I periodically go to MajorGeeks.com every few days and browse the latest freeware to make the daily list looking for anything new and good to download and test out.  This afternoon I found and ran a piece of freeware written by Microsoft called Autoruns 9.37 and this is a super advanced version of the msconfig utility.  This powerful application gives you complete and total access to every possible piece of software, or driver that automatically starts in your system.

The main tab shows you everything combined from all other tabs, but you can narrow to see only the Logon Scripts, Scheduled Tasks, or even everything that Internet Explorer executes when it starts running.  You can see print monitors, Network Providers, Known DLL extensions…etc.  This is very easy to find the clutter and help speed up your boot time or general system run time.

Here is snapshot from my main screen (Click to Enlarge)

Note:  Since this is an advanced tool I would strongly encourage you to research each item you don’t know before you disabled it, this is especially true with any DLL extensions, you don’t want to harm your system.  Also you can save a snapshot of your run time configuration as a backup and I recommend you do this before touching anything else.

But this utility helped me chop about 6 programs that were auto loading and running in the background that I couldn’t find with MSConfig or other startup software programs.

I suggest you download Autoruns for yourself and see just how powerful and useful it is.

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