How Performance Tweaks work

Every tweak on this page is a documented Windows setting that TrayTrigger reads and, if you choose, changes. Nothing here is a registry cleaner, a driver hack, or a service that runs in the background.

What the badges mean

• OPTIMAL or STANDARD shows the current state of that setting on your PC right now, read live from Windows (for HAGS, straight from the display driver).
• OPT-IN marks tweaks with a real trade-off. They stay off by default and are skipped by Apply Performance Preset, so they only change if you click them yourself.
• RESTART means Windows only picks up the new value after a reboot.
• ADMIN means the change writes a machine-wide value, so Windows shows a User Account Control prompt.
• N/A means the tweak cannot do anything on this machine, for example a Windows 11 graphics setting on Windows 10 or HAGS on a GPU without support. The row explains why and its button is disabled.
• ON or OFF (blue) marks a status-only row such as Core Isolation.
• RESTORE POINT: ON or OFF, next to the Performance Optimization Status heading, shows whether TrayTrigger creates a System Restore point before a tweak is applied. Green means on. Click the badge to open the setting; it lives in Settings under Performance Tweaks.

The score

"N / M Recommended Optimizations Active" counts only the recommended set: available, toggleable, not opt-in, not status-only. Opt-in tweaks you have turned on are shown separately. Reaching M / M means the preset has nothing left to do; it does not mean every opt-in tweak should be on.

Apply Performance Preset and Reset Defaults

• Apply Performance Preset turns on every recommended tweak that is not already on, in one pass, with at most one administrator prompt.
• Reset Defaults reverts only the tweaks that are currently applied, putting each back to what TrayTrigger found before it changed it, again with at most one prompt. A power plan or visual-effects state you set yourself is never overwritten.
• A restart is suggested only when a restart-required tweak actually changed in that pass.
• Both can create a System Restore point first, controlled in Settings under Performance Tweaks. Restore points are the safety net if something on your PC behaves differently afterward.

Permanent tweaks versus Performance Profiles

Everything on this page is permanent until you change it back. Settings that only make sense while a game is running, such as the high-performance power plan, MMCSS game priority, process priority, timer resolution, and Do Not Disturb, live under Performance Profiles instead. Those apply when a game launches and revert when it exits.

Refresh re-reads every setting from Windows. Use it after changing something outside TrayTrigger, for example in Windows Settings or Game Bar.

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Part of Performance Tweaks. This page is the same text as the app's Learn more button, generated from Help/tweaks/overview.md. To fix something, edit that file (or open an issue); wiki edits are overwritten on the next sync.