Disable Startup Items to Speed up Your PC

[avatar user="Jamie Poindexter" size="thumbnail" align="left" link="attachment" /]byJamie Poindexter|Jun 23, 2020|Jamie's Tech Corner,Our blogThat super-fast top of the line computer slowing down? It happens to all of us, as we install more and more programs everything tries to startup at the same time and now you are stuck waiting longer and longer before you can use your PC.When a new program is installed depending on the type it may automatically add itself to the startup so each time you power on or login to the PC it will launch itself to be ready when you need it. Issue is we may not want say Spotify or Adobe Acrobat launching each time since you might not use it often. Microsoft has a tool to fix that.To view and edit the startup items on Windows 10 right click the task bar and choose “Task Manager”. Then click on the tab labeled “Startup”. Here you will see every program in the startup list. If you sort by status you can view the enabled and any that were disabled from starting up. Now comes the fun part, identifying the ones you don’t need and disabling them. Browse through the list and see what you do and don’t use on a daily basic. To be clear if you accidently disable something in this list you are not going to hurt anything. Worse case the program just wont open on startup forcing you to run it manually. Then you can re-enable it at anytime if you like.

Programs like Java and Adobe are likely to be found in this list as well as Teams. If you don’t use Teams for instance there is no need in it wasting precious CPU and memory (and time) starting up each time. Are you a gamer? Steam is a big one as well, if you are like me you might play games a couple times a week so its best to leave it disabled as well. Keep in mind that some programs that startup are checking for things like updates and automatically install them when found so disabling does remove that convenience in turn for speed.