How To Disable Automatically Starting Software At Windows Startup

Some software commit a “crime” of automatically installing themselves as startup items without your notice or consent. I don’t like it in many cases as I don’t like my Windows to start slowly. I’ve got other shortcut techniques up my sleeve to start the software which I need but after Windows has started. There are so many softwares available for this purpose. But if something goes wrong and you don’t have a software, you can use the following techniques to do the job for you without any third party software involved.

1-With Microsoft Configuration Tool

Microsoft Configuration Tool  is a utility that comes

preinstalled with Windows (except Windows 2000 family). It is used to control the Windows startup for you. You can open the tool by going to Start –> Run –> msconfig –>Ok. This will open the Configuration tool for you:

All the tabs listed in the tool are for specific purpose. For now, we will concentrate on the startup tab because it will serve our main purpose. The startup Tab will list all the items that will start with your Windows startup. You can uncheck any of the items which you feel unimportant. This will help boot your computer fast and you’ll be in control of what you want to run on your system.

2-With Registry Editor

You can do the same process of controlling your startup items with the registry editor too. To do this, you have to go through two registry keys.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\
Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
This key lists all the items that will start no matter which user logs on to the computer.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\
Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
This key lists all the items that will start according to specific users.

3-Using the magical shift key

Yes, you can keep pressing the shift key and Windows will bypass all the startup items on the go without disturbing any configuration. This can be handy when you only want to disable startup items for a specific startup only.