Technical Tidbits™

The other day, I left you with the thought that we would be discussing the items that start up on boot within your Windows system.

Have you ever taken a look at the bottom system tray? The area by your clock in the lower right corner of your desktop. Have you ever noticed that when you update some piece of software, or install new software that every one of the manufacturers have to give you some icon there?

Yes, everyone wants a piece of your attention and they are doing it in such a way that you are not even noticing how much garbage is accumulating in your startup menu! And guess what? The more stuff that loads at start-up, the more bogged down your computer gets!

Software companies have made it increasingly more difficult to stop the unnecessary crap from loading but you can not only stop it from running once it’s installed, but you can also stop it from running at boot time!

In Windows Vista and XP, you have a handy tool called msconfig, or your System Configuration utility. Inside this little tool, lurks every start-up entry that is bogging down your system.

I’ve prepared the following video (about 15 minutes in length) to show you how to use this little utility to stop the insanity at boot time.

Also, inside the video, I show you a little known secret about a wonderful FREE spyware removal tool that can save you reboot after reboot. Curious? It’s using a feature in Spybot Search & Destroy in Advanced Mode!

Now, if you’re one of my students at the online colleges, you may have seen the text version with the step-by-step directions to using other features in Spybot. But in this video, I deal specifically with the start-up items that are bogging down your PC speed.

So, without further delay, here’s the video instruction on how to stop programs from bogging down your PC performance at boot and after!

To download this vide to watch later or save for future reference, use this link and right mouse click to save as:

So, if you’d like to download the FREE Spybot Search & Destroy, you can do so here: http://www.safer-networking.org

Be sure to use the Safer Networking mirrors to download unless you really know how to tell you are downloading the correct file from the mirrors. Many of my students have accidentally downloaded the advertisers program which told them they had to pay to clean up their system. Spybot is FREE but I would highly recommend donating! This program is very valuable and you’ll see more of what it does in future videos and posts!

And if you missed the URL in the video for checking what the heck the process is that’s running in start-up, you can find it here:  http://www.liutilities.com

Scroll down to the Library Section and select either processes or the dll library to find your specific item. They are listed alphabetically.