More and more people are becoming aware of how important it is to take control of the autorunprograms on their PCs. In case you didn’t know, an autorun or startup program will launch automatically when Windows starts. Quite often, it’s a useful program and you can find it’s icon in the system tray. However, sometimes an autorun is not that useful. You may not know it’s installed because it’s hidden or you’ve forgotten you installed it. When that happens, these not so useful programs are taking up processor cycles and eating up system memory. Your PC gets slower as more hidden programs are launched as an autorun.

Fortunately, there are several ways to take control of the autorun programs. Windows has a utility built in called msconfig, and there are also quite a few third party autorun apps such as this one: Autoruns by Sysinternals.

Autoruns is offered for download as a ZIP file. To install it, extract the ZIP file to a folder somewhere on your PC. You’ll see the following four files in the folder.

Double click the autoruns.exefile to launch the program.

Here’s a peek at Autoruns in action.

The default Everythingtab, shows you all of the programs, services and scheduled tasks that are automatically starting with Windows.

If you find a program you aren’t familiar with, you can right click on it and choose the Search Onlinetask. That will open your web browser and send you to the search results for the file or process that you have highlighted.

In order to stop a program from running at startup, you can remove the little check-mark beside it.

The interface may look confusing at first, but if you run into any problems, you can always consult the built in help from the top menu.

Download Autoruns

Techie Buzz Verdict

Autoruns is a great free startup manager. The only one that I like better is WinPatrol. If you need to regain control of your PC, Autoruns is a good tool.

Techie Buzz Rating: 3/5 (Good)

WhatInStartup is a free tool that helps you manage the programs that load while your machine starts. This is a portable tool. Hence, you do not need to install the tool. After downloading, just run the app.

As the tool starts, it will show a list of programs that start when the operating system boots. If you want to disable any entry i.e. bar it from loading on startup, just select it and press the red button on control pane at the top. You can also save any set of startup items for future use.

Techie-Buzz Verdict

We can easily manage the startup items using msconfig. However, we will not be able to save any particular set of startup items that can be used for any future restoration of our workspace. Other than the save option, the tool also provides detailed info about any particular startup item, permanent removal of any item from startup list and many more useful operations. This is a must have tool for people who install a lot of applications, thereby prolonging their machine startup time and unintentionally burdening it with unnecessary startup items.

[Download WhatInStartup]

Techie Buzz Rating: 4.5/5 (Very Good)

The programs that get executed every time you boot up your computer (called startup entries) affects the speed of the startup process very badly. This situation could be managed by disabling unwanted programs and selectively enabling startup programs using any   startup manager. Here is a tip to speed up the startup even more by delaying the needed-but-less important startup programs using a very good freeware security tool for Windows, WinPatrol.

Once installed, WinPatrol will run in the background and will alert you if any change is made to the system settings, there by, preventing malwares from getting installed. What we are going to use now, is the ‘Delayed Startup’ feature of Winpatrol.

How To

• Launch WinPatrol
• In the “Startup Programs” tab, right click the program you want to delay and select “move to delayed start”
• Switch to the “Delayed start” tab and you’ll find the program you just delayed in the list there.
  By default, the delay value is 30 seconds, but you can set it to a maximum of 1 hour, by right-clicking the program in the list and selecting the ‘Delay start options’.

Usage Tips

• This method could be used to delay helper/tray agents like iTunes helper, PC suite helpers of phone softwares etc.
• DO NOT delay programs/processes related to your display, sound card, touch pad and anti-virus/firewall
• You may weigh programs of their importance to you and then set custom delay timings so that multiple programs won’t be executed simultaneously, saving up the total system performance .

If your Windows PC boots up very slow, it may be due to the fact, that there are several unwanted items that are scheduled to automatically startup with Windows.

Most of the software that automatically run on startup are not actually added by users themselves, many software installations do that automatically.

In the past we have told you about some really good startup managers for Windows, WhatInStartup is another Freeware tool that displays the list of all applications that are loaded automatically when Windows starts up. For each application, the following information is displayed: Startup Type (Registry/Startup Folder), Command-Line String, Product Name, File Version, Company Name, Location in the Registry or file system, and more.

It allows you to easily disable or delete unwanted programs that runs in your Windows startup. You can use it on your currently running instance of Windows, as well as you can use it on external instance of Windows in another drive.

WhatInStartup also supports a special "Permanent Disabling" feature – If a program that you previously disabled added itself again to the startup list of Windows, WhatInStartup will automatically detect the change and disable it again.

WhatInStartup does not require any installation, so you can easily use it as a portable software.

If you are looking to disable softwares from adding themselves to startup with Windows you can use the free spyware remover.

Download WhatInStartup