What Runs At Startup?

Check Your Start-up Programs

Programmers just love to have their stuff start up in the background every time you boot up your computer. Who needs that? It’s your computer not theirs.

I’ll start my own programs when I need them thank you very much.

We will use the Microsoft System Configuration utility to see which programs are starting up every time we boot.

Here is how:

Go to “Start -> Run”

Type “msconfig” in the box and click “OK”

Click on the “Start-up” tab and uncheck any programs that you do not want to start automatically when Windows boots up. This will not uninstall the programs it will just prevent them from running at boot up time.

Click on the “OK” button.

Now reboot your computer and make sure everything is working the way you want it to.

If anything got broken, you can always go back into MSConfig and recheck the items in the “Start-up” tab and reboot again.

There are some other free ways of accomplishing this as well:

SysInternals Autoruns.

If you want to know everything about the startup process then this is the program for you, you can get it here

http://download.sysinternals.com/Files/Autoruns.zip

You will be stunned by the amount of startup entries there are for a typical system, and like MSConfig, you just uncheck the ones that you do not want to start on bootup.

CCleaner.

Get it here

http://www.ccleaner.com

Yes good old CCleaner has a Startup tool built into it, simply start CCleaner, go to “Tools”, click on “Startup” and in this utility you highlight the entries that you do not want to start and then hit the disable button.

Good luck,

John

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