Configure System Startup Settings

One of my personal computing pet peeves is to have a cluttered and ridiculously overloaded system tray of applications and processes that are running at boot-up. For one thing, having all kinds of unnecessary processes running at start-up on the chance that you might use seems like a waste of resources to me.

Startup Tab of MSCONFIG control in Windows XP Pro

If you’re running Windows XP Professional there’s a really easy way to configure at the operating system level what applications have set themselves up to run on startup and to disable them.

Just follow these steps:

1. Go to Start > Run
2. Type in “msconfig” in the window (minus the quotes) and click “OK”
3. Click on the “Startup” tab
4. Scroll through the identified programs and uncheck the programs you don’t think you need automatically starting up every time Windows starts

Be careful not to uncheck anything you’re not too sure about. The programs that you’ll probably want to turn-off should be easy to identify and uncheck.