How To Clean Up Your Gaming Setup

If you live in the United States or in another country that have Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you probably took advantage of great deals to get a brand new computer.

In the US and Canada, Microsoft even has its 12 Days of Deals, which unlike Black Friday or Cyber Monday, the company offers a new deal every day on the first 12 days of December.

Whether you bought your brand new Windows 10 PC in your local store or online in this guide, we're going to help you to set up your new device.

In this setup guide, we'll go through doing a clean installation of Windows 10, get the operating system and drivers up to date, set some common configurations to make your computer more personal and productive. We'll also show how to protect your data from a system failure by making a full backup.

Starting clean

Seeing Lenovo, Samsung, and recently Dell as some of the manufacturers putting customers at risk by adding potentially harmful code to their devices, it's becoming harder to know which company to trust, as such it's a good idea to do a clean installation of the operating system on your new computer whenever possible.

Note: If you have purchased a "Signature Edition" computer from the Microsoft Store, you can probably skip this step, as the purpose of a service is to have a fast and clean computer from the beginning.

If you choose to go through a clean installation route to start from scratch knowing exactly what will be included in your brand new computer, there are a few things you want to do before proceeding:

Make sure your new computer is working correctly
Make sure your copy of Windows 10 is activated
Identify which edition of the operating system came with your device
Download all the latest drivers
Get your machine product key

Step 1

Instead of erasing your new computer's hard drive from the beginning, you want to make sure that the device is working properly. You can do this by going through the initial out-of-box experience (OOBE) as you would with any other device. Then simply make sure your display, keyboard, mouse, network adapter, other hardware, and peripherals are working correctly.

Step 2

The next step is to make sure your copy of Windows 10 is activated. Simply use the Windows + I keyboard shortcut to open the Settings app, go to Update & security, and under Activation take a look at the activation status.

Step 3

Once, you know Windows is activated, go back to the main Settings page, get into System, and under About make note of your edition (e.g., Windows 10 Home or Windows 10 Pro) and system type (e.g., 64-bit or 32-bit).

Step 4

Now, it's the time to download the drivers onto an external USB drive that you can use to reinstall drivers after the clean installation of Windows 10 as necessary.

There are various ways to obtain your computer drivers, sometimes manufacturers create a "Drivers" folder on the main hard drive, which you can copy to an external drive. However, your best bet is to download the latest drivers available from your computer's manufacturer support page.

Here are a few links from popular brands:

Dell
HP
Lenovo{.nofollow}
Acer
Samsung
Toshiba
Asus

Additionally, if you have a gaming rig running on specific graphic card, you may also want download and install the latest drivers from graphics manufacturer:

Download NVIDIA graphics drivers
Download AMD graphics drivers
Download Intel graphics drivers

Step 5

It's important that before you reformat your computer, know your Windows 10 product key just in case something goes wrong and you need to reactivate.

If the product key didn't come with the packaging and there isn't a sticker attached to your device, even though the key can be recorded in the BIOS, you can use a number of software to retrieve your product key. For example, you can try using Enchanted Keyfinder tool, which is a free tool designed to recover your product key.

Step 6

Now, it's the time to reinstall Windows 10 in your new computer. Yes, you could use the reset feature within Windows to do a clean install, but on an OEM computer, it will restore the factory defaults that includes all the configurations we're trying to avoid.

The next step is to download the Media Creation Tool to create a bootable installation media:

1- Go to the Microsoft Software Download page and click the Download tool now.

2- Run the Media Creation Tool and select Create installation media for another PC.

3- Select the language, architecture, and edition, but to make easier you can check the option "Use the recommended settings for this PC," which should select the correct settings for your computer.

4- Connect a USB flash drive with at least 3GB of free space, choose the option USB flash drive, and click Next.

5- Select the correct removal drive and click Next to complete the process.

Step 7

When you're ready to do a clean install, connect the USB flash drive into the computer, restart your computer and press any key to boot from the installation drive.

If your computer reboots into your current version of Windows, you may need to change the boot order on the BIOS or UEFI settings. Typically, you can access these settings by pressing ESC, Delete, F2, or F12 during boot, but you may want to refer to your computer manufacturer support website for more specific help.

Important: It's worth pointing out that during the following steps you will completely wipe out the hard drive, and you won't be able to restore the computer to the factory default configurations that originally came with the device. It's assumed that you know what you're doing and you have previously created a full backup in case things don't go as planned and you need to roll back.

Once in the Windows 10 Setup do the following:

1- Click Install Windows and then Next.

2- Select Install Windows, and enter your product key if prompted, but you can click the Skip button to this later.

3- Accept the license terms and click Next.

4- At this point, you will get to the Which type of installation do you want? page, select Custom to do a clean installation.

5- On the Where do you want to install Windows? page, select and delete all available partitions until you end up with only one "Unallocated Space".

6- Click Next and follow the on-screen instructions to complete the Windows 10 installation.