Find and Delete Windows 8 Startup Programs

When looking to mass delete start programs in Windows 8 you will have a limited set of options available to you from what I can find. Windows 8 moved the Startup Program management to the Windows Task Manager which is actually quite good, unless you are looking to select and disable multiple Windows 8 startup programs at the same time.

One thing you can do is search and disable your profile startup applications manually, this allows you to select/delete them out of your start up folder.  To go to your Windows 8 Startup folder and delete startup programs follow these quick steps.

Open Windows 8 Startup Folder

• Open File Explorer (Win+E)
• Type in C:users<username>AppDataRoamingMicrosoftWindowsStart MenuProgramsStartup

Example: C:UsersbobbysmithAppDataRoamingMicrosoftWindowsStart MenuProgramsStartup

• Select and delete all programs you don’t want starting up when Windows starts and loads your profile.

Note, this only disables some of the applications that are program specific, you still have to use the Windows 8 Task Manager to Disable Start programs that don’t show up in your profile startup folder.  These unfortunately are done one at a time.

Disable Windows 8 Start Programs with Task Manager

• Open Task Manager
• Click on the Startup tab
• Click on the program/application you want to disable
• Click the Disable button in bottom right
• Repeat for all applications you don’t want to start at Windows 8 Startup

If anyone knows a tip on how to mass select or another method on bulk disabling startup programs which used to exist in MSConfig in the older versions of Windows let me know, but I was unable to find a way after searching the Internet for various phrases and related keywords to mass disable Windows 8 startup applications.

Note, even though it is a pain to disable Windows 8 startup applications one at a time once you do it you don’t generally have to keep doing it over and over, so it really is a big inconvenience only the first time, I mean how many startup applications do you have that you can’t spend a few minutes looking them over and manually clicking down arrow, disable, down arrow, disable…etc.

Of course when you see an startup program that looks fishy, like a program named program.

You wonder what the heck it is, and why it doesn’t allow you to open file location.

This is very fishy indeed, and if you run into programs like this, you are better of disabling them just to be safe and re-running an antivirus/antimalware program against your Windows Operating System.

I do recommend the Fix Me Stick which is an excellent USB Antivirus AntiMalware tool that runs it’s own Linux OS so it can’t be corrupted by viruses that can infect and hide themselves from your actively installed antivirus scanners.