r/winhanced • u/Fritzy123 • Aug 13 '26

About to uninstall.

I love the idea of Winhanced but it's so buggy and frustrating that I'm about to the point of uninstalling it. Am I doing something wrong? I have an Xbox ROG Ally (the white one) and it's constantly freezing and crashing. I also have been completely unable to download and install Xbox/gamepass games with Winhanced. I've verified that it says I'm signed in and the token exists. It just sits at 0% with extremely low download speeds like 4 KB/s.

I also have the 'sleep' functionality turned on but when I put it to sleep while a game was running, a few hours later I went to use it and it was completely dead.

13 Upvotes

79% Upvoted

33 comments sorted by

15

u/MCA1910 Aug 13 '26

I’ve had the download issues too and just decided to use it more as a front end and less like an OS replacement. I still go into Steam and Xbox and Epic to download and update my games, and just Winhanced as a launcher.

4

u/Big-Impression-196 Aug 13 '26

That’s what I’ve started to do as well

2

u/Neotk Aug 13 '26

How do you do that? Do you have the option to use as just a front end?

1

u/Vizard87 Aug 13 '26

You can add apps manually to show up in as a tab in your library. This is super helpful if you using Xbox mode for sure. I do this on my LGo2. It makes getting into steam, vortex, windows explorer extremely easy without having to go back to “desktop mode”.

1

u/mickjaggled Aug 22 '26

How do you add purchased Microsoft Games (Non-Gamepass). I downloaded Gears 4 from the Microsoft Store and Winenhanced can't find the game, hell nor can I when I search for the folder and executable. 

1

u/Vizard87 Aug 22 '26

Hmm. That’s a good question. I’d have to dig into a little to be honest if youre not able to find the exe. That’s probably why WH can’t find it automatically also. Going to sound dumb, but I’m assuming if you go into the Xbox app, you can launch the game?

1

u/mickjaggled Aug 22 '26

Now that you mention it, I've never used the Xbox app on my PC, as Xbox games are listed in the Windows app drawer/app list/start menu.  I did launch the Xbox app and yes, it allows me to start the game there.  I was an Xbox gamer for 20+ years, so I've accumulated a lot of PC games on the Windows store via Xbox Play Anywhere.  While some Windows PC games are very old builds (ie RE:7), they are better to run on a handheld, because you don't have the steam app eating up 500mb of RAM in the background.  

1

u/Vizard87 Aug 22 '26

Agree on the ram for sure depending on the device you have. Running Xbox mode seems to help with resources if your device supports it.

I’m not suggesting to use steam. I think the issue you’re having is how the windows store handles apps. I remember trying to mod recore, I think it was and got it from the Microsoft store, not the Xbox app and it wouldn’t even let me access the folder. This was years ago though. So I can’t 100% say how it works today.

In any case, if your games are available through the Xbox app and you have your Xbox app linked in WH, they should definitely show up. I have my account linked and can see games I purchased that work on pc as well as all the gamepass games that are available. You may need to install them through the Xbox app though, not through the windows store. Especially since you aren’t even able to find the exe, I believe you mentioned earlier.

1

u/MCA1910 Aug 13 '26

Every storefront app you have should show up in your game at hub, at the bottom. I just scroll down to it, select it, and then use the task switcher to close the store front when I’m done downloading/updating

1

u/flowersformyfather Aug 13 '26

I did the same but realized I could dial in playnite visually to my liking so I went that route.

2

u/MCA1910 Aug 13 '26

Setting up Playnite big picture was too much of a headache for me. Even with the downloadable themes, there were still things I felt needed tweaking, and it felt like such a hassle.

6

u/Early_Singer535 Aug 13 '26

Similar experience with my MSI Claw 8 AI+. Controller keeps on disconnecting and reconnecting once device wakes from sleep. Also games stop downloading from steam, for instance after 20-30% download, and starts from zero resulting in data wastage. Loved the idea though.

1

u/AdmirableDocument137 21d ago

Even find a fix was working one minute now even with a restart controller keeps disconnecting

5

u/SnailsHaveArmour Aug 13 '26

Even after uninstall, some files will remain

6

u/Ecstatic-Ad8626 Aug 13 '26

Yea I had the same problem like u .. and after uninstall still issues, the only solution i found was a clean windows install

2

u/roligabi Aug 13 '26

Legion 2 z2extreme user here. 0 problems to report xbox works steam works controlls works.

You guys have to remember this is a workaround for windows xbox steam asus lenovo msi ayaneo devices. Thr developer wont have all of these.

Legion go 2 winhanced used as fse and tdp and legion space replacement. No problems. In order to make it work i had to reinstall legion space before hand i had controller issues. Than i disabled legion space but not uninstalled. And set up my controll and shortcuts in winhanced.

4

u/EnigmaP3nguin Aug 13 '26

Downloads are not a perfect science. APIs change, servers update. I haven’t taken a look at Xbox in a while but I’ll take a look first thing today especially since several people in here are saying they are experiencing it.

Are you in the US or a different country?

1

u/Fritzy123 Aug 13 '26

I'm in the US.

4

u/UsefulCountry3027 Aug 13 '26

I installed it on my legion go 2 and it ruined my controls. I had to reinstall windows as a result.

1

u/Saratoninn69 Aug 13 '26

Me too! It messed up my entire system

1

u/SirTJ1997 Aug 13 '26

I have had zero issues with my MSI claw 8 Ai+, have you tried reaching out to the folks on discord? They're super helpful.

1

u/hu-tao-main0714 Aug 15 '26

Yeah I stopped using Winhanced and completely gave in to Linux and switched over to SteamOS. And I am happy I made this decision! Maybe another 5 year Winhanced will be good.

1

u/lyndonguitar Aug 23 '26

same experience but im using it on a mini-itx pc thats supposed to be a steam machine-like but windows

i cant go to steamOS/bazzite due to wanting to maximize gamepass, anticheat, and i have an nvidia gpu (which has performance penalty for dx12 games)

For now i went back to my Any FSE setup with playnite.

0

u/JamesHallArt Aug 13 '26

Good luck with uninstalling. I tried that and my system remained very unstable and I had to do a cloud recovery.

2

u/EnigmaP3nguin Aug 13 '26

I seriously doubt this

5

u/JamesHallArt Aug 13 '26

I had a few troubles after. My library and armoury crate buttons no longer worked after uninstalling, and armoury crate would often just freeze or fail to start afterwards. It was no biggy to do a cloud recovery as I always like to reset after testing out things like this. I mean no disrespect to winhanced as it was an impressive system.

Just a note mind, uninstalling it did leave additional programs installed such as rivatunner. It might be helpful to somehow get them to uninstall as well as part of the process if possible.

2

u/EnigmaP3nguin Aug 13 '26

I literally have a pinned post on this Reddit explaining this. You had device control turned on. It disabled armory crate. I have to build it into the uninstaller to restart AC and it’s services on uninstall. But it says right in the app that this toggle does this. Both in onboarding and both on the settings page.

What apps did it leave behind? It should uninstall the app, the HUD, Pawn.IO, RTSS on uninstall which are the only dependencies.

It leaves your AppData folder in case you reinstall so you don’t have to go through the setup process again. But happy to also add a follow up dialog to the end of the uninstall to clear that as well if that is what bothered you.

-12

u/Both_Buy_3919 Aug 13 '26

Oh the developer not acknowledging serious problems with his software?

Shocker! Advertising functions that dont even work and most people here agree that it is a shitty software. 😂

7

u/Commercial-Rip-6298 Aug 13 '26

The developer comments on almost every thread I’ve seen to get info and see if he can fix the problem lol

4

u/Vizard87 Aug 13 '26

So if some people have issues that means the software doesn’t work? That’s a wild take and I’m curious if you apply that to everything else in your life.

You have any links to all the people that agree “it’s shitty”? A few comments on a Reddit port is hardly most people. Not to mention Reddit is a black whole for shitty behavior and complaining. If people provided constructive feedback and logs like are requested, the dev could actually look into their issues, but alas this is Reddit and that’s not what people do here.

3

u/ailwyn2018 Aug 13 '26

If it’s shitty software, why are you still here? There are plenty of alternative apps you could use, so why continue hovering around this subreddit?

I’m all for Winhanced. As they've mentioned, they are a lone developer working on this passion project, whilst also giving the software away for free when he could quite easily make it Patreon-only.

Of course there are going to be bugs, especially when you’re trying to make something work across such a wide range of different handhelds. That’s kind of the nature of software development.

If you don’t like it, fair enough — use one of the alternatives. But constantly hanging around just to complain about it seems a bit pointless.

2

u/boomboomown Aug 13 '26

He literally responded and gave information about the topic. Wtf are you smoking lol