I am seeing my machine's memory slowly becoming more and more clogged with
more and more processes. How do I see what is launching them and how can I
prevent them from launching on startup?
Use task manager to see what's running, then research what each one is to
decide if you want it. Here are some research sites.
Research sites
www.google.com
http://www.answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist.htm
http://castlecops.com/StartupList.html
http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_index.htm
http://www.theeldergeek.com/services_guide.htm
Once you know decide which processes/programs you don't want to run at
startup first step should be to check in the options for the program you
don't want to start and see if there is a setting to tell it not to run at
startup. The next step is to remove any entries you don't want from the two
startup folders:
C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Start Menu\Programs\Startup
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup
For anything else uncheck their entries in the startup tab of msconfig:
Start | Run | Msconfig | Ok
Another option is to remove the reference to them from one of these keys in
the registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce
Make sure you have a backup of the registry using a program like ERUNT
before making any changes to the registry.
ERUNT
http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/
http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/erunt.txt
