You want the convenience of a console and the power of a PC. That's a dream I've been chasing for years, piecing together different pieces of hardware and poking around in Windows to provide an experience as seamless as a console, just with access to my massive library of PC games. And I've learned quite a bit getting everything set up.

If you want something as pick-up-and-play as a console, I have bad news for you; you'll never find that with a Windows PC. However, you can get much closer to the console experience by leveraging controller-friendly interfaces like Steam Big Picture mode and Playnite, along with a couple of tweaks within the bowels of Windows.

5 Wake your PC using a controller

It kind of works, but it depends on what hardware you have

The dream scenario for a console-like gaming PC is being able to wake the PC using your controller and immediately start playing games, which is more difficult to do than it sounds like. If you go into Device Manager in Windows and find your Bluetooth adapter, you should see the option to have Bluetooth wake the PC in the Properties window. The problem is that there's no power running to the internal Bluetooth chip when your device is asleep, so it never sees your controller try to connect, and therefore, never wakes. There are some ways around this problem, though.

The first popular solution is to use an old Xbox wireless adapter. Particularly, the discontinued version 1713 adapter. With a compatible controller, you can wake your PC from sleep with this adapter; you just have to enable it through Device Manager. Some third-party licensed Xbox controllers also work this way. YouTuber Cheese Turbulence was able to get it working with the Razer Wolverine V3 Pro, for example. I went through the same process with the GameSir Cyclone V2 and 8bitdo Ultrimate 2 controllers, neither of which worked. It ultimately comes down to the hardware inside the adapter for the controller.

If you have a PC that supports Modern Standby (S0 power state), you can wake the PC with a compatible Bluetooth device. Open a command prompt as administrator and run the following command:

powercfg /devicequery wake_programmable

You'll see a list of devices that can wake your PC. If you see your controller there, you can run the following command to enable it to wake the PC:

powercfg /deviceenablewake "device name"

Note for the above command, you'll need to keep the parenthesis. The problem with this approach is that any updates to your Bluetooth driver will effectively reset this whole thing. If you're looking for a more seamless solution, a cheap HTPC keyboard like the Logitech K400 Plus will allow you to consistently wake your PC from sleep, and since it uses a 2.4GHz dongle, you don't have to worry about Bluetooth updates screwing things up.

Or, you could just take 10 steps and press the power button on your PC. Up to you.

4 Bypass password requirements to log straight into Windows

You'll sacrifice your security for a seamless experience

Turning your PC on is one hurdle. Logging into Windows is next. You can disable the need to enter a pin or password when you start your PC and have Windows automatically log you in. Naturally, this is a terrible step for security, since anyone with access to the PC can get right into your account. But you'll need to sacrifice some security if you want the full console experience.

The easiest way to do this is with Autologon. This is a Microsoft utility that you can download for free, and all you need to do is run it, enter your password, and enable the service. It'll store your encrypted password locally and attempt to enter it when you log in. It works perfectly, but it's technically a separate program, and I promised you Windows tweaks. So here's how you do it just through Windows.

Use Windows Key + R to open the Run command, and enter "regedit." This will open the Registry Editor. Navigate to the path HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\PasswordLess\Device, and find the DevicePasswordLessBuildVersion entry. Right-click and select Modify and change the value to 0.

Next, open the Settings app in Windows and head to the Accounts tab. Choose the Sign-in options, and disable the setting that says, "For improved security, only allow Windows Hello sign-in for Microsoft accounts on this device." Once that's done, use Windows Key + R again and enter "netplwiz." Uncheck the box that says, "Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer," and you're off to the races after a reboot.

3 Go the easy route and download this batch file

GameDows is collection of free batch files that will handle the dirty work for you

Now the fun part. To make your PC work like a console, we're going to replace the normal Windows shell with Steam Big Picture mode. The idea is to have Steam immediately and launch Windows Explorer on a delay so you immediately get into Steam while still being able to back up to your desktop if you need to. First thing's first, though. Open Steam and select the Stream option in the upper left corner to open the settings menu. Navigate to Interface and check the box next to "Start Steam in Big Picture mode."

At this point, you have two routes. Here, I'll detail the easy method with a batch file you can download online. In the next two sections, I'll show you how to piece together something similar on your own.

If you just want everything to work, you can download a series of batch files from GitHub called GameDows. There are batch files to configure everything you need for both Playnite and Steam, as well as a batch file to reverse the process. It even supports Decky Loader for Windows. Note that these files will throw up a malware flag in your browser. In fact, I wasn't even able to download the files in Chrome; I had to switch to Firefox to proceed. These are batch files modifying the registry with elevated privileges, after all.

If you're concerned, you can download the file in a VM and open the batch files with a text editor like Sublime Text. I did exactly that, and there's nothing nefarious going on, but I understand if it's too close for comfort. Thankfully, you can piece together something similar on your own, and you don't even need to make a batch file to do it.

2 Go the manual route by disabling the Windows shell

Steam relies on Windows Explorer, but you can launch it manually

To go about this process manually, you'll need to modify the registry and create a couple of scheduled tasks in Windows. Before changing anything, there are a few steps you should take. First, create a system restore point. You should be able to reverse this process easily, but a restore point makes it easy to back up in the event you're not able to get into Windows Explorer. Next, disable notifications and all start-up applications. We'll start up what we need with Task Scheduler in the next step.

Not scared off? Let's do it. Once again, use Windows Key + R to open Run and enter "regedit." In the Registry Editor, navigate to Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon. There, you'll see a Shell entry, which should be set to explorer.exe. Edit the entry and remove the data. You should be left with an empty string for the Shell entry.

The shell launches Windows Explorer, and it's what lets you navigate File Explorer, see your desktop, and interact with your Taskbar. We're disabling the shell here so that we can schedule a task to run before Windows Explorer loads, and that task is Steam. There's another method of going about this where you set the shell to run your Steam executable with elevated privileges, but I didn't have much luck with that route. With this method, I had to manually launch Windows Explorer twice from Task Manager in order for my desktop to load, which isn't ideal for a console-like experience.

1 Schedule your tasks to run automatically

A couple of automated tasks makes this whole process work

With the shell empty, we can launch the applications in the order we want. Open up everyone's favorite Run dialog once again and enter "taskschd.msc" to open the Task Scheduler. We're going to create two tasks, one to launch Steam and another to launch Windows Explorer on a delay. Create a new task for Steam. In the dialog, check "Run whether user is logged on or not" and "Run with highest privileges." Go to the Triggers tab and add an "At log on" trigger. Finally, go to the Actions tab and create a new action to start a program, selecting Steam.exe from your Program Files.

Once you're done, create another task for File Explorer, using the same settings in the General tab that you set for Steam. In the Triggers tab, once again set up an "At log on" trigger. This time, however, check the Delay task for box in the advanced settings, and set a delay of 30 seconds. Finally, go to the Actions tab and add an action to start explorer.exe (it's located at C:\Windows\explorer.exe).

This will work, but it's not always perfect. Sometimes notifications will still pop up and take over the screen once Windows Explorer starts up. Thankfully, you can easily refocus Steam Big Picture mode with your controller without taking out a keyboard and mouse. If you want to revert everything back to normal, change the Shell registry entry back to launch explorer.exe and delete the two tasks you created in Task Scheduler.

A mostly seamless experience

If you want the console experience, you should buy a console. There's no way around that. You can set up your Windows PC to provide a console-like experience with minimal hiccups (hopefully), but you're destined to bust out the keyboard and mouse at some point. That's just the reality of using Windows. If you want something a bit simpler, however, you have a couple of options.

The first is EmuDeck. If you're a supporter of EmuDeck on Patreon, you can enable Game Mode. It basically runs some similar batch commands to launch you directly into Steam, but it disables Windows Explorer completely and only reopens it on exiting Steam. The other option is Bazzite, which is a fork of SteamOS that provides a true console-like experience. It's Linux, though, so you'll have to run everything through Proton, and it has some serious issues with Nvidia GPUs.