Re: startup icons bottom right corner

Elle wrote:

"Ken Blake, MVP" <kblake@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote

Once you have that information, you can make an
intelligent informed decision about what you want to keep
and what you want to get rid of.

Ken, I realize you're a nice guy with a lot of experience,
but don't you think, to be fair and honest, it's worth
mentioning that it's often easier to live with these icons?


Well, I think the answer is, as it is in so many places, it depends. These
are not just "icons," in the sense that shortcut icons are.. If you don't
use a shortcut icon, it doesn't hurt you. But these icons represent programs
running in the background. And when a program runs, it uses up some of the
CPU power and RAM available, and that in turn can decrease your overall
performance, often substantially..

Sure, some of these can have such a minor effect of performance that you
will never notice them. Others can affect performance greatly. That's why I
say "Don't just stop programs from running willy-nilly. What you should do
is determine what each program is, what its value is to you, and what the
cost in performance is of its running all the time." I'm not of the school
of thought that says "get rid of all your background programs," and I'm not
of the school of thought that says "just ignore (live with) everything."
Yes, it takes some effort to determine what to keep and what not to keep,
but the person who isn't willing to make some effort to keep his computer
running well will quickly get into all kinds of trouble.


Dan Gookin's most recent _Windows for Dummies_ book says,
like you, that some of these applications can be fairly
easily stopped from automatically launching by going to the
startup properties pages some offer. Subsequently, and again
like you, he tells people to use MSCONFIG. You uncheck the
appropriate MSCONFIG boxes, and all's better, sort of. One
pretty consistently gets a warning, upon startup, from
MSCONFIG that something's loused up.


Nope, it doesn't have to be "pretty consistently." You don't need to see it
more than once. Just tell it not to show you the message again and it won't.
And it's not "loused up" at all. It's simply reminding you that you've
disabled something and haven't told it that you want to leave it that way.


So one often trades one
eyesore and pain for another.


I don't agree. There's no tradeoff like this at all. It's *extremely* easy
to get rid of the message. You can even not get the message in the first
place by using any of the several freeware alternatives to MSCONFIG.


IIRC Gookin concludes that
often there is nothing that can be done (or nothing can be
done easily) about these system tray icons.


He's entitled to that opinion. I completely disagree. Except for some
malware programs, stopping background programs from running is almost always
extremely easy. MSCONFIG is only one of several tools that can do it easily.
The only part that can be difficult is making the decision of what to keep
and what not to. That often takes some research, but it's necessary.



The final
counsel seems to be to not let it bother you.


If that's Gookin's final counsel, once again he's entitled to that opinion.
I never buy and never recommend "... for Dummies" books because I find
their titles insulting, but in this case, if that's what this one says, I
won't recommend it because of its poor content. Some of these things can
have a big effect on performance, and taken together, the mishmash of
background programs running on many people's computers (again, I'm talking
about *all* the background programs, not just those that manifest themselves
by an icon in the System Tray) can have an *enormous* effect on performance.

--
Ken Blake - Microsoft MVP Windows: Shell/User
Please reply to the newsgroup


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: How to get rid of icons in system tray?
    ... There are a number of ways to get rid of the icons, ... Go to Startup and check if there any program shortcuts there, ... > completely by right-clicking it and disabling it. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: Cant remove desktop icons
    ... into safe mode and deleted the funny entry in MSConfig and the funny ... The icons are gone. ... > extension, I gave it the extension of .old. ... I also ran msconfig from ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)
  • Re: Cant remove desktop icons
    ... The icons are now gone. ... hijackings now take on many different names. ... > extension, I gave it the extension of .old. ... I also ran msconfig from ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)
  • Re: Cant remove desktop icons
    ... them, icons all gone now. ... the lop hijackings are now creating ... > extension, I gave it the extension of .old. ... I also ran msconfig from ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)
  • Re: Icons in notification area
    ... MSCONFIG (click Start>Run type: msconfig. ... In msconfig window click the ... startup tab and remove the check mark from beside the quicktime entry) ... Alternatively, hide the icons. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.customize)
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