FINER START-UP CONTROL
FIX START-UP DELAYS
BOOTRACER AND AUTORUNS
The boot process consists of several phases: first is Preboot when your hardware runs start-up checks and the boot manager waits to hand over to your selected operating system. Next is the Windows loading process (Windows Boot), then a pause at the login screen, followed by the post-logon process (or Desktop), as Windows loads your user profile along with apps configured to run at startup.
Wise Game Booster (for on-the-fly optimization) Process Lasso (to rein in resource hogs)
If you want more control over startup, including viewing hidden parts of the start-up process, download Autoruns from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ You’ll find it under Process Utilities. Unzip its contents and then right-click either Autoruns.exe (32-bit) or Autoruns64. exe (64-bit) and choose ‘Run as administrator’ to launch it.
If your pre-boot time is longer than five seconds, this may indicate several things: you may not have enabled Fast Boot in your system UEFI—there may be a reason for this (dual-booting with Linux), otherwise, give it a go. There may also be a delay if you have a dual-boot menu that pauses for a lengthy period before booting the default OS.
DOES YOUR PC take longer to boot than it used to? In most cases, you can trace this to the growing number of apps on your system, thanks to their tendency to insert themselves into the start-up process even when they’re not essential. What about other parts of your system? Does your PC suddenly struggle to play certain games, or have you started to notice things grinding to a temporary halt every now and then for no obvious reason?
You’ll see a huge list of items appear under an allencompassing Everything tab. The trick is to quickly navigate away from this tab to focus on specific start-up types. The Logon tab closely approximates what’s shown by BootRacer but may well include additional entries. You’ll also see that those items you have disabled or removed in BootRacer are shown as being enabled here—that’s because BootRacer suppresses this list in favor of its own settings (uninstall BootRacer, and they will all flood back).
Delays in the Windows Boot portion of the boot process may indicate errors on the drive (press Win+X, choose ‘Terminal (Admin)’ or ‘Command Prompt (Admin)’, then run ‘chkdsk c: /f /r /x’, selecting yes to perform the check and repair on your next boot). If you’ve not yet upgraded your boot drive to SATA or NVMe, you might also want to check to make sure it has recently been defragged (type defrag into the Search box).
If the answer to any of these frustrations is yes, it sounds as though Windows needs streamlining to eliminate the resource hogs and divert precious system resources to where they’re most needed. In this issue, we’ll focus on eliminating those bottlenecks and reveal ways in which you can keep unruly processes from disrupting your computing life.