Managing Startup Programs

Ever wondered why you have lots of icons on your system tray (Fig. 1)? You ask yourself,”Do I need all the programs that reside on my system tray? What would be the benefit of those programs? Lot’s of questions for you to ask but the only thing that I could say is that trim down the number of icons there and you would have a much responsive system.

System Tray Snapshot

How do we take of or remove these icons on your system tray? Every icon on your system tray represents a program that is running in the background. The most common system tray icon is your antivirus icon. These programs are loaded when you login to your account or if you don’t have an account when the computer is loading your desktop. Now don’t you notice that it’s a bit slow sometimes? Well its because this programs load simultaneously and that eats up a lot of resources. There are programs than can rearrange the programs to startup one after the other, but the point of this article is to reduce load up times by removing programs that you don’t need. So how do we do that?

The first method is to look for your Startup folder in the Start menu. Check what are the programs listed on your Startup folder (Fig. 2).

Start --> StartUp

If you see anything listed there check if you really need that program. You can do a google search to know what that program exactly is for.

The next method is to run MSCONFIG. MSCONFIG is a utility builtin to Windows Operating systems except on Windows 2000/NT. In order to run MSCONFIG, click Start -> then type msconfig on the search bar (Fig. 3), and once you see msconfig.exe appear on the top portion of your start menu, right click on it and click run as administrator(Fig. 4).

Fig. 3 : Start - type msconfig on search box

and once you see msconfig.exe appear on the top portion of your start menu, right click on it and click run as administrator(Fig. 4).

Fig. 4 : right click on msconfig.exe and click Run as Administrator

This would run the program msconfigFig. 5). There would be several tabs and one of the tabs would be the StartUp tab. Click on the Startup tab and you will see a list with check marks. These programs that are listed are the programs that also startup when your computer loads up your desktop.

Fig. 5 : Msconfig --> Startup tab

Some of them are really not needed. The most important thing to remember is to google the programs listed and check their use and decide if you really need them to load or not. Always remember to leave your antivirus and firewall program checked if they are listed. Once you have unchecked the programs that you don’t want to load click on apply then click on close. If the computer asks you to restart, agree with the computer’s suggestion.

Msconfig does not delete the programs you have unchecked. It will just prevent it from loading up when you start your computer.

If you have any questions about the article please don’t hesitate to leave a comment…. have a nice day!

Till our next tip….

STOP : 0xDEADDEAD – What the huh?

And if you think there is no stop to those BSODs you see on Windows XP and Windows Vista, here’s one weird BSOD error message. 0xDEADDEAD. How strange isn’t it? Is Microsoft trying to be funny here or what? What’s the deal with this stop error code? So I wore my Sherlock Holmes hat and whipped out my magnifying glass and tried to find the cause of this issue. Most the the systems affected by this BSOD error are DELL Systems the XPS 1330 and XPS 1530 line. Using the microsoft debugger program it spewed out this driver file, NETw5v32.sys. This driver file is part of the beta drivers that Intel is going to release later this year. It is part of the Proset 12.0.0 driver set. The solution to this problem is to rollback the driver or try the drivers that are currently posted right now at support.dell.com. The NETw5v32.sys was purported to support the 3945ABG and 4965AGN adapter, but these adapters are still not in production.
Bug Check 0xDEADDEAD: MANUALLY_INITIATED_CRASH1 <— that is the complete error message. This is usually part of a debugging a driver to be used in windows. It is a manually initiated crash and according to the websites that I read there would usually be a registry that is manually added to cause this crash. Now if your system installed a driver that is still in beta and is still being “DEBUGGED” I guess that would result into this 0xDEADDEAD BSOD.

Any other ideas?

User profile hive corrupted when logging in to Windows Vista

I’ve been getting a lot of calls recently regarding problems when logging in. When a customer logs in he gets the error “The user profile service failed to log on user profile cannot be loaded”. I noticed this problem when a certain windows update was installed on Windows Vista. I haven’t really pinpointed which update that was but there is a solution for this problem. Here are the steps to resolve this issue :
Log on with another administrator user profile or if you don’t have any other and you are the only user do the following:
1.       Turn off computer
2.       Turn on computer and press F8 while you see the DELL logo
3.       On the Windows Advanced Options select Safe Mode
4.       Open the Start Menu and type Regedit on the Start Search field
5.       Go to the following entry:
a.        HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Profile List
6.       There you will find the following information:
7.    On the “.BAK” file you will find an entry with ProfileImagePath with the name of the user
8.    Delete the repeated entry that does not contain “.BAK”
9.    Right click on the other entry and select Rename. Delete the extension .BAK for the original entry.
10.    Exit Regedit
11.    Restart computer.

BSOD 0×8E on an NVidia 8800 Series video card on a Dell XPS systems

Technical support has been getting calls regarding problems with Nvidia video cards. Customers are getting  BSOD errors most of the time 0×0000008E  pointing to  nv4_disp.dll. There are several solutions floating around being used by technical support.

1. Upgrade the BIOS of the XPS system to the latest if there is any available bios update.

2. Downgrade / Upgrade the video card drivers. If you have the latest video card drivers downgrade to about  2 or 3 releases from the latest driver then work your way up. If symptoms persists downgrade to at least 5 releases of the driver from the latest one.

3. Download and install customized/tweaked video drivers. Some of the drivers you could download would be the Omega drivers from www.omegadrivers.net or the Xtreme-G Drivers from www.tweakforce.com

It’s more of a hit and miss situation with these drivers. I’ve seen an article with regards to this issue and that microsoft is suing Nvidia.

If anybody has any other solutions for this issue please post it here. Thank you.

Dell XPS 420 no sound / HDMI port detected

I’ve recently encountered a new problem with one of the Dell XPS systems. The Dell XPS 420 suddenly loses audio output going to the speakers. If you check the sound option in control panel, the only device it detects or shows is the HDMI port. Funny thing about this is that the brand new XPS 420 does not have an HDMI port. Expansion cards installed are ATI TVTuner card and ATI HD 2600 XT video card. Both expansion cards do support Hi-Def output but they don’t have HDMI ports. XPS 420′s audio chip is from Sigmatel. If you reinstall the drivers downloaded from Dell’s website it tells you that the object/device cannot be found. The Dell XPS 420 audio works out of the box, PC-restore sometimes works but eventually it loses the audio again. I am thinking that there is a conflict with drivers on this system. Any ideas?