Msconfig and Start-Up Items

[Hap]

I disabled all start-up items via Msconfig.  Everything seemed to work okay.  Is it recommended to do that before I play or no?  I also use FSAutostart from time to time too.

[gpwurzel]

If you stop em via msconfig Hap, they wont start up ever again (unless you change it or manually call them). If you use FSautostart, you can stop them purely to play the game, then when you finish, drop out of fsautostart, and it'll restart them before it dies.

Upside of fs, you can drop your av, java updates, flash updates, messenger etc and it wont interfere with your game, but will be running if you leave your pc on.

Wurzel

[Fulmar]

I prefer using msconfig and services.msc.  I'm always amazed at friends' and families' computers.  Record I saw was 105 processes on a Dell laptop running Vista.  I fixed my coworkers laptop the other week and found 3 antivirus programs installed/running at the same time.

[Masherbrum]

Use this to help you identify the programs:  http://www.answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist.htm

[Ghastly]

MSConfig is meant to be a temporary troubleshooting tool.  It ideally shouldn't be used to make permanent changes to startup items, as later, you can't tell what's newly shut off" and what's left over from the last few times you used it.

Use Microsofts Autoruns tool, which is part of the Systernals suite.  It's not only more comprehensive, but manages the process of disabling things better too.

<S>

[Ghosth]

Another choice is Glary Utilities which has a very nice start up manager, and process manager.
Both of which have options to google entrys so you can learn exactly what they do, if they are needed, recomended etc.

[Chalenge]

If you turn them off in msconfig and then uninstall an application that has a latch in there it will stay behind and I think that leads to bad registry entries.