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!

As mentioned in a previous post you can stop lots of programs starting up with Windows so your computer loads up quickly but what if you cannot stop these programs from starting?

Even worse a malware program (malicious program that harvests your data) could be present every time your laptop loads up and you may never know about it!

Windows have made a handy little program called “Autoruns” which checks to see which programs load when you start Vista or XP – start by downloading it here from Microsoft:

Open the zip you downloaded and open it (I used WinRAR), run the program "autoruns.exe" and agree its terms

Microsoft's Autoruns Tool for stopping unwanted programs starting up in Windows

WARNING – do not touch anything you don’t understand on Autoruns it has every little cog that runs the Windows environment and all of your internet protocol, mouse settings etc!

The only boxes you can un-tick safely are the ones at the top with little icons next to them if you don’t know what the program does then you can either Google it’s program name (example: “ehTray.exe”) and see what type of program it is or leave it well alone!

In the example above I’ve spotted the free office program “OpenOffice” pre-loading itself (when I never asked it to) so that can be stopped, also a webcam chat thingy from Dell is pre-loading itself so that must be killed and “Microsoft’s Media Center” is taking up my memory for no reason so I’ll kill that too.  Click the disk icon and save the changes you made to a handy place on your computer to save the settings.

You may be unfortunate enough to find some strange looking/named programs near the top of Autoruns and these could well be malware or trojan viruses!! Again Google the names of anything suspicious and delete them if they turn out to be harmful when you find out about them online; you may save yourself credit card fraud or worse!

Don't start up loads of program at once

When you switch your laptop on how long do you have to wait until you can properly use it?  Even if you do stop a lot of programs from starting up with Windows things can be painfully slow when you computer is getting upto speed.

Behind the scenes lots and lots of little programs run themselves when you start Windows from boot up plus your internet card is trying to connect to the internet and your anti-virus may be updating itself.

If you try and open your browser, music player, email client etc. whilst the computer is still starting up then expect a computer traffic jam!

This bottle neck effect will jam up the processor as it has 40 or so jobs to do at once already.  If you keep making it run extra programs then it’ll do each job bit by bit and the overall time it takes is a lot longer that if they all ran separately.

The best thing to do is be patient, go and make yourself a cup of tea or do some stretches whilst your laptop wakes up from it’s slumber!

Want to time how long it takes to get upto speed with your laptop?  Try pressing CTRL + ALT + DEL at any time and you’ll bring you the task manager:

You can see on the “Performance” tab what percentage of your processor is being used every second.  When it gets to a steady 1 – 5% usage then you can open up other programs and avoid any bottle necking.  Another good indicator of when your computer is not extremely busy with programs is when the hard drive stops making that annoying ticky sound.  When new SSD technology comes out for hard drives this problem will be a thing of the past, bring on the new technology!

P.S. You can use the task manager to see what “Processes” are taking up the most memory and processor power if Windows is being consistantly slow