Yesterday, I had a service call, one of the "standards" as I like to call them. A slow PC. I got on-site, and looked at the usual suspects. There were no viruses or spyware, but there were a dozen little icons in the system tray. NO WONDER! All this junk loading, XP was choking!
There was Real Player, some kind of game cr*p, AOL, an HP toolbox (but they had a Lexmark printer!), MSN Messenger, Quicktime, 2 different spyware scanners, and a bunch of other silly things that are totally not needed. And that's just the stuff I can see. I decided to check the other start areas using a neat little non-installing tool from mlin.net called "Startup Control Panel"(please donate to the site if you use it!).
Not only was I able to clean up the system tray, but I was able to manage the startup items in all 5 areas of the operating system where they reside (yes 5 different places in windows!). Just be careful with this tool. If you don't know what something is for, don't just remove it, look it up first and decide if it's tray-worthy.
If you're not using MSN Messenger, take it out of the tray, there's no need to have it running, it's a resource hog. So is Real Updater, and all those media player preloaders, they are not needed... If you have at least a P4 1ghz, you're not going to notice any significant difference in the program startup times. Get rid of that S--T!
Well, 2 reboots later, I got the system running lean and mean within 15 minutes. The customer was happy, and I knew I'd be back in a few months again, after they install more junk. Thanks Microsoft, for making such a vulnerable OS. Keeps us guys in biz.
If your tray doesn't look like the picture here, you might want to give me a call ;) Just like your toaster oven, the tray needs to be emptied once in a while.
-=Jeff Gross=-
Hehehe lol@ Realplayer and
Hehehe lol@ Realplayer and Quicktime startup entries. Why use that stupid bloatware anyway? Its been ages since I used either of those...not since QT/Real alternative became available anyway. The 'alternative' versions are much leaner, non-intrusive and stable.
Regular PC maintainence is key to keeping the PC running smoothly. No rocket science there, but most users dont' know or can't be bothered. A weekly virus scan with AVG/Avira/AVS/Avast followed by a spybot S&D + Adaware scan should clean up the nasties. Then spring cleaning with Ccleaner followed by a solid defrag with the excellent Diskeeper defragmenter should round off the job.
Apart from the obvious point of not letting junk startup with XP, a good security scan +diskcleanup + proper disk defragmentation is all the average home user needs to keep their systems running along nicely.