How Can I Stop An Application From Running In Startup Of Windows XP, Vista, 7

How to disable processes that run at startup in Vista

As time progresses, your Windows startup becomes slower and slower due to several programs being installed and being lined during the startup process. Thus, an effective way of decreasing boot time is to remove programs from the startup list so that your Windows PC boots up in a lesser time than before. This article will show you how you can easily do this in Windows Vista.

1. Open the Control Panel by going to Start -> Control Panel.
2. Type in startup in the search box next to the address bar.
3. Click on the Windows Defender link that comes up.
4. You will be taken to a Software Explorer page of Windows Defender, where you have Startup Programs being selected as the current option in the drop-down list under Category.
5. Simply browse through the list and remove/disable those programs which you think are unnecessarily being started during your system boot.

Although the steps given above are quite simple and straightforward, for beginners, the tough part is selecting the programs which they do not need at startup. Here are a few tips:

1. You can remove all messengers (such as MSN, GTalk, Yahoo, etc.) from startup as these applications are in no way crucial for your Vista PC to start off.
2. Next, you should also remove media player related applications that are there in the startup list. Media players, QuickTime, Winamp, etc. place a related process at startup as the default setting during their initial installation. Although these are meant to increase the speed of the player while opening media files, this is actually unnecessary and taxing on the startup process.
3. Applications such as Java, Chrome, Adobe, etc. have updaters that they run at Windows startup – this too is a default setting of their installation procedures. These processes should also be removed from Windows startup if you want to increase speed.