Speed up my PC #1 – Clearing Startup Items with MSCONFIG

In this series, we are going to focus on how to speed up your computer system. I don’t know about you, but personally I hate a slow computer! Having a slow computer is certainly bad for business and personal use. Extra long loading times, crashing and general system stability issues cause numerous headaches, stress, and reduced productivity… nobody wants that!

Over the next few weeks I will be building up this series of guides to help you speed up your computer. With our easy step by step instructions, you can have a fast computer in no time. Even if you are already an IT professional, you still might want to read these guides as you may see a couple of tricks you were not aware of.

Today at revHardware for our very first “Speed up my PC” guide I am going to show you the first step in speeding up your PC by clearing out extra, unused and unnecessary startup items. For this guide we will be using a very simple program that is already on your computer. It is called MSCONFIG. This program allows you to selectively enable/disable services and startup items.

The problem with startup items is over time, you say buy a new digital camera, a new cellphone or PDA with synchronization software, change email clients, install games etc, all of the previous programs that were starting up, to help you use those devices and software packages are STILL starting up. Even though they are totally unnecessary.

You will also find if you are on a laptop computer, most manufacturers bundle many extra programs on your laptop to make extra features available, for example to easily take snapshots with your webcam, or to display the volume when you press the volume buttons on your laptop. If you aren’t too worried about these, you can disable these also.

After you have gotten rid of the startup items that are no longer being used, your system will be ready to use from boot much faster, and there will be much less overhead on your system resources, meaning your RAM usage will be a lot lower, and most likely your CPU usage also. It’s basically a free upgrade of your computer!

So now that we have covered the basics, let’s get into this!

Step One:

Ensure you are running at least Windows ME, 2000, XP, Vista or Windows 7. Then navigate to your Start Menu and click “Run”. On Vista/7 type “Run” into the “Search programs and files” box then hit “Enter” on your keyboard.

In the Run dialogue type in “msconfig” (without quotes) and click “Ok”.

Step Two:

Now you are inside MSCONFIG we are firstly going to go through your systems services. Services are generally drivers that are used to control additional hardware’s on your computer, but sometimes can even be nasty viruses hiding on your machine.

Click on the “Services” tab. You will be presented with a very large list of services, but don’t worry, we are going to hide some of these. Click on “Hide all Microsoft services”, by doing this you will also protect yourself from accidentally disabling critical services that are required for your system to run.

Now you will see a much smaller list of services. Caution is the rule of thumb here. If you do not know what the service is, enter the service name into Google and ensure you are using quotation marks, for example “ATI External Event Utility” is a part of the ATI Catalyst software for your Video Card and is perfectly safe to disable.

What I normally do here is disable basically everything that I no longer use or do not have any use for. Keeping in mind you MUST keep your Antivirus and commonly used Hardware Drivers, printer drivers and iPod drivers for example.

Below I have listed the most common items I see on a day-to-day basis repairing PC’s that are safe to disable. Use the below list as a guide to work out if you require these services, if you don’t, disable them.

• “Ati External Event Utility” and “Ati Hotkey Poller” – these are safe to disable if you do not require extra ATI Catalyst features
• “Event Log Watch”
• “Machine Debug Manager”
• “NVIDIA Driver Helper Service”
• “NVIDIA Steroscopic 3D Driver Service”
• “Steam Client Service” – You don’t need Steam loading at startup, disabling this is a big saving!
• “PnkBstrA” – if you don’t use PunkBuster anti-cheat software
• Anything that’s made by “Cyberlink” – probably safe to disable if you do not use this software often.
• “Google Software Updater” – not really necessary
• “Windows Cardspace” – not used often
• “Microsoft Office Diagnostics Service” – highly unlikely you will ever need this
• “Office Source Engine”
• “Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service” – if you do not share your media, disable it
• “Windows Defender” – if you have a good antivirus and anti spyware already, disable
• “iPod Service” – disable unless you own an iPod or plan to get one.
• “Java Quick Starter” – simply helps Java load quicker, disable

Step Three:

Now that we have disabled all of the surplus services on our machine, let’s move on to startup items. Click on the “Startup” tab.

Here you can be a little more bold with your removal, as long as you keep your Antivirus and programs you want to startup every time you turn on your computer, you will generally be fine.

Skype, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, AIM and several other instant messaging programs will all start up automatically, every time you start your PC. If you have several programs like this on your machine, you will certainly notice a delay in startup. Personally I recommend only starting up the messenger you use regularly, disable the rest and only start them up when you want ot talk to those people.

You may also find many programs like the “EA Download Manager”, “PunkBuster”, “Steam” and several other gaming programs that will start up every time you turn on your PC. You most likely do not require these every single time you use your PC, so disable them and manually run them from your start menu when you want to use them.

After you have removed these surplus items, restart your computer and admire the results! You will find your computer now load’s faster, and programs will load faster also.

If you are unsure about a certain program, or service feel free to post in our forums and one of our experts will let you know if it is safe or not to remove.

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