Microsoft Weekly

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Manage startup programs

By Ed Bott

How many programs run automatically every time you start your PC or sign in to Windows? Very few installers warn you that they're about to add a helper program or an automatic updater that runs in the background.

Each of those auto-starting programs uses up some of your available memory. Some background programs can conflict with other software, resulting in mysterious slowdowns or crashes. That's especially true of security software, disk utilities, and other low-level system tools.

One of your first troubleshooting steps when you're trying to figure out the cause of a performance or reliability problem is to rule out the possibility that one of these auto-starting programs is to blame for the issue. In older Windows versions, this list was in the System Configuration tool, Msconfig.exe. In Windows 10, a short list of auto-starting programs appears in Task Manager; switch to More Details view, if necessary, and then click the Startup tab.

Right-click any item and choose Disable to temporarily prevent it from running at the next start-up. After your testing is complete, repeat those steps and choose Enable if you want to allow it to run again. If you find a mysterious entry for which you need more details, right-click the list of column headings and choose additional columns to display; the Startup Type and Command Line options are especially useful.

To see a much more complete list of auto-starting programs, complete with the capability to remove entries from the list rather than simply enable/disable them, use the Sysinternals tool, AutoRuns. You can find that utility and run it immediately from the Sysinternals Live website: https://live.sysinternals.com.

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