People frequently ask questions about the “msconfig” utility and startup programs, but I must confess that I don’t completely understand the purpose of msconfig. I assume that any processes needed by the operating system start anyway, and appreciate that firewalls and antivirus programs must run in the background, but why would I want other programs to run in the background out of my control? If I remove a program from the list can it be started manually later? Incidentally, I don’t recall placing programs in this list, or being asked if I want it to be placed there, so how do the programs get put there in the first place?

This is a very good question and something which perplexes many users. The “msconfig” utility is the short name for the System Configuration Utility. This utility allows you to essentially specify how Windows should startup and, amongst other things, it allows you to view and configure which programs and processes should load on Windows startup. You are correct that essential processes needed for the system to operate will automatically load on startup. However, you generally will not find these on the “Startup” tab of the System Configuration Utility. Instead, you will find them on the “Services” tab. Whereas the items which are located on the Startup tab will only load when someone logs into the computer, items which run as a service will always be running in the background regardless of whether a user is logged onto the computer, and will also run regardless of which user is logged onto the computer. If you browse through the list of items you will see things such as DHCP client (used for network access) and Windows Firewall, amongst other things. As you can infer, these services are needed all the time, for all users who are on the computer. Thus the reason that they run as a service, rather than a startup process. Given the critical nature of most services you should not disable any of those unless you are given specific instruction.

However, items on the Startup tab are those which load when someone logs into the computer and are generally not essential system items but instead relate to programs which the user has installed. The reason that you may need such programs and processes running in the background all the time is that they provide support services for other things on your computer. For example, monitoring of your printer providing information about the level of ink or a process which alerts you about updates for applications. There may also be other processes running which do not provide anything visible, a well known one being the iTunesHelper process which provides various functions, in particular facilitating the quick launch of the iTunes application. You are correct that if you disable these background processes then they can be launched manually later, and in some cases they may not even be necessary, if you are willing to accept the trade-off if you don’t run the process (for example, if you don’t run the iTunesHelper process then you may lose some functionality and also result in a slower launching of the iTunes application). However, if you do decide to disable some of the processes from loading on startup, always make sure you note down the processes that you disable, just in case you do need their functionality and want to re-enable the processes in the future.

You have also raised the question about how the programs and processes are placed in the startup list. The most obvious way is that you put them into the list. The simplest way is to add something to the “Startup” group in the Start menu. The Startup tab in the msconfig utility lists all items which will load on Windows startup, with the Startup group on the Start menu being an obvious starting point. However, it is likely that a lot more items appear in the msconfig utility than in your Startup group. This is because the way which most programs configure themselves to load is by directly adding themselves to the Windows registry. In most cases this happens automatically when you install the programs, since they generally install their own helper (and any other needed startup) processes and then configure them to load on startup. So long as the software you are installing is trusted and legitimate then this is usually fine and just part of those programs, although if you do find that your computer is slowing down you may wish to check the number of items loading on startup and consolidate them so that you are not loading a huge amount of potentially unnecessary items on startup.