Whether you’re on a Windows system or a Macintosh, there’s little more frustrating than the parade of apps that seem to start up every time you boot your computer. Worse, many of them are hidden behind-the-scenes, little “helper apps” that enable certain functions, listen for incoming queries, etc. For some, it’s almost impossible to figure out what they do and some of those might well be malware of some sort of another. It stinks!

Even benign programs like Skype, a very helpful video chat application, can exhibit the same sort of behaviors, starting up even if you don’t have an account and sitting on the Taskbar on your new Windows 10 system even if you never want to use the program. Any one program likely doesn’t have that much impact on your performance, but when you get 4, 5 or more starting up automatically, that’s going to have an impact on how your computer works.

Let’s just focus on your specific complaint, however. Skype automatically starting up on Microsoft Windows 10.

Start up your system and here’s what’ll be staring at you:

Logically, it seems like one of the menus should offer up a “don’t launch on next restart” or similar, but there’s nothing like that. The closest you get is this:

Choose “Connection options…” though, and you’ll find that it offers some obscure settings, but nothing to disable that pesky autostart:

So that’s a dead end.

And now, the bad news: You can’t actually disable auto-start without having — and logging in — to your Skype account. I suppose you could create one, set Skype to not launch automatically, then delete the account, but it’s a strange and quite frankly annoying option!

If you have an account, log in. If you don’t, well, you’ll need to create one.

Now once you’re logged in, there are oodles of additional menu options and settings.

For this, you’ll want the “Tools” menu:

Finally! In “Options…” you’ll find what you seek:

There it is, smack dab in the “General settings”: Start Skype when I start Windows.

Uncheck that box, click “Save” on the bottom, quit Skype and you shouldn’t have it bother you next time you start up your computer.

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