About two months ago, I began booting my home PC running Windows 7 and not only did it take excessively long to start, but I also had an unusual window on the desktop at startup. I consider myself a decent troubleshooter and have experience in many different versions of Windows, but this particular problem alluded me. Obviously, I initially checked msconfig and went through my startup programs, but found nothing out of the ordinary. I googled the problem and found a few others with the same issue, but nobody had an answer. I didn’t want to reformat because I would have to backup everything, which at the time, would have been a daunting task. I actually lived with the annoyance for quite a while, which is very uncharacteristic of myself, until I started noticing a longer boot time. Sometimes it was very minimal and sometimes it would stick on a black screen with a lone mouse cursor. I would also find myself stalling on the Starting Windows screen just before the desktop loads. Nothing made sense and it was maddening not knowing what was causing it. After waiting too long and doing nothing about it, I decided to do a little more research. What I found is that the people with a similar issue used the Autoruns tool from Microsoft Technet. I had used the tool in the past, but it had never occurred to me to try it out again for this issue.
For those who are unfamiliar with Autoruns, it’s a utility which has a “most comprehensive knowledge” of your computers startup activity. Like using the startup option in msconfig, Autoruns will list your programs and activity on startup, but in a much more detailed fashion.
There are so many options and features while using Autoruns that I don’t have time to list and go over all, maybe in the future. However, with my recent computer issue I was reminded of this very useful tool provided free by technet and wanted to share with the readers. You can download it here.
The end of my story is somewhat bittersweet. While Autoruns didn’t help me find my specific problem, which I am still researching, I did find some other very useful reasons to keep Autoruns installed on my PC. If you or a user you know doesn’t really notice what they install and how it affects their startup and performance, they might benefit from using Autoruns and digging a little into the processes which can cause performance drops. Autoruns also provides a more-secure way of accessing this information, than burrowing through your registry.
UPDATE: I wanted to add the link for George Garza’s article on this site for a walkthrough of the features in Autoruns. Visit here for his in-depth look at Autoruns.
Important: As with any program or utility, be sure to read and understand how it works, so as to avoid making any unessecary or damaging changes to your PC.
