Free Autoruns Utility Lets You See a List of All Your PC's Startup Programs

An essential utility every PC owner and user needs, whether you are a seasoned technological expert or a PC newbie, is a utility that displays what programs load whenever you start up your PC. When you turn on your personal computer, as it starts, after going through all of the various self checking and boot up test, there is a school of digital suckerfish programs, all of whom wish to attach themselves to your PC and its memory and start up automatically.

Knowledge of what is in this school of digital suckerfish programs and what they do is important for the health and safety of your PC. There may be a number of unnecessary programs loading which will just sit there and use up precious Random Access Memory (RAM) which could slow down your PC and limit needed resources. There could be hidden malware which will in time disable your PC. There may be remnant application leftover from programs which you uninstalled that are taking up hard drive space. Without you doing some detective work you are likely to never discover these. A utility which displays what programs load whenever you start up your PC is the tool you need to help you uncover these details.

Msconfig, an operating system application, is where the lists of every program that loads at start up is maintained. To the casual untrained PC user, the information it provides is too cryptic to be understood and used. A great free utility which will provide a clear description of this list and its information is Autoruns. Autoruns is a program made available from Microsoft's own Windows Sysinternals. Auto runs provides you with an easy to understand viewable list so you can see every start up program. It segments the list in subcategories such as Boot Execute, Drivers, and Scheduled Tasks. It includes a search function to help you make sense of the baffling assortment of programs and lets you see how some hitchhiking applications are slowing down your PC's startup.

If this is your first time running Autoruns, a lot of what you will see will appear archaic and non-understandable. To help you with this, each Autoruns listed item can initiate a Google search of that item so you can obtain information regarding its importance or lack thereof. You also have the option to disable and delete entries so they will not load automatically with future startups. Please be cautious when utilizing this part of Autoruns. It is recommended you only use the disable and delete capabilities after you have thoroughly completed the necessary research on a start up application and understand its purpose. A wrong decision with this option may render some of your software applications inoperable or worse yet, disable your PC.

Autoruns is a great little utility and will help you stay on top of what is going on inside your PC. You can download your free copy from Sysinternals web site at: http://www.systernals.com. One point I can not over emphasis; be careful when utilizing the disable and delete capability of Autoruns. Make sure you know what the purpose is of the application you are disabling or deleting.

Resource: Autoruns - Sysinternals - http://www.systernals.com

Tags: autoruns, sysinternals, PC auto start programs, msconfig, free software