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….
Tags: fast pc, how to make your pc fast, msconfig, startup accelerator
