How do I know which start up items are safe to disable?

[soarwitheagles]

Hi again everyone!

Well, after re-reading Eric's post on how to make Windows XP fast and stable, I realized maybe I need to look at my start up items in the system configuration utility.

Well, here is my question:

How do I know which start up items are safe to disable?

I realize Eric says leave the antivirus and the firewall on...

But how do I recognize these and is everyone sure that if I disable everything else, my compute will still work?

It me, Freddy

 

[Eric1]

Some questions to ask yourself first. Have you installed anything recently that is in your task bar that you don't use or need? Also it's not just your startup items that can slow you down but services running as well. Under the services tab it should show the programs running such as AVG anti virus, Ad-Aware etc. There is alot of services that Windows needs to operate correctly so be careful of what you disable. If you don't know what it is then don't disable it. Also if you don't need or use chat which always starts with windows that should be safe to disable. If it has a system extension then it is usually a system file. leave it alone. I hope I have not confused you any further.

 

[soarwitheagles]

Some questions to ask yourself first. Have you installed anything recently that is in your task bar that you don't use or need? Also it's not just your startup items that can slow you down but services running as well. Under the services tab it should show the programs running such as AVG anti virus, Ad-Aware etc. There is alot of services that Windows needs to operate correctly so be careful of what you disable. If you don't know what it is then don't disable it. Also if you don't need or use chat which always starts with windows that should be safe to disable. If it has a system extension then it is usually a system file. leave it alone. I hope I have not confused you any further.

Eric, ok, thank you for your good advice. I think I best not take the risk because there are a lot of items that I have no clue as to what they are.

Keep up the good work!!!!

Freddy

 

[Osiris]

backup.........


Ummm....Startup tab under msconfig

It IS safe to disable everything but your antivirus and firewall if you use one, even if you don't know what it is, you can still disable it. There should be nothing in the startup folder that is critical for system use. Now if you do under services, then thats a different story. You can still disable everything in there and boot up fine but with limited/no funtionality. If you want to see what eah entry is, just google the service. If I was you, just leave the services alone as you most likely wont see any performance gain but you will see a performance gain buy limiting your startup items to very few as possible.