Getting the right tools

For this module we are going to work with Autoruns, this tool gives you the possibility to disable services and processes that run at start-up. In theory it’s the same as the old Msconfig and nowadays Task Manager (Start-up) but it’s more detailed and has a huge number of features both msconfig and task manager don’t offer. You can download Autoruns on Microsoft Technet located here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902 After downloading and extracting Autoruns we’ll need to start the tool as Administrator. (Right-click autoruns.exe and select Run as Administrator)

Wait for the program to finish scanning your system, you can see the current status of the program in the left corner, when it’s done it will show done and you will see a list of processes pop up.

Using Autoruns

Now that we have opened Autoruns we can take a look at the services and processes. You will see that a lot of Windows services and security software services will be listed, this is normal and you should never touch them if you don’t need to. In the previous module we took a look at some processes that were using a lot of system resources and thus slowing down the boot experience. We concluded that we could disable MSI_LiveUpdate_Service.exe safely. So lets do that, shall we? The easiest way to accomplish this is to search for that particular file in Autoruns, you can do that by pressing CTRL+F on your keyboard and entering the filename (1) MSI_LiveUpdate_Service.exe.

If you did this right, you will find the first process you wrote down to disable. To delete this process from starting up on the next boot we can right-click the process and select delete. You will get a confirmation screen, always double-check if the process you are disabling is really the process you searched for. Always double-check if the process does not appear two times in Autoruns, in rare cases this could happen, be sure to remove them both.

Conclusion

This concludes this learning path. I hope you learned how to use Xperf and Autoruns to determine which processes are slowing down the boot process and how to disable them.