Lean up Windows 7 with Msconfig

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Most people are blissfully unaware of all the absolute JUNK that gets run when Windows starts up, mostly due to registry entries installed by various programs, drivers, and what not.

Much of this junk can be safely disabled. You can use Msconfig to do it. Here’s how:

Hit the Windows Start button at the lower left side of your Taskbar. Click RUN, then enter “msconfig” and click OK.

You’ll see four Tabs – the one you want is “Startup”. You can start disabling items by unchecking them. Some items will be automatically reinstalled on the next startup by windows or by necessary drivers. But you can disable a lot, and that means less memory usage and less resource-hogging.

Here are the first two screens of mine:

msconfig1

 

msconfig2

You can see that I have most of it (from the first screen) and all of them (on the second screen) disabled, along with even more on the third screen (not shown).

I could care less about Adobe Updater, Itunes, Zune and whatever. If I need to run Itunes, I plug my iPhone into the USB, and run ITunes. It will say that the Apple Mobile Device Service is not running. So what do I do? I go into Services and start the booger, and everything is fine. I have it set to “Manual”.  I absolutely do not need this service running and hogging resources on my machine when I’m not updating my iPhone. Same with Zune and a hundred other useless programs including Google Update, which does not behave well even if turned off in msconfig (Are you listening, Google? How about lets make our stuff user-friendly?)

Lean up your machine. I guarantee, you’ll be a happier developer.

Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

  1. Unknown10:35 AM

    Good post, but I don´t see the Windows7 part here, this works in Vista and Xp...

    ReplyDelete
  2. peterbromberg11:23 AM

    All the stuff discussed and the screenshots are from Windows 7

    ReplyDelete

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