Could someone recommend to me a good free start up manager for Window XP? I am getting sick of all the crap my pc starts when I switch it on.

Start->Run->type Msconfig->Startup->Deselect whatever you want->OK

A few things about msconfig:

 

1) You'll want apply+OK

 

2) It will ask you if you want to reboot, no need to, but only once you reboot will it not start those processes.

 

3) If you are runing Spybot tea timer or something similar when you change stuff in msconfig it will give you a warning about you changing the registries, you want to allow these changes.

 

4) When you start your computer up after having made the changes you'll get a little popup box thing, just tick the thing + press OK and you'll never see it again, it's nothing important and it's meant to happen.

 

5) Be careful what you deselect there, you could end up disabling your mouse/printer/firewall or AV (anti virus) software by mistake.

I have a god one you may also like to try though msconfig should be find in most if not all cases

 

http://www.sysinternals.com/utilities/autoruns.html

 

Its great and its freeware!

 

Cheers,

 

Ryan Jones

Hmm... I tried the build in windows startup manager (via msconfig) but there are still loads of things that it starts up without asking (even though nothing is ticked).

Hmm... I tried the build in windows startup manager (via msconfig) but there are still loads of things that it starts up without asking (even though nothing is ticked).

Probably those are the files that are required by windows to run - there would be no way to disable these apart form writng a program to do it yourself.

 

Cheers,

 

Ryan Jones

You could ensure that there are no Scheduled Tasks ie. go to Control Panel > Scheduled Tasks and see what is in there.

 

Try using msconfig.

 

Get prcview, details:

http://www.xmlsp.com/pview/prcview.htm

download:

http://www.xmlsp.com/pview/PrcView.zip

and it will display all of the processes running, then you can look at the directory (ie. where the program is on the computer) and then you can manually remove/uninstal/delete the program. But you have to end the process first, so click on it and click the 'kill' button, the reason you have to do that is because you can't delete a program that is running.

Probably those are the files that are required by windows to run - there would be no way to disable these apart form writng a program to do it yourself.

 

They are things like iTunesHelper.exe which is definitely not needed by windows!

You could ensure that there are no Scheduled Tasks ie. go to Control Panel > Scheduled Tasks and see what is in there.

 

Only my virus scanner is scheduled and I want to keep that.

 

Get prcview' date=' details:

http://www.xmlsp.com/pview/prcview.htm

download:

http://www.xmlsp.com/pview/PrcView.zip

and it will display all of the processes running, then you can look at the directory (ie. where the program is on the computer) and then you can manually remove/uninstal/delete the program. But you have to end the process first, so click on it and click the 'kill' button, the reason you have to do that is because you can't delete a program that is running.[/quote']

 

I don't want to delete the programs which are running - I just don't want them to start when I boot.

Fair enough... if you open the actual programs then there may be an option within the program to stop it running from startup.

 

Obviously every program, if it has this option, will have it in a different place. The best bet is to use the help file for that program and see if it has an option for starting on start up.

 

Have you tried using msconfig ?