tallation process, is the unfortunate automatic setting of starting the application on startup. Gradually, your computer takes forever to startup and eventually it becomes ridiculously slow. You could use an application like StartupDelayer to delay programs from starting up (also check out AutoRuns by Karl and WinPatrol by Mark), but many of those applications do not even need to be running at all.

So here is one way to stop those unnecessary applications from running:

1. Go to “Start,” “Run,” and type msconfig.
2. Click on the “Startup” tab.

You should now see a list of all of the programs that automatically start up. Many of these applications are nicely labeled with the correct names, but some are not. If they are not clearly labeled you can just check the path of the file and hopefully find the name of the program, but if not it is probably better to just not remove it.

stop programs from running at startup

When you are disabling services make sure not to disable any of the Microsoft Services. Many of the ones that you see on the startup are necessary. Once you have selected the services you do not need, simply click “Apply.”

Hope this helps some of you to get started on speeding up that computer of yours. Stay tuned for the next installment of WinHack!