WINDOWS ACTIVATION WATERMARK ISSUES

[Dylan Stanco]

TL;DR The windows over lay sucks, find your exe files and disable full screen optimization (doesn't work for all games )also horrible screen flicker just in general on second display. So I was always under the impression that windows without an activation key was a benign little hinderance at the bottom of my screen. But recently that overlay has been the bane of my existence. I just built my pc with many hiccups in between. I had a hard drive failure and at first thought it was my GPU due to smite crashing every time it loaded. But further investigation showed corrupt files associated with smite and DirectX11 in general. I ran sfc/ scannow in the command prompt and my SSD had unfixable corrupt files. So I loaded my OS onto another drive of mine and boom no problems. But about 2 or 3 hours of gaming, i noticed a stutter in all my games. At first I thought it was just Apex but every single game from Witcher 3 to low end games like Bullets Per Minute having this ridiculous stutter. But the weird thing was, I wasn't dropping frames. In Apex i was still hitting 100+ frames with no major drops. I was very confused. So I tried doom eternal, again same issue. I'm over my frame limit with freesync enabled and still getting horrible stutter. so I come to the conclusion I have a faulty GPU. 2 to 3 hours of gaming and then horrible stutter? sounds like I have a crappy GPU, and not to help it, my GPU is the XFX 5700 xt, a card known for being hot. So I start a return with the retailer. I go on to some forums cause I don't want to return this card, I have been building this computer for over a month now. But I saw a post on how OC ram may cause stutter in game, so I returned my ram to stock stetting and BOOM no stutter. I canceled the return and hopped on apex and was having a blast. However the stutter returns and I am pissed. I could not for the life of me figure it out. Eventually I noticed if I reset my computer the stutter goes away, which in itself is odd, but still seemed like a GPU issue. But then i noticed that the windows activation water mark was missing. That's when I put the two together. I scoured the internet for similar problems. I found very few but it seemed like it was my issue. So eventually I found the fix on steam and that is to find the .exe file for your game and to right click and then go to combability  and turn off fullscreen optimizations. Fixed most of my issues. When the watermark is present, there is horrible screen flicker especially on my second display which is horrible for my eyes. Overall I am going to buy a cheap windows home key. 

[Slottr]

OP, It would greatly help if you formatted your post for us to better understand your incredibly large message.

 

A side note to this- our community guidelines forbid anything to do with piracy, so any content related to that will be removed. 

 

-Moved to troubleshooting-

[Coolmaster]

Windows Activation isn't causing your files to corrupt, something else is.

 

And if you want to activate Windows you need to pay for it.