Quiet Windows down so your games get the whole PC.
A console runs one thing at a time. Your game gets the whole machine, every second, and nothing interrupts it. That's why a console that's years old and much weaker than your PC can still feel perfectly smooth.
A Windows PC doesn't work like that. While you're playing, Windows is also checking for updates, indexing your files, scanning for viruses, updating apps you forgot you installed, and letting a dozen background programs wake up whenever they feel like it. Each of those is a tiny interruption. Most of them you'd never notice. But one landing at the wrong moment is a stutter — that half-second hitch where the picture freezes and you miss the shot, the corner, the jump.
QuietWindows puts those interruptions on hold while you play, and hands everything back when you're done.
- Double-click
QuietWindows.bat - Press the big green button
- Restart your PC when it says to
Then before each session press Quiet Windows down, and after each session press Wake Windows back up.
That's the whole thing. If you want it explained step by step, open HOW-TO.md — it's written for people who don't want to learn what any of this means.
| What | Why it helps |
|---|---|
| Puts Windows Update, Search and app updates on hold while you play | These are the number one cause of a mid-game freeze |
| Tells your antivirus to skip your game folders | It re-scans the same files thousands of times while you play. It still guards everything else |
| Turns off USB power saving and the Xbox Game Bar | Two Windows habits that quietly cost frames |
| Steadies the system clock | Windows slows its internal clock when your game isn't the front window. That's the "it stutters until I click on the game" problem |
| Moves graphics-card and USB interrupts off your game's cores | Your hardware taps the processor thousands of times a second. This moves the taps somewhere your game isn't |
| Keeps your game on the fast half of an AMD X3D processor | Only applies to some AMD chips. It works out whether yours is one, and skips it if not |
Everything is reversible. Every single change has an Undo button on the Advanced page, and it saves a snapshot of your real settings before it touches anything so it can put them back exactly as they were.
There's a whole page for that. It records what your PC does every second while you play, then reads the recording back and names what interrupted you. Not a guess — the actual program, and often the actual file it was reading at that moment.
The most useful thing it tells people is that it usually isn't the game and it usually isn't your hard drive. On one measured 25-minute session, the PC waited on the disk 4,712 times. Fourteen of those were the game. The other 4,698 were the Microsoft Store updating apps, Edge updating itself, Windows Search indexing, and the touch keyboard.
That's the whole idea behind this tool. Your hardware is almost certainly fine. Windows is just busy.
QuietWindows keeps a list of the games it looks after. First time you run
it, it scans Steam, Epic, Xbox, GOG, EA and Ubisoft and builds that list on
its own. If it misses one — an older game, something installed somewhere
unusual — open My Games and point it at the game's .exe file.
That list is what it uses to tell your antivirus what to leave alone, and to recognise which program on your PC is "the game" when it's hunting a stutter.
Some fixes only make sense for one specific game. Those live in the
Extras page rather than cluttering up the main menu. iRacing is in there
to start with. Adding another game is a matter of dropping a folder into
extras\ — see extras/README.txt.
- Windows 10 or 11. Nothing else to install — the PowerShell it uses is already built into Windows.
- Process Lasso (free, from bitsum.com) — only if you have an AMD X3D processor. QuietWindows tells you on screen whether you do. If you don't, skip it.
- Windows Performance Toolkit — optional, only for the deepest level of stutter hunting. Everything else works without it.
Read this bit if nothing else:
- Nothing runs until you press a button.
- Every button says what it's about to do, before it does it.
- Every change has an Undo.
- Your antivirus stays on. It just stops re-scanning your games.
- The one thing you must do: after playing, press Wake Windows back
up. Until you do, Windows Update is switched off, which also means no
fresh antivirus definitions. There's a
-Deadmanoption that puts everything back automatically at your next restart if you're the forgetful type.
These scripts change Windows settings — power, registry, services, antivirus exclusions. All reversible, nothing happens without your say-so, but they're yours to review and run at your own risk.
MIT licensed. Share it freely.
Built on the stutter-hunting work of the sim-racing community, who spent a lot of hours measuring this properly instead of guessing.