I work on a IBM thinkpad that just seems too slow. I looked online and there was a comment that this computer starts 25 different programs on boot. I have a whole row of icons at the bottom of the screen that I question if they need to be there. What can I delete from the startup process? How (I think I could find a way on my own, but maybe there is a free software program out there that helps or ???)?
Is there a way to find out what is booting up so I can paste that list here?
If you’re on XP, go to Start > Run and type msconfig. That’ll show you, among other things, a list of the programs that are set to start automatically at boot.
Win Xp? If so, I use ccleaner, available for free at www.ccleaner.com. It’s primarily a handy disk tidy utility, but has a function under the tools menu to manage your startup.
There are a number of ways to tweak a tired Windows PC, but nothing works better (IMO) than a format and reinstall. It’s drastic medicine, for sure, but is more reliable than tweaking and cleaning up, in my experience.
Of course, before attempting it, you should back up all your data and ensure you have installation disks (with license keys where appropriate) for all the software you wish to keep, plus drivers for your hardware (most of the driver stuff will be taken care of if your Windows CD is a disk image-based ‘factory restore’.
If you still want to go the cleanup route, a program called HijackThis (intended to identify malware, but works fine for analysing startup programs) will tell you what’s being fired up at boot time.
Another thing that can make your computer sluggish and slow to start is redundant entries in the device manager - less likely to be an issue with Laptops than desktops, but perhaps still worth a try. (Usual disclaimers apply… at the very least, set a system restore point before following these instructions):
Click Start>Run and type cmd <enter>
In the command window, type SET DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1 <enter> (type exactly as shown here, or it just won’t work)
Type START DEVMGMT.MSC <enter> (the Device Manager window will launch)
Click View>Show Hidden Devices
Expand each entry in turn and take a look - pretty much anything that is ‘greyed out’ can be removed, especially if it is a duplicate of another non-greyed entry. I tend not to bother removing scattered greyed-out networking stuff.
Mangetout, I did all that, and I don’t see any ‘grey’ but I do see duplicates. e.g. under Display Adapters there are two ‘910GML Express Chipset Family’ and under Monitors there are 3 ‘Default’ 2 ‘Generic’ and 2 ‘Thinkpad Display’. Delete or leave?
I think that msconfig will take care of all of that as well. You can check and uncheck things you want to run at startup and you already have it on your computer. Again, it is Start - Run - msconfig
If you have duplicates, but none of them are ‘grey’ (actually faint), then leave them alone - in the case of your display adaptor, it’s probably a dual display model - one for the LCD screen and one for the VGA/S Video output, so it can display a different thing on the external output.
I’m surprised you didn’t see anything that could be removed; makes me wonder if you might have inadvertently added a space before/after the equals sign in the line SET DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1 - if you type it as SET DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES = 1, it does nothing.
You can experiment with it if you want. One thing to do is hit control-alt-delete and look at the Task List. Select Processes and then sort by user name. Any of the ones owned by you are almost certainly not system critical. Go to misconfig and kill them at startup based on a best guess. Restart and see if anything big is missing like an antivirus program. If there is, you can re-enable it. Most likely, most things you think are useless will be. You can always re-enable things at any time so there isn’t much risk if you use even a little common sense.
If nothing else, you can simply google for them, and often find out what they are. In that case, I think you meant ezejmnap.exe, which turns out to be the “easy eject utility”
The site for that first link, http://www.processlibrary.com/ , is one of several that allow you to look up processes and dlls by name to find out what they are. You can go through that site with your list and find out what a lot of the stuff is.
You can get sort of an idea of what to disable by googling the name of the program. But you can get rid of things from adobe, winamp, apple, quicktime. If you have an ipod you might not want to remove ipod services but I do. It seems to only autorun itunes when you plug in the ipod. I would leave in things that are for your sound cards graphics cards, anti virus and firewall and things from microsoft.
I really dislike advice to reformat the drive and reinstall windows for 3 reasons. 1) you have to reinstall all you other programs. 2) unless you built the computer yourself the reinstall media provided by the manufacturer is often not easily used to reinstall a bare machine and finally this problem came about because of other programs you installed which you will probably want again thus you do a lot of work to end up in the same place.
I think I inserted enough qualifiers to cover this.
<shrug>
In my experience, image-based ‘factory restore’ disks are easier than ordinary installation media. - sometimes so easy that if you restart the machine with the disk in the drive, it happens when you didn’t mean it to. They usually include all of the drivers necessary to get the hardware at least working(although they might not be the latest versions).
In which case, no amount of cleaning up is going to help either.
But I think you’re at least partly wrong on this; slowdown in Windows is very often caused by residual components/devices/registry entries left behind by applications that have been installed and subsequently uninstalled - often trial versions. Some of the registry cleaning utilities can deal with this, to some extent, but there’s nothing more effective than a bare metal install - which I fully admit is a very drastic action and is not everybody’s cup of tea.
What I want to see is a utility similar to Windows Restore that will keep a restore file indefinitely (rather than just the most recent ones). Ideally, you could restore to that version just prior to any permanent software installs, then update the restore file. That would “autoclean” your windows install and keep it from getting unnecessarily bogged down.
That’s what I did last time I did a bare-metal wipe on the machine I’m posting this from - it’s got a heck of a lot of software on it that I use all the time, so I made sure I had install media for everything I wanted, wiped the drive, carefully installed all my software, set up my email account and a few other things, then imaged the drive before actually using the machine in earnest. I’ve never had cause to go back to that image again yet, but it’s nice to know that in the event of a big problem, I can go back to a working system with everything I absolutely need in the space of about an hour.
The big disadvantage that this approach has over System restore is that restoring to an image wipes out actual work; documents, pictures, emails, etc - so those would all need to be carefully backed up. System restore leaves them intact.
I concede that wipe/reinstall is about the most drastic advice that could be offered in this context (actually let’s change that to *the most drastic valid option - I’m sure we’ve seen more drastic ones that aren’t viable, valid or sensible in the context - for example… ‘get a Mac’ or ‘install Linux’).