One of the easiest and most effective ways of streamlining your system is preventing unnecessary programs from starting in the first place.

What you’ll find starting with Windows may surprise you! Many hardware and software vendors enjoy adding junk to the startup. It seems everyone wants to be noticed not just once when you install these items, but over and over again in the form of pop-ups, registration reminders, spyware, and items sitting in the tray and so on.

99% of the people out there just don’t know any better and allow this to happen.

You may read others telling you to disable your antivirus program and running a scan weekly, therefore freeing up a chunk of memory and regaining a bit of processing power. I for one do not recommend doing this. For what little you gain in speed and resources, you risk the possibility of a serious infection, one that may ultimately render your system useless and forcing to to rebuilt from scratch.

We’re not talking about hardware damage, but system file corruption, corruption to the point where it’ll become necessary to re-install everything!

First, check your STARTUP folder. Click START, and under All Programs look for that folder. You can remove shortcuts from here by right-clicking, and choosing DELETE.

In addition to this, start MSCONFIG, click the Startup tab. There you’ll see what starts as Windows starts. Uncheck each item you choose to not start. Reboot when prompted.

So what do I remove from starting? Good question. A list can be found here offsite, and it’s very instrumental in identifying programs.

Personally I choose the trial and error method. After making absolutely sure to leave my antivirus running, I remove everything that I’m sure is not necessary. From there, I take a wait and see attitude.