Think I’m going to publish something from the draft bin on Humpday Wednesdays here and there. Once we get through the holidays and into Q12025 at some point we’ll get back to what we’ve been doing on Wednesdays regularly, but in the meantime, let’s do something a little different.
Yes, it’s Humpday Wednesday, but here’s something that’s been on my mind for some time, for whatever reason, haven’t been finished.
Let’s talk Microsoft OneDrive on the gaming PC.
Turning off Microsoft’s OneDrive is one of the first things I do to our gaming PCs. I don’t want their cloud storage and, like the author of the article below, wish it was opt-in versus opt-out. The same for Microsoft’s AI Co-Pilot, previously covered here: How to Remove Microsoft Copilot from Gaming PC Toolbar
The main problem with OneDrive and PC gaming is your documents folder. This is one of the default locations that OneDrive automatically syncs when you sign into your Microsoft account on a new PC, and it’s a critical location if you’re a PC gamer. When moving between devices, you can get caught up in conflicts that will lock you out of adjusting settings in games or sometimes block you from playing certain games at all.
OneDrive is ruining my PC gaming setups | Digital Trends
Do we really want synced drive between gaming PCs? Sure, we want progress within games saved to some cloud storage, but do we literally need everything we’re doing on a PC saved and synced? No.
This is my problem with what Microsoft does sometimes (too often?). They aren’t the only company that does this, of course, Google has been known to assume what we want, too. Now that they all seem to be flirting around with AI, that will be the next thing that tries to think what we want and act upon it.
Common sense cloud saves, that’s what gamers need. Our progress within a game saved from one machine to the next. Feel free to share what your ideas are for what we need saved and synched across multiple computers? Browser shortcuts? Yeah, that is fine, too. There are other actually helpful items that could be saved and synched.
I work for a software company and it is always a huge debate if a feature with a toggle should be on, or off. I am a huge advocate for them always being off. I think it’s the responsibility of the company to educate users of the feature, and its use, but not to enable it.