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Thursday, January 28, 2010

Disable unnecessary services

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Windows XP runs many, many services in the background. A lot of these are not actually necessary to the day-to-day operation of your PC, depending of course, on what you use it for. Creating a guide for which services are useful in which situation would unfortunately take up the entire remainder of this article just for itself, so we're not going to go in depth. The simple fact is different people will need different services enabled. To judge for you which are necessary, right click on 'My computer' and select 'manage' from the computer management window, expand 'services and applications' then click 'services' to open up the window listing all available services. The ones labeled 'started' are currently running, and the startup type 'automatic' denotes a service which is started by windows each time the operating system loads.

By highlighting each service, you can see a description of its properties, and make an informed decision on whether you need it or not. To stop a service from running, right click on it and select 'properties', then stop it and make the startup type 'disabled', If the description indicates that services which depend on the service you are currently examining will fail if it is disabled, you can go to the 'dependencies' tab to see which services will be affected.
SoftTricks

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Cleaning up unwanted startup programs

Many freeware and commercial application programs have a habit of setting themselves up to run automatically upon Windows startup. This can contribute to the gradual decline in startup speed that most Windows XP systems (and windows PCs in general) experience. Also, having programs that you only use selectively, or not at all, load automatically is a waste of system resources that could be better used for other things.

To top it off, many internet nasty programs such as spyware programs, viruses and Trojan horses will install themselves into one of the automatic start locations on your system in order to make sure that they are run on startup. So the point is, take a look at what is currently running every time you load your PC, and disable what you don't need or can't identify.

To do this: -

(1). The first place you should go is “start | programs | startup” which is a directory Windows XP uses to launch application shortcuts on boot-up. If you remove the shortcuts from this directory, the applications will not load on startup. This directory can also be a repository for much badness such as spyware and virus software. So if there are files here which are not shortcuts and you don't recognize them, you may wish to consider removing them anyways, as Windows will not place critical files in this directory.

(2). The next location for removing unnecessary startup files is the handy MSCONFIG utility that has been resurrected from the graveyard of Windows 9x especially for XP. Go to “start | run” and type “msconfig” to access the utility. The “startup” tab in MSCONFIG provides access to several other applications that are started at boot up and are running in the background. By examining their Filenames and directories, you should be able to get a feeling for what is necessary and what is not. Be aware than several viruses and worms have a habit of disguising themselves with authoritative sounding Windows system file names, such as win32.spybot.worm present in the above screenshot as MSCONFIG32.EXE. Leave these for now if you are not sure. The other method for removing these programs is through the programs themselves, as many applications, for example MSN messenger, contain the option to remove the software from startup.

Now go for it….. and next time you feel that your PC is taking less time to boot.