Improve the speed of Windows startup with Microsoft Autoruns

First, go to the Windows Sysinternals web page to download Autoruns. Click the ‘Download Autoruns and Autorunsc’ link and, if the File Download Security Warning dialogue box appears, click Save and choose a location for the downloaded file. Firefox users should select Save File to save the download to Firefox’s default download folder. Now double click the downloaded file (Autoruns.zip) and click on the ‘Extract all files’ link. In Windows XP this is at the left of the Windows Explorer pane, and in Windows 7 and Vista it is on the menu bar. In XP, when the Compressed Files wizard starts, click Next, click Next again and click Finish. A new folder named Autoruns containing the extracted files will appear. In Windows 7 or Vista, click Extract instead. In the new folder double-click the program file named Autoruns.exe to launch it.

Click Agree on the licence agreement and select the Everything tab. By default, Autoruns hides any items that are necessary for Windows to run correctly (click Options, and the ‘Hide Windows Entries’ box should be ticked), but it can also hide all items created by Microsoft. For the moment we are interested only in items added by companies other than Microsoft, so we will enable this feature. Click Options, choose ‘Hide Microsoft and Windows Entries’ (the Hide Windows Entries item will become greyed out) and press the F5 key to refresh all the tabbed lists simultaneously.

Clearing the tick box next to an entry’s name prevents the program from running at startup. To delete an entry permanently, right-click it and choose Delete from the pop-up menu. In Windows 7 and Vista an ‘Autoruns Access Denied’ message may appear if you do this. Click the Run as Administrator button to rectify this before trying again (you can also restart Autoruns in Administrator mode by clicking File followed by Run as Administrator). We recommend disabling items rather than deleting them – the effect is the same, but disabled items can always be re-enabled if needed.

Information about an entry can be seen in the Description column and the bottom pane of the program window. Double-clicking an entry opens its location in the Windows Registry, except for items in the Scheduled Tasks tab (when the Windows Task Scheduler is launched instead). Right-clicking an item and choosing Properties shows more details about the associated file. Choose Search Online from the pop-up menu and a web search will be launched for that entry. This can help you find out more about an item whose function is not obvious.

The Compare feature is great for keeping track of any changes made. Before making alterations, click File and choose Save. Type a memorable name for the file and click Save. Now, if you’re making changes to entries, click File and choose Compare. Navigate to the file saved earlier and click Open. Any entries that have been changed (but not deleted) since the comparison file was first saved will be highlighted in green. Use this feature before and after installing software to see if any new startup items have been added, for example.

Invalid startup entries are commonly left behind when programs are uninstalled. These display ‘File not found’ in the description in the rightmost Image Path column. (If the full description isn’t visible, click and drag the faint vertical separator bar to the right of the Image Path label.) The best way to deal with invalid entries is to disable them by clearing the relevant tick box. Close Autoruns and restart the PC, then launch Autoruns and compare against the original configuration (Step 5) to double-check they remain disabled.

To search entries, press Control (Ctrl) and F together and type in a search term. Alternatively, click one of the tabs to see items grouped together by function. Here, the Logon tab is one of the most useful, containing everything in the Windows Startup folder as well as Registry entries. On a new installation of Windows with no programs installed this section would be empty. As such, you can safely disable all the items here to see if it improves startup times. If it does, re-enable the items one by one, restarting the PC each time, until you identify the cause of the slowness.

Some programs add items to the context (right-click) menus in Windows Explorer. While these can be useful, they can sometimes hang around even after the related program has been uninstalled. These can also be disabled easily using Autoruns. Click the Explorer tab and look for the section with the heading HKLM\Software\Classes\*\ShellEx\ContextMenuHandlers. Any context menu entries will be listed here, and clearing the tick box next to one will immediately disable it. Some context menu entries only appear when browsing a particular folder: these entries can be found in the HKCU\Software\Classes\*\ShellEx\ContextMenuHandlers section.

Troublesome Internet Explorer toolbars can also be zapped quickly with Autoruns. Click the Internet Explorer tab and look for the section labelled HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Toolbar. Any non-Microsoft toolbars will be listed here and can be disabled (Internet Explorer needs to be restarted). To see Microsoft toolbars as well, click Options, remove the tick from ‘Hide Microsoft and Windows Entries’ and press the F5 key to refresh the list. If launching a program doesn’t open the expected application, it is worth checking the Image Hijacks tab.

Services often cause startup and performance problems. Click on the Services tab and check through the list for unwanted items. As with startup items, a brand-new (clean) Windows installation will show no entries here. Be very suspicious of services with nonsense names and no description or publisher name, as they could be malicious software. Disabling an item will stop it loading, but Windows will need to be restarted for the change to take effect. To troubleshoot problems with services, follow the same procedure for items listed under the Logon tab (see Step 7). Finally, we don’t recommend disabling items in the Drivers tab as this could lead to problems if a necessary driver is disabled.