My Windows 10 system is starting to really drag and I’m wondering if there are too many programs starting up on boot. How can I see and disable those I don’t want?
A Windows system slow down can be caused by a number of things, only one of which is having too darn many background and utility tasks running. Before you check that, I always recommend that you scan for malware and viruses as they’re a common culprit for having your CPU cycles stolen. All clean from Windows Defender? How about disk space? If your computer is running critically low on disk space — you want to always have at least 10% to 20% free as a minimum if possible — it can really bog down the computer too. If you have that problem time to clean house. Here’s a useful article from Microsoft on some digital spring cleaning tips: Tips to Free up Disk Space.
Okay, got those two out of the way. Now let’s have a look at what programs and helper utilities you have launch and running when you’re using your Windows 10 computer, because after a while, those can definitely get to be quite a burden on the computer. Used to be, Microsoft would recommend that you actually press Control-Alt-Delete to get to what’s known as the Task Manager but we live in more enlightened times, so simply start by searching with Cortana for “task manager”:
There it is, no fuss, no hassle. It’s a “Desktop app”, as shown, so click or tap on it to launch the program.
Now, don’t panic. It’s going to look very, very minimal:
At this moment, the only program I have running is Microsoft Edge, but though it sure doesn’t look like it, there’s a world of information hiding in this program. Click or tap on “More details” at the bottom to see what’s going on…
Here you can see some of the background tasks running, including ABBYY network license server and Bonjour Service, along with 4 background processes related to Cortana. Look at CPU and Memory closely on these tasks and you’ll see they have very minimal impact on the system. This screen answers the question “what programs are impacting my performance right now?”
To see what programs and utilities are launched on startup, click on the “Startup” tab along the top.
I pay very close attention to this list, so you’ll notice (in the third column) that many of these are disabled. That means that they’re on the list, but don’t actually get started up. For many helper apps with programs like Google Chrome or iCloud Drive, it’s no big deal at all and these just launch the first time you actually run that program instead. In fact, you’ll see on close examination that I only have four of these enabled at all: QuickFinder Index Scheduler, VMware Tools Core Service, Windows Defender notification server and Wondershare Studio.
With that in mind, check to see the assessed impact on startup in the fourth column. Only VMware Tools Core Service is considered to be high impact. Good to know, that’s one to look at carefully and ascertain if it’s really, really necessary to have running. In this instance, since I’m running within a VMware instance, yes, it’s pretty critical so I won’t touch it.
But Wondershare Studio is one I can disable since I don’t often run any of the slick Wondershare utility programs and they can launch helper apps on demand anyway. To disable it, I simple click or tap to select it, and the Disable button becomes something I can select:
Not only that, but the inverse is true too. If I decided that I do want to have iTunes ready to rock any time I launch the program, I can re-enable its helper app with a similar process of selecting, then clicking on the button:
That’s it. Be judicious with disabling things in case they’re critical (especially anything from Microsoft) and don’t be shy about using a quick Google search to double check something does what you think it does.
Then reboot and hopefully your Windows 10 system will be running faster!
While you’re here, please don’t miss the chance to explore the rest of our extensive Windows help articles!
This will also improve your boot times. As a side note, no critical applications should be listed there. So, there’s really no need to worry about disabling an important program from starting up.