Written by tc | Posted in Computers and Tech |

By using the Windows startup manager, it should be possible to improve the start/boot performance of most PCs. In this article, we’ll look at how to use the System Configuration utility to manually modify which services and programs are run at boot time.

The System Configuration utility is one of the lesser used computer fix programs supplied with the Windows operating system. This is possibly due to the fact that it does not appear within the Start menu of programs. It has tabs for modifying operating system settings relating to a number of areas. To modify startup program lists, do the following:

1. Launch the application by going to the Start menu/Run program and entering msconfig.
2. When the application launches up, go to the Startup tab to view the list of programs enabled to initialize as Windows is starting up.
3. Use the check boxes provided to which programs run. You should be careful to only deactivate applications you are familiar with and are certain are non-critical to the safe running of your PC (i.e. do not disable any of your anti-virus programs from being updated or run).
4. Save each of the changes that you have made, close down the application and reboot the operating system to see if it changes have benefited the performance.

An additional check that you can make, aside from running the Windows Startup manager, is to try and improve the performance of those applications you leave enabled. The easiest way to do this is to check for updates (e.g. patch updates or new versions) to each of these programs. You could target applications that use a lot of RAM memory by identifying these external file names in the Task Manager utility (processes tab/mem usage column).

If you do not feel like using the Windows Startup manager then you could alternatively resort to shutting down the PC in standby or hibernation mode instead of doing a full reboot every single time. Hibernation and standby modes saves snapshots of running applications and operating system programs to the disk when shutting down the PC. These snapshots are then reloaded when the computer restarts in order to speed up the startup process.

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