Okay Geek Farm
Configure Start Up Programs with Autoruns Utility
Ricardo Trejo
Everyone has had this issue one time or another with their pc's: you turn it on, you wait for Windows to boot, and you wait as you watch all the familiar icons take their respective place on your taskbar. For many users those programs won't even be used at all, yet they'll still be running in the background and taking up precious memory at start up. So how do you get rid of those programs that are slowing down your computer?
There's a simple solution and a more hardcore one. What you can do is go to your Start menu and in your command prompt type in: msconfig . Move over to the start up tab and you'll see a list of applications that are set to load up when you boot up Windows. Uncheck any unwanted programs to solve the problem. (NOTE: the picture above is the msconfig tool)
The hardcore solution is a utility called Autoruns. It's a bit more geared toward those with technical know-how, but it's the best tool for this sort of job. It arranges every sort of program and process that the pc will use when it boots up in lists of operation. Just uncheck anything you don't, but be sure it's something you know what it does. If you accidentally shut off an instance that may be necessary to Windows start up then you may have just shot yourself in the foot - requiring an entire installation of Windows to fix it. So ONLY remove programs and applications that you are absolutely sure of when using Autoruns.
