A frequent cause of computer slowness is the set of programs and services (a special kind of program) that runs every time the computer starts. By the time you can get to your desktop after starting your computer, there could be 20 programs and 20 more services running — so, no wonder your computer is slow! It's very simple: the more programs running, the slower the program you are interested in will run. This can make you think something is wrong inherently, when really it's the tasks your computer is trying to accomplish.

In today’s discussion, let’s first take a look at the programs running when your computer starts. The meat of this discussion will focus on Windows, but there are similar tools in other operating systems. For example, in Ubuntu Linux 9.04, navigate to System/Preferences/Startup Applications.

Back to the Windows world. Microsoft hides a very helpful list of these startup programs in a program called msconfig. You'd never know about this program because it's only available through the command line.  To open it, open Start/Run and type msconfig followed by enter.  Once you get in, these programs can be located under the Startup tab. When you reach that tab, those programs can be removed from the list of programs that starts at boot-up time simply by deselecting the corresponding checkbox! (see the video elsewhere in this hub for a demonstration)

That is the easy part.

How do you know which ones can safely be disabled, and which ones would cause a problem? Use a database such as the one at BleepingComputer.com/startups — open that website and type in the name (far left column, next to the checkbox) of the program listed in the Startups tab of msconfig, and if the Status column has anything but “Y” then it can be safely de-selected. Additional clues can be found simply by searching for the program name in Google, and looking at the folder it’s installed in within msconfig.

Often times, programs are configured to start up so that their “environment” is ready when you want the application. As an example, Adobe Reader includes a program with the sole purpose of helping Adobe Reader to start faster (reader_sl.exe), but which consumes your computer’s resources! Ultimately we recommend replacing Adobe Reader because it is bloated and slow, but more on that later–uncheck the reader_sl.exe entry in msconfig!

Keep an eye out for a future write-up about operating system Services.