How to use Winhanced

1. Grab the installer from the Downloads page. There's one installer and it's free. Early Access isn't a separate download, it's a switch you flip inside the app.
2. Run it. Windows will ask for admin once, because Winhanced installs a background service (WHService) that owns hardware control, game monitoring, and the sleep path.
3. Let onboarding run. It detects your device, asks which libraries you want to connect, and lets you pick a layout.

That's it. Winhanced itself runs unelevated after install. The admin prompt is a one time thing to register the service.

No. Winhanced ships fully self contained. The .NET 8 runtime and the Windows App SDK are both bundled inside the install, so there is no separate runtime to hunt down and no version conflict with anything else on your machine. Download, run, done.

Everyone installs the same build. Early Access isn't a different download, it's an update channel you unlock inside the app, so you get new builds over the air ahead of the public release.

1. Open Settings / Integrations.
2. Toggle Early Access on.
3. Pick how you want to verify: Patreon or Discord. Use whichever one you signed up for Early Access through.
4. Sign in. Patreon runs through its own OAuth flow and an active supporter is verified automatically. Discord checks for the Supporter+ role.

From then on your OTA updates come from the Early Access channel. Toggle it back off any time and you're returned to public updates. Winhanced only checks your membership status to confirm eligibility, and it rechecks periodically rather than once.

Onboarding walks you through it on first launch, and you can change any of it later in Settings / Libraries. Each source gets its own page.

Winhanced pulls two different things, from two different places. What you own comes from the storefront's own API, so you sign in to Steam, Epic, GOG, Xbox, or PlayStation once inside Winhanced and it imports your owned catalog. What's installed comes from scanning local directories on your drives. That's why an owned but uninstalled game still gets a tile, and why the install state is real rather than assumed.

Because ownership comes from the API rather than the launcher, you don't need the Epic or GOG launchers installed at all. Winhanced can pull the catalog and download the game itself.

Four sources work differently: Ubisoft Connect, Battle.net, the EA app, and Amazon Games have no sign-in and no owned list. Winhanced only finds what's already installed on disk, so a game there appears when you install it and the tile goes away when you uninstall it.

The first scan takes a minute or two depending on library size. After that it reconciles in the background.

Xbox mode, which Microsoft also calls the Xbox Full Screen Experience, is the controller-first shell Windows boots into on a handheld instead of the desktop. A home app is what it opens to, and Winhanced can be yours.

You don't have to register anything. Winhanced registers itself as an available home app in the background a few seconds after it launches, with no toggle to find and no setup step. All you do is pick it: Windows Settings / Gaming / Full Screen Experience, then choose Winhanced from the home app list, where it sits next to the Xbox app. Windows still labels that page with the long name, which is the one place you'll see it spelled out.

Once it's selected, Xbox mode boots straight into Winhanced. There's no Xbox app flash and no process being killed off screen, because Windows is launching Winhanced directly rather than Winhanced racing to intercept Xbox. The Game Bar Home button also comes back to Winhanced instead of doing nothing.

If Winhanced isn't in the list, the usual reason is the Windows build. This needs Windows 11 with Xbox mode support, which in practice means 24H2 or newer on a supported handheld. Also make sure you've launched Winhanced at least once, since that's when it registers.

No. Windows stays Windows underneath. Your desktop is still there, Steam still works, and you can alt tab out whenever you want. Winhanced is a shell on top, not a replacement OS.

You don't even have to keep Winhanced open. The background service runs on its own, so sleep and wake, game session tracking, and the HUD all keep working with the app closed. Launch a game straight from the Steam client and the service still picks it up.

Storefronts: Steam, Xbox and Game Pass, Epic Games, GOG, PlayStation, EA, Ubisoft, Battle.net, and Amazon Games.

Cloud and streaming: Xbox Cloud Gaming (xCloud), GeForce NOW, PlayStation Remote Play, and streaming from your own gaming PC over Moonlight.

Everything else: ROM libraries for your emulators, an Apps library for the non game software you want on the couch, and a catch all Other library where you add a game by pointing at an executable or by scanning a folder. ROM Libraries and Apps are currently Early Access features.

They all land in one library. You sort and filter across the whole thing, not per store. Where a game exists in more than one place, the tile lets you choose how to play it: locally, via xCloud, via cloud, or via Remote Play.

1. Open Settings / Libraries, find the store it belongs to, and confirm you're signed in and the path is right.
2. Trigger a rescan for that store.
3. If it still doesn't show, add it yourself through the Other library. You can point at a single executable or hand it a folder to scan. It behaves like any other tile once it's in.

Worth knowing: a scan that fails or comes back incomplete is treated as a non event. It doesn't erase, hide, or duplicate anything, it keeps what it already knew and retries. So a missing game is almost always a source that hasn't reported in yet, not data that got lost.

Hide it from the game's own tile, or manage the whole list in Settings / Libraries / Hidden Games. Hiding is a display flag, never a deletion, so nothing about your actual library is touched and you can unhide anything at any time.

You shouldn't need it as often as you'd expect. Non games (DLC, soundtracks, tools, demos that aren't really playable) get filtered out at scan time and never become tiles in the first place. That filtering is mostly aimed at Xbox, which is by far the messiest source.

Open the game, go to Game Options, and pick Change Box Art, Change Hero Art, or Change Logo. Each one opens a SteamGridDB browser filtered to that slot, so you're not digging through every image type to find a cover. Your choice sticks and a later scan won't overwrite it.

Artwork follows a fill then improve rule: Winhanced won't replace art it already has unless the new source is genuinely better. So a bad match stays put rather than flickering between options, which is why it's worth correcting by hand once.

Yes. The ROM library landed in Early Access with 0.9.9.4. In Settings / Libraries you'll find ROM Libraries: add a ROM folder, tell Winhanced which console it holds, and the ROMs show up as normal tiles with console artwork alongside everything else. Folders it can't work out get flagged under "folders that need attention" rather than silently doing nothing.

You can also sign in to RetroAchievements from the same page, so retro titles carry achievements the way the rest of your library does.

One distinction that matters: a ROM showing as installed means the file is on disk. Whether it's playable depends on an emulator being wired up for that console, and a game in that state says NEEDS AN EMULATOR rather than failing at launch. A ROM row also survives its drive being unplugged, since a missing folder usually means an external drive rather than a deleted file.

We don't ship, host, or link to ROMs or BIOS files. Bring your own.

Yes, and on most stores Winhanced does the downloading itself rather than handing you off to a launcher.

• Steam: full chunk-level download, and updates only pull the chunks that actually changed.
• Epic: downloads direct from the CDN, no Epic launcher needed. Updates currently re-download the changed files rather than diffing inside them.
• GOG: downloads direct, no GOG Galaxy needed. Installs and updates are full downloads for now.
• Xbox: the install is started from Winhanced and handed to the Microsoft Store, which does the transfer.
• PlayStation: Winhanced queues the download onto your console, so the PS5 downloads it, not your PC. Progress shows in Winhanced while it runs, and you can cancel from there.

Install state is detected per source rather than assumed, so uninstalling in the Steam client shows up correctly in Winhanced instead of leaving a dead tile behind.

Put the device down mid game, pick it up later, and your game is still running. That's the goal, and it's the thing Windows handhelds have never done reliably.

On stock Windows, standby on a handheld is a coin flip. Sometimes it wakes clean, sometimes the game has crashed, sometimes the device woke itself up in your bag and cooked the battery. Winhanced takes over that path in its background service instead of leaving it to whatever Windows and the OEM tool happen to negotiate between them.

It's the Enhanced sleep/wake toggle in Settings / Performance. Turn it on and then use the device normally: hit the power button, close the lid, or let it idle out, and Winhanced handles suspending the session and bringing it back.

Suspend and resume more than one game at a time. Leave a long RPG parked, jump into something short, come back to the RPG exactly where you left it, no reload and no title screen.

It's the Xbox feature everyone wants on PC, and it works on Windows games from any store rather than a curated list. How many you can keep parked comes down to your RAM.

Sleep Engine 1.0 shipped in 0.9.5. It records every sleep cycle on your device: when it went down, when it came back, how long it was out, and what woke it. Once it can name a wake source that shouldn't be waking you, like a USB root device or a network adapter armed for wake, it can stop that source from doing it again.

This is aimed at Modern Standby, the S0 low power state handhelds use, where the machine never fully powers down and anything left armed for wake can pull it out of sleep in your bag. The reason it learns rather than shipping a fixed list is that every handheld and every BIOS revision misbehaves differently. A hardcoded fix for the Ally would be wrong on the Legion Go.

Give the Sleep Engine a few cycles to profile the device first, since it needs data before it can act. If it's still happening after that, it's a wake source we haven't catalogued on your hardware yet.

Post in Discord with your device model, your build number, and a log. Spurious wake reports are genuinely useful to us because each one usually turns into a fix that helps everyone on that device.

Instead of picking one wattage and living with it, Dynamic TDP moves the power limit while you play. You give it a framerate to hold, and it spends the least power it can to hold it: more when a heavy scene needs it, less when it doesn't. That gap is where the battery savings come from.

It reads your actual framerate live, starts a new game at a mid-range power limit, and waits for the framerate to settle before it starts tuning, so a loading screen doesn't send it hunting. It remembers the wattage that worked for each game and uses that as the starting point next time, but treats it as a head start rather than a commitment: if the framerate is off target in the first few seconds, it abandons the remembered value and hunts again.

If a target genuinely isn't reachable, it won't sit at max power pretending. After a few minutes it tells you what framerate your device can actually hold and offers to take that instead.

It behaves identically plugged in and on battery. That's deliberate, not an oversight. Unnecessary watts on AC are still unnecessary heat and fan noise. If you want the chip to run flat out on AC, use the Performance profile, which is what it's for.

Winhanced talks to the power limit directly rather than shelling out to a helper tool, using each vendor's own interface where one exists (ASUS, Lenovo, and MSI all have theirs) and a generic AMD path everywhere else. You can still set a fixed wattage by hand whenever you want.

For day to day use, no. ASUS, Lenovo, and MSI are all first class in Winhanced, and on all three we talk to the hardware ourselves rather than sitting on top of the vendor app.

On ASUS we reversed Armoury Crate's TDP handling, so it's no longer needed for power control. That landed in 0.9.5. On Lenovo, power, fan, RGB, and paddle remapping all route through our own background service. On MSI, the whole Claw family (A1M, A8, 8 AI+, 8 EX) is verified on physical hardware for power, fan, RGB, and remapping, so MSI Center M isn't in the loop either.

If the vendor app has stopped responding since you installed Winhanced, that's device control, and one toggle reverts it.

The one thing the vendors still own is BIOS and driver updates. That's why there's an Update Center inside Winhanced that pulls from ASUS, Lenovo, and MSI support directly, so you can get the updates without keeping the whole suite installed.

Three rules, everywhere in the app, no exceptions:

• A always selects.
• B always goes back to wherever you just were.
• Stick and d-pad always move focus through whatever layer you're currently on.

Keyboard and mouse work everywhere too if you're on a desktop. The controller is the design target, not a requirement.

On supported hardware, yes. Settings / Controllers has three features down the left: Paddles, Lighting, and Vibration. Pick one and its editor fills the panel.

They're scoped differently on purpose, because they behave differently. Paddle mappings belong to a controller profile, lighting belongs to an RGB layout, and vibration is device wide and written to the controller's own firmware, so it sticks whether or not Winhanced is running.

That left rail is capability gated: features your device can't do aren't listed at all, rather than sitting there looking clickable and doing nothing. This is the most device dependent part of Winhanced, since every vendor speaks a different firmware protocol and we won't guess at one. Check the device support table for what your machine gets.

Yes. Controller input runs on SDL rather than XInput alone, so Xbox pads, DualSense, and the long tail of third party gamepads all drive the whole interface. That's the point of running Winhanced on a desktop or a living room PC: a gaming PC plugged into a TV is the same problem a handheld has, which is a controller, a couch, and an OS that assumes a mouse.

On a handheld you can also tell Winhanced to prefer an external controller over the built-in one, so a pad you connect becomes Player 1 instead of fighting the device's own sticks. That's in the HUD.

Vendor specific extras like paddle firmware remapping and device lighting are tied to handheld hardware, so a plain Xbox pad gets navigation and games rather than lighting control.

It's the in-game half of Winhanced: power, display, scaling, controller, and session controls you can reach without leaving the game.

The important part is what it's built as. The HUD is a native Xbox Game Bar widget, not a custom overlay injected into your game. Nothing hooks into the game process, so there's no anti cheat exposure and no per-game compatibility list to check. It installs alongside Winhanced and behaves like every other Game Bar widget, because it is one.

It's also game aware: with nothing running it says so, and the game specific controls fill in once you start playing. That works off Winhanced's background service, which runs on its own, so you don't need the main app open for the HUD to do its job.

Open the Xbox Game Bar the way you already do: the Xbox or Guide button on a handheld, or Win + G on a keyboard. The Winhanced HUD is one of the widgets inside it.

If your device's hardware button isn't bringing up the Game Bar, there's a Remap hardware key to Gamebar/HUD option in Settings / Performance in the main app.

Most of what you'd otherwise back out to the desktop for. The HUD is a grid of tiles with filter chips across the top, so you can narrow it to Frames, GPU, Display, System, or Scaling instead of scrolling past everything.

• Power profile: Silent, Balanced, Performance, DynamicTDP, or Custom. Custom gives you a manual wattage slider. Picking DynamicTDP is how you hand power over to it, and while it's driving, it owns the framerate limit too, which the HUD tells you rather than leaving the control looking broken.
• Fan curve: editable point by point, with save and restore to default.
• Display: resolution, refresh rate and framerate limit shown together so you can see when they disagree, target FPS or unlimited, brightness with an ultra dim step below the normal floor, and Auto HDR that turns Windows HDR on when a game launches and off when you exit.
• Performance overlay: six settings. Off, three increasing detail levels, and two DynamicTDP views that show what it's doing to your power and framerate.
• GPU: your graphics driver's own controls, surfaced here so you don't have to leave the game to open Adrenalin or Intel's app. On AMD that's Anti-Lag, Fluid Motion Frames 2, Endurance Gaming, image sharpening, and CPU and GPU boost. On Intel there's a Frame Gen Override, which is the same Application Choice / 2x / 3x / 4x dropdown the Intel driver has. It doesn't add frame generation to anything: it sets the default multiplier for games that already support XeSS frame gen, and left on Auto each game keeps deciding for itself. Multipliers your hardware can't do aren't shown.
• Controller: lighting, and preferring an external controller so a pad you plug in becomes Player 1 instead of the built-in sticks.
• The session: back to game, pause, suspend, resume, or exit, plus current session time, total play time, and achievements unlocked out of total.
• Per-game profile: one toggle that saves the above against the game you're in, so it comes back next launch.

What's available depends on your hardware. Fan curves and lighting need a device Winhanced can drive, so check the device support table.

Lossless Scaling is a separate third party app you buy on Steam. If you own it, Winhanced drives it for you from the HUD instead of making you alt tab into its own window mid game.

You get the real settings, not a cut down version: frame generation mode, multiplier, target FPS, flow scale and performance mode, then scaling type (FSR, NIS, SGSR, LS1, Anime4k, and the rest), sharpness, scale factor, fit mode, capture API, sync mode, and variable rate shading.

The only requirement is that Lossless Scaling is installed on the machine. If it isn't, the HUD says so instead of showing you dead controls.

It turns your controller into a mouse so you can deal with a launcher window, a config dialog, or an installer without reaching for a keyboard. You toggle it from the HUD on every device. What changes between devices is how Winhanced delivers it, and the difference matters.

On the ASUS ROG Ally family and the MSI Claw, Winhanced switches the controller's own firmware into mouse mode. The controller's chip stops reporting as a gamepad and starts emitting a real USB HID mouse, sticks moving the cursor and the bumper and trigger clicking. Because Windows sees an actual mouse rather than software moving the pointer, it works over fullscreen games, through Raw Input, and past anti cheat, which is exactly where a fake cursor falls apart. That toggle is in the HUD.

On every other device the same toggle falls back to software stick-mouse, where Winhanced drives the cursor itself. It does the job on the desktop, but it's moving the pointer from outside rather than being a mouse, so it won't reach into a fullscreen game the way the firmware version does.

Firmware mouse mode is a manual switch, and it's per session on purpose. It doesn't persist and doesn't flip itself on when a game launches, so you can't get stranded in mouse mode with no way to play.

It got closed. Widgets in the Game Bar can be dismissed, and once one is closed it stays closed until you bring it back. Nothing is broken and nothing needs reinstalling.

1. Open the Game Bar.
2. Go to the widget menu on the far right. It lists every widget installed on your machine.
3. Pick Winhanced HUD from that list to reopen it.

Not in the way you're probably hoping, at least not yet. There's no setting that pins a specific widget as the one the Game Bar always opens to.

There is a way to get close. In Game Bar settings, turn off the option to always open to the home widget. With that off, the Game Bar opens to whichever widget you had open last. Open the Winhanced HUD once and it's what you land on from then on.

It's not about how you launched the game. Winhanced's background service tracks sessions on its own and keeps running whether or not the main app is open, so launching from Steam or any other client is fine.

What the service needs is a current picture of your library. The app hands it a list of your games and where they're installed, and the service uses that to recognise a running process as a game. Two things can break that:

• Your library list is stale or was never sent. Open Winhanced once and let it resync. That's the fix if you've added games, moved an install, or are on a fresh setup.
• The service is having trouble. It should always be running, so if it isn't, that's the problem rather than a setting. Reboot, and grab a log if it keeps happening.

Yes. Everything that isn't vendor firmware works on any Windows 11 x64 machine: your whole library, sleep and wake, controller navigation, the Game Bar HUD, cloud and PC streaming. That's the majority of what Winhanced is.

What you won't get is control over hardware we can't safely talk to. If you want your device added, tell us in Discord. Demand is genuinely how we decide what to buy next.

Because we have a hard rule against guessing at firmware protocols. Writing the wrong values to a controller's firmware can brick it, and devices that look identical often aren't. The Legion Go S shares the Go 2's entire effect set and appearance, and four of its RGB constants are still different. A copied driver would have written wrong values while cheerfully logging success.

So a device gets full support when we own the hardware, or when there's an authoritative source (a vendor binary or a mainline kernel driver) to verify against. Everything else gets the generic power path, which is safe everywhere, and stays honest about what it can't do.

We'd rather show you a short list of things that definitely work than a long list where half of it silently fails.

No to both. Winhanced targets Windows 11 build 22000 and up, and ships x64 only.

Windows 10 isn't an arbitrary cutoff. The app is built against Windows 11 as its floor, and the pieces Winhanced depends on most either don't exist there or behave differently enough that supporting it would mean maintaining a second product. Xbox mode is the clearest example: it needs 24H2 or newer, which is two major versions past anything Windows 10 will ever get.

Yes, and it's a bigger part of who uses it than people assume. Winhanced is controller-first, not handheld-only. A gaming PC hooked to a TV has the exact same problem a handheld does: you're holding a controller, sitting ten feet away, and Windows still wants you to find a mouse.

On a desktop you get the unified library, controller navigation everywhere, sleep and wake, the HUD, and streaming. You skip the handheld power tuning, which your desktop doesn't need anyway.

Logs live at %LocalAppData%\Winhanced\Logs. Paste that into File Explorer's address bar and it'll take you straight there, whether or not the app is running.

Grab the newest file for the session where the problem happened. If it's an Xbox mode or home app issue, there's a separate FSE subfolder worth including too.

Four things, and they triage most issues on the first reply:

• Your device model
• Your Winhanced build number
• One line on what you were doing when it broke
• A log file if you can grab one

Post it in Discord. Both of us read everything, and most bugs get a fix in the next build.

That combination almost always means the background service isn't running. WHService owns hardware, sleep, and game monitoring, so if it's absent the app comes up as a shell with pieces missing rather than failing loudly.

Reboot first, since the service starts with your session. If that doesn't do it, reinstall, which re-registers the service. If it still won't come up, grab a log and post it, because a service that won't register usually points at something specific on your machine that we can name once we see it.

Check whether it launches from its own store client. If it doesn't work there either, it's the game or the store, not Winhanced.

If it works there but not here, the launch command is probably wrong or the store's launcher needs a sign in. Rescan that store in Settings / Libraries. For a ROM, confirm the emulator is mapped for that platform, since a ROM file existing on disk and a ROM being playable are two different things.

That's Winhanced device control doing its job. On supported hardware Winhanced drives TDP, fans, RGB, and the OEM button itself, and two apps can't own that at once, so it stops the vendor software and its services before taking over. It's off until you switch it on, either in onboarding or in Settings / Performance.

Turn that toggle off to hand the hardware back. Winhanced restarts the vendor app, re-enables the services it stopped, and restarts its own. Give it a minute to finish.

Do this before you uninstall. The app that knows how to put your OEM software back is the one you're removing. If the vendor app still won't come up after that, grab a log and post it in Discord.

First check the device support table. If you're in the core tier, TDP goes through a generic power path that we've verified on some silicon and not others, and there are devices where we know it doesn't land yet.

On a full stack device, make sure the OEM tool isn't fighting us for control, and confirm the service is running. Then tell us in Discord with your model and a log. Every TDP report on hardware we don't own is how that path gets fixed.

Winhanced is a controller-first frontend that sits on top of Windows. It started as a project to fix Windows handhelds, but the same frontend works just as well on a gaming PC hooked to your TV or a desktop you'd rather drive from the couch. It pulls your libraries together (Steam, Xbox, Epic, GOG, PlayStation, Game Pass, xCloud, GeForce Now), rebuilds sleep and resume so closing the lid (or hitting standby) doesn't crash your game, and handles TDP and per-game profiles automatically. Windows stays Windows underneath. You just stop seeing the desktop.

Armoury Crate, Legion Space, and MSI Center M are great at the hardware they ship with, but they don't touch your library and each one only works on its own OEM's device. Playnite is fantastic for desktop power users, but it's built for mouse and keyboard and stops short of the deeper Windows fixes (sleep, Xbox mode registration, native Game Bar HUD). Steam Big Picture only shows your Steam library and doesn't fix anything underneath Windows. Winhanced is the only app trying to handle every library, the sleep path, and the performance layer in one place, on any Windows device, controller-first.

Yes. Early Access builds are signed, scanned, and tested by us and a few hundred active Discord members before they go out on the Early Access channel. They're not unstable, just newer. If something breaks, ping us in Discord. We read everything and most bugs get a fix in the next build.

It's also the same app either way. You're not installing a different, riskier binary, you're just receiving updates earlier. See how to turn Early Access on.

The Winhanced Discord. Both of us check in daily, and the community is genuinely helpful. When you post a bug, include your device model, your Winhanced build number, a one-line description of what you were doing, and a log file if you can grab one (they live in %LocalAppData%\Winhanced\Logs). That triages most issues on the first reply.

Not yet. It's a two-person team funded through Patreon, and keeping the source closed lets us ship signed builds fast without spinning up a larger contributor process. We're not philosophically opposed, just not there yet. Supporters get Early Access and a direct line to roadmap decisions in the meantime.

As a tool, yes, and I want to be upfront about it. AI makes things like writing patch notes, reviewing dense app logs, putting together shareouts, drafting some content copy, and building this website easier, and that frees up time to actually build the product. But I have a strong personal stance on this from my day job as a product designer and developer: AI is a powerful tool that can help you, it should never be a crutch, and we never use it for image or art generation. Every piece of art and design you see in Winhanced is made by a person.

Winhanced is free. One installer, no trial, and no account needed to use it. The library, sleep and wake, controller navigation, the HUD, streaming, and power tuning are all in the free build.

Supporting through Patreon or Discord unlocks Early Access: the same app a few weeks ahead, some extra themes, and a direct line into roadmap decisions. You switch it on inside the app rather than downloading anything different.

That's what funds development for a two person team, and features that start in Early Access land in the public build.