Bald Sealion’s Steam Deck Ultimate Windows Guide

I don’t want to read. I just want to Get Started

Well you might miss out on important information! – But I am beginning to provide YouTube tutorials that cover all of this guide(Work-In-Progress).

You can click here to go to the first video

we is doing ?

guide intended Dual – Booting SteamOS Windows , optionally , getting rid SteamOS Windows Deck

Has Valve released Dual Boot ?

No, you can check here to see if this guide is outdated and incorrect and it is in fact available:

Valves Windows Resources

Can this brick my Steam Deck ?

No, you can always revert back, as long as you have a spare flash drive or micro SD and another computer, you can always reinstall SteamOS from scratch using the Recovery Image provided by Valve:

Should I pick Windows 10 or Windows 11 ?

This is is completely choice . Both is work work Steam Deck . pros cons .

Here are some reasons to choose Windows 10:

• Comparing stock Windows 10 to stock Windows 11, Windows 10 has less resource consumption
• specific games work Windows 10 – specifically – FIFA 23 Valorant

Here are some reasons to choose Windows 11:

Which Steam Deck versions can Dual Boot ?

Technically all of them. However, 64GB users will find it very difficult to keep both SteamOS and Windows. Windows 10 Home requires a minimum of 20GB free space; Windows 11 Home requires a minimum of 32GB of free space. If you are interested in upgrading your Solid State Drive, I have provided a tutorial in 10. Hardware Upgrades

Should I use a microSD for Windows Operating System?

This is entirely your call, but it doesn’t perform very well. My opinion is that, a micro SD install should be used only for testing purposes, your performance bottleneck will be the micro SD card.

What about an External Solid State Drive ?

Yes , it is ‘s PC . It is work work OK long mean actualy Solid State Drive m2 slot USB Flash Drive .

issues External Solid State Drives ?

Yes.

• If your External SSD is connected to a hub/dock and connected to the charger, when you disconnect the charger, it is likely that Windows will freeze. Possible work-arounds would be sleeping the device first before disconnecting the charger cable, though this has limited success. Possibly more successful would be to hibernate the device first instead of sleep.

• You must use Windows To Go instead of the main Windows Home/Pro installation

• If you are connected through a dock made for the Steam Deck, your bandwidth for throughout may be limited to 5GBps. This is a very YMMV situation, but something to be aware of and will vary based on the dock’s technical specifications.

How is the gaming performance in Windows versus SteamOS ?

This will vary based on a lot of factors(what other apps you have included in Windows outside of this guide, what build of Windows you are using, etc) but typically in community testing, benchmarks perform similar, if not better. Some games can run faster in SteamOS thanks to pre-cached shaders, but you can also do this in Windows on DirectX 9-11 titles using DXVK in Windows

Battery Life is is Windows versus SteamOS ?

Again this will vary based on your system, but if you follow this guide, very comparable! I don’t have any fancy benchmarks to show you here, just personal & community testing experience.

Is there fan control for Windows ?

Yes! This is covered in Section 1.6 of this guide. However, it can result in bans for online games that use Anti-Cheat, so use at your own risk. This is provided by Ayufan’s Steam Deck Tools

SteamOS Windows ?

Yes.

• You cannot use the Steam Deck in Windows as a remote streaming host(but you can use it as a streaming client)
• Windows GPU/APU drivers do not include hardware codecs, which means you will have to use Software Decoding for OBS, Steam Remote Play, or Moonlight (you should use Sunshine for this as nVidia killed Gamestream)

Steam Deck Recovery

Please proceed to 1. Getting Started