What Windows Startup programs do I need?
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Here's the question.
"How do I determine what Windows startup programs I absolutely need to load?
Do I really need all of my protection
programs like Virus and Spyware to load at startup?"
Boy, if ever there was a question,
I wish I had an easy, obvious answer for this would be it.
The problem is that there is no minimum
set of things you need to run at startup that I could tell you because it's going
to be different, not just for every machine, but for everybody.
Different people run different software.
Different people have different software installed on their machines.
Different machines have different requirements for things to be run
on startup, so I can't tell you what you do and don't need.
I have some guidelines and some things to look at.
And what I want to do in this video is
walk you through a couple of the different places that you can start to look.
So we'll start by firing up the task
manager, which I'm going to do with a right click here and hit
Task Manager and start in the alternate start menu, as it's called.
Now you may find that your task manager looks more like this.
This is the default view of Task Manager.
It's only showing you the programs
that you believe you have running, and right now I don't have any running.
I just have Windows itself running.
If I click on more details,
then you get a sense for yeah, there's a lot more running here than we
might expect for a system that is running nothing that's doing nothing.
There's a lot of software here that's
running and this is kind of what we're looking at.
So over here on the startup tab, we get an opportunity to see what kinds
of things are happening when we sign into our machine.
Each one of these are things that you can turn off.
These are things you can also use to make some other decisions.
For example, Cortana is a great one.
I'm going to disable Cortana.
I'm not going to uninstall or remove it or anything.
I'm just going to right click on it and click on disable.
You can see now here that it's listed as disabled.
That means that the next time I boot this machine, it won't run.
Cortana won't start up. Dropbox.
I use it. Onedrive
I use it. PowerShell.
I'm actually not sure what this is doing and I'm not going to touch things
I don't understand.
Skype, I had already disabled and Windows security notifications.
Well, that I do want enabled because security notifications are important.
You want to see about those you want to hear about those things.
So even with just this really short list, we've given a clue as to what kinds
of things you may or may not want to turn off or leave turned on in your startup.
The things that you don't use, the things that you don't care about,
the things you can identify as being unnecessary with whatever knowledge you
have, those are things you can probably safely disable.
Now, I'm actually going to suggest that in some cases,
you may want to instead of disabling them, go to Settings apps and uninstall
the program that installed them in the first place.
If you find that you're not using the program that they represent, then
the best way to actually get rid of this is to get rid of all of it.
So if that means Program X,
which you used last maybe a year ago, and you haven't used since.
But it installed a startup entry so that there's a little piece of Program X
running every time you boot your machine, you could disable it.
But if you're not using Program X, uninstall the whole thing.
If you find that the software is something
that you use, say Program X really is something that you find valuable.
But having it start something up every
time you reboot your machine just doesn't seem necessary to you then.
Yeah, that's a candidate for disabling the startup entry.
The good news about disabling startup
entries is that, by and large, it's a safe thing to do.
You can disable pretty much everything I have listed here.
The downside of doing that is that some features may not work.
For example, if I were to disable Dropbox,
then Dropbox would stop synchronizing the files on my machine with the files
in the Dropbox cloud, and with any other machines I have Dropbox installed on.
That's the synchronization service you
want that running, but you may find that for Application X,
there's a thing that it starts for no apparent reason.
Go ahead, disable it.
You may find at some point that some aspect of Program X may work differently
or may stop working, in which case, you know, or at least can make a decision
about whether or not you want to come back here and re enable the entry.
Now you mentioned in the original question
about your antimalware that's not listed here,
and that's not listed here because my antimalware tool is Windows Security.
It's already running.
It's part of the operating system.
And in fact, we could take a look over
here on the Services tab, which has a whole bunch of other things
that are potentially running on your system.
You can see many of them are stopped.
Some of them are running,
but one of the ones that is running is this one way down here at the bottom
that I believe should be called Windows Defender.
Microsoft Defender Antivirus service.
That's not something you're going to find
in your startup list because it's the Microsoft service that's doing that.
However,
one of the things that you might find in your startup list is a security tool
that you installed yourself, a different security tool.
Different security tool.
That when Microsoft defender sees you've installed another tool, it steps aside.
It says, okay, this person wanted this other tool because they installed it,
so I'm not going to come into conflict with it.
I'm going to shut down, turn myself off.
If your security software has a listing
here in the startup entries, by all means, leave it running.
You don't want to run the risk of not
being protected because you didn't run something at startup.
Now, I have to be completely clear here that disabling your security software
in startup may or may not impact your security.
Different tools work in different ways.
Some may, in fact,
work the same way as Microsoft does and install themselves as a service.
And the only thing they really have in the startup list here would be
a notification app or a little helper app, but some of them start their primary
function by being here in the start up list.
You don't want to turn that off.
The thing is, we don't know when in doubt, leave it running.
Just let it run.
Now.
The other thing that happens and this is
I'll just call it annoying is that you might go through the process of disabling
one or more entries here and then come back sometime later and find that they've
been re enabled or reinstalled or whatever.
But they're back here impacting your startup.
This can be annoying.
And what it boils down to is some software
is I'll call it so convinced of its own importance that it will use any of several
different opportunities to reassert itself into the startup list.
That can happen either because the software is just monitoring.
The next time you run the software, it says, hey, you disabled my startup entry.
I'm going to re enable it again or more
commonly, the next time you update that software,
that update process may then as part of the process, go through and update,
quote, unquote, update the startup process and re enable it there as well.
It's up to you as to whether or not these are things worth tracking down.
Here's my bottom line, and it really is a question of
you should ask yourself, is all of this really worth it?
My answer is kind of I disable Skype,
I disable Cortana there's some random stuff I have disabled on my main machine.
This is an example machine. On my main
machine list is much, much longer, but it's not something I come back too often.
It's not something
I come back to to see who turned
themselves back on again or after I've installed half a dozen different packages.
I don't look after each one to see what got added to my startup list.
Startup performance is one of those things
where you can improve it the best way to improve it.
The easiest way to improve it that has
benefits far beyond startup is, of course, to replace your existing old HDD,
your hard disk with an SSD that improves startup time dramatically and keeps your
system running faster even after you start it up.
The other is just acceptance.
In other words,
often especially for machines that aren't mine that aren't in my control.
Startup takes a while, so I let it take a while.
I will start the machine and walk away,
or I will sign into the machine and walk away.
Get some coffee, get something to drink, whatever.
Sometimes that's the safest thing to do,
because that way, you know you're not turning off something important.
But the bottom line is I really don't
think it's necessarily worth the time and effort to try and really spend a lot
of time analyzing your startup beyond what I would call the obvious.
And in this example, to me, the obvious things were Cortana and Skype for you.
That might be something else.
I hope this was helpful.
Hope this gives you some ideas,
some places to look at, some things to look for, some decisions,
some data to make some decisions on your own.
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I'm Leo Notenboom, and this is
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