Speeding up your boot process – Windows

Microsoft Configuration wizard is one tool you can use to improve your systems boot time. This tip utilizes the msconfig utility.

1. Go to Start»Run(WIN+R) and type “msconfig” , the Microsoft System Configuration Utility will pop up.

2. Select the “STARTUP” tab. This will show you a list of programs that will automatically start when your system boots and if the unnecessary ones are there your start up time is gonna increase a lot.

3. The trick here is to remove any unwanted entries from here.

Un-checking the programs is where you need to be cautious. Make sure that you don’t remove your systems sound driver, Graphics driver or other important programs. Almost all of the services can be removed actually. But if there are some programs provided by your graphics card, Sound card or your Laptop provider like DELL please make sure it won’t affect your systems working. You can easily figure out the other removed ones also by either looking at the name or the path. But here what stays checked is important. “igfxtray” can be removed (the tray icon for Intel graphic accelerator – present only for Intel boards with on-board graphics enabled) “igfxpers.exe” is related to graphics driver..

I have found that some programs are commonly present on most systems which can be removed from startup safely, they are

hkcmd : Intel hot key manager (it can be removed but Windows Hot Keys won’t work)
realsched : Real player’s memory resident service (some crap)
ctfmon : monitors the active windows and provides text input service support for speech recognition, handwriting recognition, keyboard, translation, and other alternative user input technologies
Yahoo***, Google***, Nero***, Acro*** are all tray icons which can be removed

After some experience you will be able to recognize viruses that add themselves to the startup list directly by seeing the name. For more on preventing viruses please read the Series Viruses dealing with the worst.

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8. How to view all drives, Disk Management under Windows