Disable startup programs to speed up your system.

Windows can run many applications in the background. Often these programs run without your knowledge. Before long, you can have many programs running that can slow down your system. Take control of these programs with a simple tool to manages what runs during your system startup.

You can get some sense of what is running in the background by look at your task tray area. Each of those small icons represents a running background program.

This many not be the entire picture. Some programs that run in the background to not have an associated icon so you will not know there are there.

To get a good sense of what is running in your system during startup you can look at your Start folder and the registry. Startup programs are added to both of these areas when you install software.

The items in the startup tab are not system critical items. You generally won’t crash your computer or break anything by not running these items. You may however loose functionality.

For example, I use the OpenOffice productivity suite. There is a startup item that loads OpenOffice on system boot. This makes launching OpenOffice faster when I’m ready to use it. I can remove it from startup and OpenOffice still works ok.

You can remove these programs with the System Configuration utility included in your Windows installation. The System Configuration utility helps you find problems with your Windows XP configuration.

Run it by clicking Start->Run and typing msconfig in the dialog box. Click Ok.

One of the tabs you will see is the Startup tab. This tab displays all of the programs that run during startup and allows you to selectively enable and disable them. After changing the items on or off, click Ok. You will have to reboot your computer to have the changes take effect.

I would disable everything than selectively enable each item until you begin to experience the performance hit. Once you’ve identified the culprit(s) you can make a judgment call over whether it is worth using the offending application.

If you are looking for a more user friendly way to manage your startup programs. Your Uninstaller! is a commercial alternative which will do this and much more.

Which ever way you go, it’s important to understand what applications are running on your system and more importantly how to control them.