Optimizing Windows Startup

Over time, your computer will seem to get slower and slower when starting up and opening your Windows session. Often this is due to the number of programs that are being loaded as tasks in the background. Some of these will present an icon in your taskbar next to your clock to show that they are present, but others are more discreet (notably certain Windows programs) that over time become more and more numerous due to patches and Service Packs.

It is possible to considerably improve the time it takes to load your Windows session by disabling the programs that we don’t often use.

There are two locations where the system will write these programs to start with Windows:

• The “Start Up” folder in each users Start menu

• The registry (for all  users)

For those applications that are loaded from the “Start” folder, these can be found under the “Programs” folder on the Start menu. To stop the automatic execution of a program, you just need to delete the associated shortcut from the folder. You can see this in the screen capture:

Deleting from the “Start Up” folder

We will see that the programs that start with each Windows session are not listed in this folder. Actually, most of these will live directly in the registry and so they need to be removed by other methods:

• Click on the “Start” button and go to “Run”. Type “regedit” and click “OK” so that you have access to the Windows registry.

• Go to the following key:
  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

• Delete the program entries that you wish to disable, as you can see here in the screen capture:

Deleting a key in the “Run” directory