My PC boot-upis sluggish. I want to eliminate as many items as possible from startup list. 1 person needs an answerI do too

What programs MUST be in startup list?

There is no definative answer to that without detailed knowledge of your system and installed programsIf your PC has sufficient memory and free disk space, unless an auto start program is an 'iffy' one it should make much difference.Any programs that are shown in the Task bar, after starting, if you check their options, there may be a setting to stop autoloading.Depending which Anti Virus / Firewall app you have, some can be resource hogs

On Fri, 16 Jul 2010 14:16:00 +0000, georgeinirvingf wrote:My PC boot-upis sluggish. I want to eliminate as many items as possible from startup list.To cover your question in the subject line first, there are nonethat must be in the startup list. Which ones you start automaticallyis up to you (although almost certainly you should want your securitysoftware to start automatically).Wanting to "eliminate as many items as possible from startup list" isvery much the wrong thing to do, as far as I'm concerned. The issuewith startup programs is which, not how many. Here's my standard reply on this subject:My personal view is that the attention many people pay to how long ittakes to boot is unwarranted. Assuming that the computer's speed isotherwise satisfactory, it is not generally worth worrying about. Mostpeople start their computers once a day or even less frequently. Inthe overall scheme of things, even a few minutes to start up isn'tvery important. Personally I power on my computer when I get up in themorning, then go get my coffee. When I come back, it's done booting. Idon't know how long it took to boot and I don't care.However if you do want to address it, it may be because of whatprograms start automatically, and you may want to stop some of themfrom starting that way. On each program you don't want to startautomatically, check its Options to see if it has the choice not tostart (make sure you actually choose the option not to run it, notjust a "don't show icon" option). Many can easily and best be stoppedthat way. If that doesn't work, run MSCONFIG from the Start | Runline, and on the Startup tab, uncheck the programs you don't want tostart automatically.However, if I were you, I wouldn't do this just for the purpose ofrunning the minimum number of programs. Despite what many people tellyou, you should be concerned, not with how many of these programsyou run, but which. Some of them can hurt performance severely, butothers have no effect on performance.Don't just stop programs from running willy-nilly. What you should dois determine what each program is, what its value is to you, and whatthe cost in performance is of its running all the time. You can getmore information about these with internet searches and asking aboutspecifics here.Once you have that information, you can make an intelligent informeddecision about what you want to keep and what you want to get rid of.          Ken Blake