(You'll find a great roundup of free Windows startup tools on Gizmo Richards' Tech Support Alert site.)

After trying several other free startup utilities for Windows, I keep coming back to the original. Like many of the best free Windows add-ons, Autoruns has been around forever. If it's information you want about your startup apps, Autoruns will tell you everything you want to know and then some. In Task Manager it's not always easy to know which programs should auto-start and which don't need to.That's where utilities such as SysInternals' free Autoruns program come in.

Unfortunately, the information and options available under Task Manager's Startup tab are meager the screen is shown at the top of this post. The startup-management tools built into Windows 8.1's Task Manager let you disable or remove programs that start automatically when the system boots. It doesn't take long for any PC's roster of auto-start apps to get out of hand. At the top of most Windows users' gripe list is having to wait so long for the OS to start. Immediately I started to think about all of the current version's shortcomings. As tempted as I was to answer 'Windows 3.1' - I still miss Program Manager - I fessed up to preferring the current version 8.1 over any of its predecessors. Not so.Īfter last week's post on essential Windows 8.1 time-saving tweaks, a reader asked me which version of Windows was my favorite. Still, you'd think that after all these years and so many versions, Windows would finally have all the tools users need right out of the box. Say what you will about Windows, you have to admit the OS has legs.

Windows 8.1's Task Manager Startup tab lists your auto-start apps but provides precious little information about them.

Windows 8 make a program run at startup