Digital Workshop

For those who might be interested, Microsoft produce some very useful utilities which can be found http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysint ... fault.mspx
They are grouped into File and Disk Utilities; Networking Utilities; Security Utilities; Process Utilities; System Information Utilities and miscellaneous Utilities.

Hi Sandy

Thanks for posting this. It appears to be a rich "treasure trove" of useful items.

Kind Regards,

Being a compulsive 'fiddler'...of computers. I've been looking again at some of the utilities supplied by Microsoft and one extremely useful one is in the 'System Information' category...called 'Autoruns'. It shows absolutely everything that is installed at startup. I normally use Msconfig for this, but Autoruns gives much more detail.
In all the machines I have installed, I was able to stop all kinds of unnecessary rubbish loading. Many of the entries had no files associated, so I assume would just delay start up. As in all programs of this kind, you have to be careful what you mess with, but it does have the ability to store the 'configuration', so you can selectively try things. It also has a useful facility where you can hide all Microsoft items and just show third party items.

Thanks, Sandy for this resource.

I too am always looking to lighten up the start-up/background load, but am never too sure about eliminating items that I can't carefully identify.

Kind Regards,