I’ve been playing with a couple different ways of managing my Windows computers’ start times recently. My goal is to go from off to usable as fast as possible. Here’s a quick look at some of the tools I’ve been using.
For a quick and easy way to manage what is going to run at start time try Windows Defender. It is a default part of Vista and easily added to XP. Fire it up, go to the Tools menu and click on “Software Explorer.” Change the Category option at the top to “Startup Programs” and have a look.
You can click on items in the left column to get more details about them displayed in the right column. You can also Remove, Disable or Enable each item – I’d suggest first using Disable. If, after a few reboots everything is good then go ahead and Remove.
Want to get a really hard core view of what’s starting up? Close down Defender and go download SysInternal’s AutoRuns program and prepare to be overwhelmed!
Caution: Don’t go mucking about if you don’t know what you’re doing. This one shows everything that is going to start and you’ll want to keep in mind that you di want many of those starting to have a functional machine.
I guess I should also mention good ol’ msconfig as another option. This one has been around since the Windows 98 days and is still a decent option. From your start menu choose run and type msconfig and hit enter. Click on the “Startup” tab and there ya go.
Now that we have a handle on what’s running the next step is to change the timing of things and that’s where Startup Delayer comes in handy. I just started using this one a couple weeks ago and love it.
While I have some programs running at startup that I want to keep there they really don’t need to be available for use immediately. Waiting a minute or two for Dropbox, for example, won’t hurt anything – and the fewer things trying to all start at once the faster the startup and the less time I need to wait to actually use the computer.
You have a list of the programs at the top and there’s a (initially blank) timeline at the bottom. Just drag programs from the list to a spot in the timeline to schedule their startup delay. It really is just that simple.
In the picture above, each of the little vertical bars represents a scheduled start delay. It might take a few trials and reboots, but this one really does make a noticeable difference.
Any other good startup management utilities that I might find useful?
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December 11th, 2008 
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I’ve used startup.cpl for so long that I wonder why it doesn’t come standard in windows. Autoruns looks very nice; as do some of these others you’ve mentioned.
I’ve thought about disabling everything except what the OS needs to survive and then enabling per application. I’ve already worked up an Autohotkey script that kills all processes and services but the bare bones – I think I might work it up into something later. Ever had this idea, nothing runs but what is needed right then?
Chris,
Great post, it is a real shame Windows doesn’t do more to help optimize the applications that load at startup, I thought Vista was going to solve that but it’s not really made an impact.
You might also like to checkout LazyLoad (www.LazyLoad.com), it’s similar to Startup Delayer but the graphical timeline also features CPU and Disk IO activity so you can get a better idea of how busy your computer is during the boot up sequence, you can then drag your applications along the timeline to a point where the PC is not so busy.
If you want to give LazyLoad a try drop me an email and I will happily send you a registration code so you are not limited to the 30 day trial.
@Jay and @Stephen — thanks for the comments with more options. I’ll check out startup control panel and LazyLoad and (ideally) have a follow-up post on the topic at some point.
Thanks again!