11 made me more productive by disabling these 5 things

Windows 11 made me more productive by disabling these 5 things

Published by skeptic

Most productivity advice focuses on what to add. New apps, new workflows, new shortcuts and so on. All of that advice works well, but my biggest productivity gains have actually come from turning things off. You may not have realized it, but Windows 11 is full of distractions. Notifications, suggestions, pop-ups, and ads all compete for focus when all you want to do is work in peace. Instead of putting up with these, I decided to spend a few minutes and turn them off for good, and now that I have, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Hide desktops icons and declutter the taskbar Create a calmer workspace Screenshot by Pankil Shah — No attribution required I don’t know about you, but a desktop full of icons has never appealed to me, and that’s even after trying to organize them better with a tool like Fences. Almost everything I want is already accessible via the Search menu, and my most-used apps are pinned in the Start menu anyway. Also, when your desktop is full …

I finally fixed my RAM spikes by disabling this useless Windows 11 service

I finally fixed my RAM spikes by disabling this useless Windows 11 service

Published by skeptic

You may have noticed sudden RAM spikes on your Windows 11 device that even show up when you’re not rendering video, compiling code, or opening several browser tabs. This abnormal Windows 11 behavior is often followed by a brief lag that seems to disappear almost as quickly as it surfaced. When it became a recurring issue on my computer, I first took time to rule out the common suspects: browsers, background apps, and even drivers. It was then that I realized these spikes occurred when there was background activity from the Connected User Experiences and Telemetry Windows service. It’s now one of the Windows services I disable to keep my computer functioning properly. The service most users never knowingly agree to run What Connected User Experiences actually does Afam Onyimadu / MUO Microsoft collects diagnostic and usage data, and Connected User Experiences and Telemetry is the core Windows 11 service that collects it. The data it sends helps Microsoft know if a device is compatible with future updates, and it also tracks how reliable the …

I fixed Windows 11 File Explorer lag by disabling this old service

I fixed Windows 11 File Explorer lag by disabling this old service

Published by skeptic

If your Windows 11 File Explorer feels sluggish, especially when opening folders crammed with documents, photos, or videos, you’re not imagining things. A default feature called auto-discovery scans folder contents to determine optimal display settings, and while this sounds helpful in theory, it’s been wreaking havoc on performance since the Windows XP era. Fortunately, a simple registry tweak can prevent File Explorer from wasting time scanning files, delivering noticeably snappier folder navigation. What Windows 11’s Automatic Folder Type Discovery does It’s a smart feature that makes File Explorer Tashreef Shareef / MakeUseOfCredit: Tashreef Shareef / MakeUseOf To understand why this fix works, you have to look at what Windows is actually doing behind the scenes. When you double-click a directory, Windows 11 doesn’t simply read the filenames and show them to you. Instead, it pauses to perform a content audit. It furiously analyzes the file headers to answer a question you never actually asked: whether the folder is full of music, photos, documents, or videos. If it detects MP3s, it switches the view to Music mode; …