Technofriends

Many of us know that when Windows boots up the Computer, it also initiates a lot of programs, these are called Startup Programs.

This post is a tutorial aimed at helping you know more about your startup applications. I will describe how to know which all startup applications are configured to run on your PC when Windows is loaded, what are those Applications and how you can enable or disable them. I will also introduce you to the Sysinfo.org website which has information about Startup Applications.

If you have too many programs or background processes loading up when your PC Starts up Windows, as an after effect, your Operating system, starts distributing system resources to these applications; which in turn puts a load on the resources and can even lead to it crashing in case of resource shortage.

To know what all programs get loaded upon startup in your Windows XP installation;

1.) Click on Start -> Run

2.) Type MSCONFIG and hit Enter.

3.) System Configuration Utility is shown. Click on the tab titled “Startup”

 

4.) The window displays information about all the Startup Items, the command and the Location. Against the items, is also available a checkbox which can be used to enable or disable the loading of the application at Startup.

This was all about getting a list of all the Windows Startup Applications configured for your Windows XP installation. However, this list, might also contain a lot of applications which you would have never heard of, but deselecting them can lead to malfunctioning of your Windows installation.

The above screenshot contains an item titled S3Trayp ( circled in red) which is executed by the application S3Trayp.exe.

In order to identify what this S3Trayp.exe is all about, just point your browser to the URL http://sysinfo.org/startuplist.php, this website has information of more than 16800 startup items and can be your best bet when it comes to getting more information about the startup items available as part of your startup list from the System Configuration Utility.

Searching for S3Trayp gives me enough information. After checking out, we get this information

S3TrayP corresponds to S3 display configuration taskbar utility for S3 chipset based graphics cards. Can be run from Start-> Settings -> Control Panel -> Display

This ways, you can now even search for startup applications like SoundMan, dumprep and others.

Also read: SVCHOST.exe and the mystery behind it.

The Mystery of Thumbs.db

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Cheers

Vaibhav

 

 

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