How to Trade Unwanted Processes for PC Speed

Sometimes you might notice that your PC has been acting a bit sluggish, and you just ran your antivirus program recently, as well as did a defragment on your hard drive. The answer may lie in having too many processes running in the background.

If you have ever tried to politely listen to your boss tell a detailed story while you were also trying to read your email, you'll notice you really can't do both without having to slow down or even stop altogether. This is roughly what the computer is going through: too many things to do at the same time! Sure, you can buy even more memory, but it makes sense to go through the cheaper route first, and possibly eliminate unnecessary programs from running without your knowledge. Here are two ways to go:

1) With No Restarting - Look at your Taskbar. In most Windows PC's (98 and after) this is found along the bottom of the desktop. Look to the bottom-right corner of the screen. You'll probably see the clock, a speaker icon and a few more. If you can click the arrow button (it usually looks like a less-than symbol "Right click on each icon, and select "Exit" to turn off these memory-squatters.

Warning:While you may eliminate these running programs to speed up your current session, you may have to do it again when you restart. If you really don't use those extra programs, you can always choose to uninstall them using the Add or Remove Programs utility in the Control Panel. The upside is that you don't have to be logged in as Administrator to do this.

2) With Restarting - This is definitely more involved, because it may involve some trial-and-error, and you might disable a few things you didn't mean to. But usually you can also un-disable them this way. And you don't have to keep repeating this each time you log in.

First, make sure you can log in as the Administrator. Make sure you close any programs running at the moment. Click on the Start menu, and select "Run..." When the little window with the text box appears, type 'msconfig' nd press 'Enter.' When the MS Configuration utility comes up, click on the Startup tab.
You will see a number of items in a list each next to a checkbox. Likely several, if not most, of those boxes are checked. To err on the side of caution: find recognizable ones that definitely resemble the names of the programs you don't want hogging the background, and uncheck them.

Click on OK. You will be asked to restart. Do so at this point, making sure to close any programs you had open. When you restart and your desktop appears, a warning message will pop up, saying that Windows noticed you have altered some startup settings. Click the checkbox ("Don't show this again") and pick OK.

At this point you will notice that on the right-hand side of the taskbar, there will be fewer icons the computer is juggling in memory. But more importantly, you will notice your computer is running a little faster.