It’s hard to believe that the Sysinternals group at Microsoft are on their 9.02 version.  For those that didn’t know, Sysinternals used to be it’s own company, until Microsoft recognized how important they were and bought them out.

I hadn’t ever heard of the AutoRuns application until today.  The jest of the application is to list every Automatically ran application during bootup.  You can then disable and remove them all.  It is extremely detailed and even includes the list of applications when you right click a file in Windows Explorer.  After downloading and running it, I removed several applications that I knew I didn’t need running.  The beautiful thing was, after reboot, it significantly made my system more responsive!

So go blow out all those apps you manually unload after reboot, and let me know if your system runs faster too!

(Another great way to use the tool is to find those nasty popups and get rid of them)

Download the tool here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx