Avoid pre-loading useless programs

Over time you’ll find that many programs that you use pre-load themselves when Windows starts so you can use them faster.  When you turn on your laptop you may have to wait a fair few minutes until you can even start surfing the internet which can be very frustrating!

Even worse is that these programs are on standby whether you want to use them or not and they take up your computer’s memory.  The computer’s memory is used as a quick swapping place for calculations, if lots of memory is free then lots of programs can use the date in their quickly and be fast running.  If the memory starts getting jammed then the hard disk is used as a substitute and it’s about ten times slower at doing the same job.

Basically you want as few programs as possible running on your laptop to make it the fastest it can be!

So how do well stop these programs pre-loading themselves?  Well it’s very hard for me to tell you as each program is different and has different ways of changing it’s settings.

Let’s take MSN Messenger (A.K.A Live Messenger) for an example, I see that messaging program load itself up on MANY laptops if the laptop user wanted it or not:

Go to "Tools" and then "Options"

Find the option to stop Messenger automatically loading up when Windows starts

Now most programs will have similar settings to MSN Messenger Live.  You usually need to go in to the “options” or “preferences” tab, find the “general” or “settings” tab and then tell that program to think twice if it’s going to jam up things when you start up Windows!

The tiny icons in the bottom right hand side of the screen show what’s running at any given time so this is your first clue of what to change the automatic settings with.

Good luck in killing each program, remember you can start up any program just as well by finding it in the “programs” section of your “Start Menu” (bottom left icon) and it may take an extra 10-20 seconds to load up than usual, that’s all!