Windows Startup Programs

The Windows world is plagued by applications that automatically run when you log in, taking up some of your RAM and/or pagefile, and bogging down your CPU with unnecessary processes that reduce your system speed and responsiveness. Some of them have icons in the notification tray, which makes their existence easier to notice, but many don't. A friend of mine used to open Task Manager every time he switched on his PC, and would manually go down the list of processes and terminate the ones he had found out were not needed. This ritual works well enough, but there is a much easier way, and it's called msconfig.

If you click Start -> Run, and type "msconfig", you'll be shown a window that looks like this.

From here, if you click the "Startup" tab, you'll be shown a list of all the applications that turn on when you start your computer. Each item in the list has a tickbox that can be used to enable or disable that particular item. You should disable as many of these items as you can; typically I only allow essential hardware drivers and my antivirus to start automatically when Windows starts; everything else I disable.

Feel free to experiment here, remember you're only disabling these items; if you disable something you needed, you can just as easily re-enable it again later using this window. If you see things on the list that you're not sure about, check the "Manufacturer", "Command" or "Location" columns for extra information, or try searching on Google for the name of the unusual startup entry to see what it is.

Don't be afraid of disabling entries like Java, or Adobe Reader etc. This won't make these programs unavailable to you; many manufacturers just add startup entries for their programs to make launching them seem quicker, as your computer has already put some CPU time into getting everything ready to run that application when you first turned on your PC (even if you weren't going to run Java or Adobe Reader anyway).

Feel free to comment here or send me a message if you have any items you are unsure about disabling. Remember; you can't do any permanent damage in this window, and you should aim to disable as much as possible to improve system performance.

As a general rule of thumb, "portable" versions of applications like those found on PortableApps.com will never add startup entries to your computer, or fiddle with the registry, and so I usually go for these over full-install versions if they are available.