Re: How Do I Control What Programs and Processes Launch Automatically Upon Startup?

"Jack Kessler" wrote

I am seeing my machine's memory slowly becoming more and more clogged with more and more processes. How do I see what is launching them and how can I prevent them from launching on startup?

Use task manager to see what's running, then research what each one is to decide if you want it. Here are some research sites.

Research sites
www.google.com
http://www.answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist.htm
http://castlecops.com/StartupList.html
http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_index.htm
http://www.theeldergeek.com/services_guide.htm

Once you know decide which processes/programs you don't want to run at startup first step should be to check in the options for the program you don't want to start and see if there is a setting to tell it not to run at startup. The next step is to remove any entries you don't want from the two startup folders:

C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Start Menu\Programs\Startup
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

For anything else uncheck their entries in the startup tab of msconfig:
Start | Run | Msconfig | Ok

Another option is to remove the reference to them from one of these keys in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce

Make sure you have a backup of the registry using a program like ERUNT before making any changes to the registry.

ERUNT
http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/
http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/erunt.txt

.

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