Back in the days of Windows 98 SE I was very excited that there was an msconfig utility. Msconfig was in the system tools in Windows 98 and when I moved to Windows 2000 I lost the utility which was very disappointing from a support point of view. Fortunately msconfig came back in Windows XP and now can be found by going to start to run and typing in msconfig.
There is a lot you can do from this interface.
The main piece of msconfig that we can use to troubleshoot and fix a PC is the startup tab. Just by unchecking any these startup events we can make the startup faster, fix apps that are not starting up correctly and give our users a faster GUI experience.
In practice I do not use any of the other tabs in msconfig as there are other places in the operating system that will work better for optimizing files or services.
A new application that has come along is another one of the great apps from Sysinternals. This new application is called Autoruns. Autoruns helps us by giving even more information on what is starting up.
What a beautiful interface. All the tools for the startup of the operating system are here and after working with msconfig and being used to that interface this is so much better and actually easier to use.There is everything that is starting up including add ins, scheduled tasks and Explorer components.
The download is very quick as usual for this app and as with all of the Sysinternal apps the application is free. Of all the applications in your arsenal for troubleshooting I believe that you will find this one to be one of the most used and relied upon in your collection.
