I’ve had my computer for about a year, and I think that it has gotten slower. Friends told me this is because of the resident programs that are eating up memory. I hit “ctrl-alt-del” to see what is running, and there is a list of things that I don’t recognize such as “brqikmon” and “updtray”. There is a list of about 20 such things. Is there any way other than trial and error to see what I can unload? Is there anyway to permanantly unload it?
The trick won’t be in unloading them this time, it will be in keeping them from loading in the future.
All sorts of programs these days like to load helpers that run in the background until called on to do something. Most of them are pretty polite and just stick a shortcut in your “Startup” folder. Ruder ones may actually modify your registry. Very old ones might modify your win.ini or autoexec.bat files.
My advice: run msconfig and start by turning off the things you can readily identify. Selectively is the key word here. Turn ONE thing off, then reboot and see what’s different. Then move on to something else.
Things you can’t identify, do a search for and see if you can figure out by their location what they might do. Things in your “Quicken” folder, for example, probably have something to do with Quicken :). Turn those off selectively, too.
Enjoy!
Sometimes if I type in the name of one in Google, I will find a site that gives specific information.