What are all these programs running after I boot Windows?
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenbom here for AskLeo.com
it's like the perennial question,
why is there so much stuff running when I boot Windows.
And as is so common, there's not a simple answer.
It can be quite complicated.
However, we can look into things
and at least classify some things as to things that are
expected, unexpected, but maybe needed, unexpected, but maybe not needed,
and of course, things that are absolutely not required at all.
So the biggest bucket that I think is
important to be aware of or what I call tools you use.
For example, if you install backup
software and expect it to back up automatically
without your having to do anything, very often they will install
a piece of software that starts at Windows startup
and keeps running and basically initiates the backup when the conditions are right.
Another example might be something like Dropbox, which is a tool that handles
synchronizing files as they change on your machine.
Almost by definition, that needs to have a piece of software
running at all times and that starts automatically when you sign into Windows.
Now, there are other tools that
fall into that same bucket, but you don't necessarily need them.
For example, there are tools that install software that runs on startup and actually
keeps running all the time, whose only job is to check for updates
to see if the software, whether or not you're actually using it,
has an update available and needs to be downloaded and installed.
My preference for those is, of course, to check when you actually run the program.
You don't need to have something running all the time.
But for whatever reason, software does occasionally fall into that bucket.
So what do you do?
How do you get rid of some of these things?
Well, there are a couple of approaches, depending on how deep you want to dive.
We'll start with Windows Task Manager.
So I'm over here in Windows 11.
I'm right clicking and we'll click on Task Manager.
In this case, Windows Task Manager has this item called Startup Apps.
In Windows 10, you'll find it on a menu across the top.
Here you can see I've got a bunch
of different things that supposedly all start when I sign into Windows.
I'm using 1Password.
I want that to be running.
I long ago disabled Cortana because I never use it.
Dropbox, as I said, is important.
Microsoft Teams, I never use it, hence I've disabled it.
Microsoft Edge, One Drive, Reflect, which is my backup software,
the Security Health SysTray, that's part of Windows Defender, Windows Security.
These are all things that you may or may not want to have running on startups.
Pretty much everything in this list is safe to disable.
And in case you're curious, right clicking on it has the disable item.
Or if something is already disabled,
you can see you can re enable it by right clicking on it as well.
I'm not going to change anything on this
system because it's exactly the way that I want it to be.
These are the things that I want to have
enabled and disabled on this particular machine's startup.
Notice that you can in fact sort by startup impact.
How bug of an impact do you get these items have on the startup process?
That I personally find that less important than simply understanding
which program it is that's trying to start something at startup.
Now, unfortunately, this is a very small,
a very narrow view into all of the different things that happen when
you boot your machine or when you sign into Windows.
There's another tool that I'm going
to suggest you at least know about called Auto Runs.
We'll go ahead and see the web results
for that because we're going to go to Auto Runs for Windows from SIS Internals.
We'll download it.
I'm going to go ahead and open it.
The tool that I want is Auto Run 64.
We'll copy that.
We will copy and paste that to a different folder.
I'm going to just go ahead and paste it
in this temporary folder and double click on it to run the utility.
Now you'll notice that it'll actually take
a few seconds to populate with a bunch of information associated with Windows.
There's a lot.
I cannot overstate just how many different things are in this utility.
You'll notice that it defaults to showing everything.
These are all of the different things
that run automatically or that are shell extensions or that have registry entries
that cause them to start up at different times in the boot process.
More options than are displayed in Windows Task Manager.
There's a reason for this.
In Windows Task Manager,
you'll notice that I said in the startup tab, playing around there is pretty safe.
You can disable things and chances are worst that will happen is you'll miss some
functionality, you'll go back to Windows Task Manager
and you'll re enable whatever it is you disabled.
However, Auto Runs is not necessarily that forgiving.
Many of the items that run automatically and that are listed here in Auto Runs are
core components of Windows, meaning that if you disable them,
if you remove them, if you do something to them,
you could render your installation of Windows unbootable.
Obviously, you don't want to do that.
So I have two recommendations.
One is, well, don't, unless you need to, unless you really feel the need to go
deeper than what Windows Task Manager offers you.
The other option, though, is that if you feel the need to play
with this, take a complete system image backup first
so that no matter what happens, no matter what you do, you can always
restore that backup image and get back to wherever it was you started.
Now, the other thing that's very important
to understand about auto runs is that unlike Task Manager,
which had a Disable Enable, all you could really do with auto runs is delete.
Delete means delete. That means it's going to be gone.
There's no undo.
There's no easy way to put it back
other than restoring to the backup that you took previously.
Or in the case of a specific program, say, for example, if I happen to accidentally
delete this one password entry, I could reinstall one password.
But if it turns out to be a system
required function, then generally you're talking about either repairing the system
or restoring the backup you took before you did anything.
This is deeper than I recommend most people go.
But when it comes to the kinds of things that are starting every time you fire up
Windows or sign into Windows, well, you now have an idea of how
many different things get started automatically, how complicated the process
is, but you also have this window in Windows Task Manager
to a number of things you can control, disable, or delete.
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I'm Leo Notenboom.
This is ask Askleo.com.
Thanks for watching.