How to Control (and Disable) Startup Applications in Windows

If performance on your Windows computer has recently begun feeling sluggish, one great place to investigate the problem is in the Startup section of your system’s Task Manager. This tab will show which applications are automatically opening in the background each time you fire up your computer, sucking RAM and precious resources without your even realizing it.

Unfortunately, many Windows programs are installed with the auto-startup option enabled, meaning that plenty of stuff that you probably don’t need running in the background is cramping your style and slowing you down.

Here’s how to manage your startup applications:

On a Windows 8 machine, all you need to do is type start up from the Start screen. You’ll see a search result to the right that reads See which processes start up automatically…. Click this, and you’ll be taken to the desktop mode with a Task Manager window open to the Startuptab.

Here’s where you can view and modify your list of startup applications. Notice the name of each application on the left-side column, and on the right, you’ll see its status, which will be either Disabled or Enabled, as well as the startup impact, which rates the degree of impact the application’s startup has on your system resources.

To disable an enabled program, highlight it and then click theDisable button on the bottom right of the window. That’s all there is to it. Next time you boot up, the disabled applications will not load in the background.

In the example above, keeping Google Drive and Google Music’s Music Manager enabled and running from boot is a good idea. These applications provide sync features that monitor particular folders for changes. Adobe Reader and uTorrent, though, really have no reason to be open in the background, so they’ve been disabled.

The same process on a Windows 7 computer is just a little different. Click the Start button from the desktop, and then type MSCONFIG into the Search/Runbox and press Enter.

In the Task Manager window that pops up, navigate to the Startup tab and uncheck the boxes next to the programs you’d like to deactivate. Click OK and you’re done.

Depending on the number of programs you disable, and their pull on your system, you should now notice a speed difference when booting up.

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How to Get the Real Start Menu Back in Windows 8 or 8.1

Continued support for Windows XP was discontinued by Microsoft recently, so many PC people may now be migrating over to Windows 8. One thing newcomers will notice missing in the latest version of Windows: the Start menu!

If you’re feeling instantly lost without the old Start menu, don’t worry; you’re not alone. Thousands of PC fans would argue that the Start menu offers a more compact, concise, customizable listing of programs and files than the tile-filled Start screen.

Microsoft scoffs at that idea. It points out that every time there’s a new version of Windows, there’s an instant spike in popularity of shareware programs that make it work like the previous version of Windows. Eventually, the public stops panicking and learns to trust the new design.

(Note: The company has backpedaled a touch on this and announced that a Start menu resembling your old beloved will be coming back to Windows 8.1 in a future update. Until then, however, enjoy these tips on living with a Start menu-less version of Windows.) 

The Start buttonStill, much has changed in this department since Windows 8. First, in Windows 8.1, the Start button (Windows button) is back. It’s there in the lower-left corner of the desktop, right where it always was. (It even appears in TileWorld if you point your mouse to that corner.)

The Start button does not open the traditional Start menu, however. It’s another way to open the Start screen. If you tap or click it, you just go back to TileWorld.

The secret Start menuWindows 8.1’s new (old) Start button may not be the same thing as the old Start menu, but it does harbor a secret: It can sprout a tiny utility menu, as shown below.

The trick to making it appear depends on where you’re starting:

• At the desktop. Right-click the Windows button, or hold your finger down on it. At the desktop, that’s easy; the Windows button is always in the lower-left corner of the screen.

• In TileWorld. The Windows button appears only when you move the mouse to the lower-left corner. If you don’t have a mouse, swipe in from the left edge of the screen.

There, in all its majesty, is the secret Start menu. What it doesn’t do is list your own programs and documents, like the old Start menu; that’s what the Start screen is for. But it is seething with shortcuts to toys for the technically inclined.

Some of these items are especially useful to have at your mousetip:

• System opens a window that provides every possible detail about your machine.

• Control Panel. This is the quickest known method to get to the desktop Control Panel.

• Search. Having the option to choose Search here saves you a trip into TileWorld and its Charms menu.

• Shut down or sign out. Huge. This is huge. Now shutting down, signing out, or restarting is a single step — and it doesn’t require leaving the desktop. This submenu offers commands for “Sign out,” “Sleep,” “Shut down,” and “Restart.” No longer must you go to the effort of installing a Shut Down tile on your Start screen just to avoid red tape.

Restoring the real Start menu

If you want the full, traditional Start menu back during your transitional learning time, that’s easy to do. All kinds of free or cheap programs are available to restore the Start menu to its rightful place at the desktop, bearing names, like StartIsBack, Start8, Power8, Pokki, StartW8, and Classic Shell.

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How to View Side-by-Side Apps in Windows 8

On Windows 8, there are no overlapping windows in TileWorld, the newly-designed, “Metro” side of Windows. So, the headache of trying to find one window in a haystack is over.

You can, however, display apps side by side—up to four, if you have a high-resolution screen. You can display a TileWorld app and a desktop program side by side, too.

That’s handy when you want to keep playing some video in one window while you’re crunching numbers in another, for example.

All of this is much more flexible and usable in Windows 8.1.

Note: Windows 8.1 doesn’t let you split the screen unless your monitor resolution is at least 1024 x 768 pixels; anything less wouldn’t give you enough room for two apps. If your screen has at least 1600 x 1200 pixels, you can see three apps side by side; 2560 x 1440 pixels or more, you can see four apps at once.

And if you have a second monitor, multiply all those numbers by two.

Side-by-Side Apps

There are two different ways to split the screen:

Drag from the top edge.  Use this method if you want to split the screen with an app you haven’t opened yet. The picture above shows the steps.

Tip: If you have a keyboard, you can press Windows + < or Windows +>. (That’s the comma or the period, but < and > are easier to remember.) The current app’s window is now shoved to the left or right side. When you open a second app (from the Start screen or the app switcher), it fills the newly opened space.

Once you’ve split the screen, you can press those keyboard shortcuts a second time to swap the positions of the two open apps.

Drag from the left edge. Use this method if you want to split the screen with an app you’ve used recently. The image below shows the steps.

Once the screen is split, you can drag the vertical divider bar horizontally, with a finger or a mouse, to adjust the relative space between the two windows. In Windows 8.1, it’s usually a free choice—you can split 50/50, or 60/40, or whatever floats your boat.

To turn off the screen-splitting effect, drag the divider bar all the way off one side of the screen or the other.

Note: Here and there, you’ll discover that Windows opens a split screen automatically. When you summon Help in an app, for example, the right half of the screen might be an Internet Explorer window showing a Help Web page; if you try to open a photo attachment in an email message, it opens in a pane of its own.

When that happens to you, just remember that you can adjust the pane widths, or close them, just as you could as if you’d opened them yourself.

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You Can Control Windows 8 with Your Voice. Here's How.

The beauty of controlling Windows by voice is that you don’t have to remember what to say; you just say whatever you would click with the mouse.

Getting started

First, to make this all work, you need a PC with a microphone. The Windows Speech Recognition program can handle just about any kind of mike, even the one built into your laptop’s case. But a regular old headset mike—“anything that costs over $20 or so,” says Microsoft—will give you the best accuracy.

The easiest way to fire up Speech Recognition for the first time is to open the Start screen. Type speech. In the search results, click Windows Speech Recognition.

The first time you open the program, you arrive at a tutorial/introduction. Just follow the on-screen instructions to get up and running, and then work your way through the tutorials and practice screens if you wish.

Once you’re done the Speech Recognition module will appear at the top of your screen. After clicking the microphone icon, it should light up blue and the status should read “Listening.”

Now you’re ready to give commands.

For example, to open the little Calculator program using the mouse, you’d open the Charms bar, click to go to the Start screen, right-click to open the App bar to get to All Programs, and finally click Calculator. To do the same thing using speech recognition, you just say,  “Start Calculator.”

Here’s the cheat sheet for manipulating programs. In this list, any word in italics is meant as an example (and other examples that work just as well are in parentheses):

•• “Start Calculator  (Word, Excel, Internet Explorer…).” Opens the program you named, without your having to touch the mouse. Super convenient.

•• “Switch to Word  (Excel, Internet Explorer…).” Switches to the program you named.

•• “File. Open.” You operate menus by saying whatever you would have clicked with the mouse. For example, say “Edit” to open the Edit menu, then “Select All” to choose that command, and so on.

 ••“Print (Cancel, Desktop…).” You can also click any button (or any tab name in a dialog box) by saying its name.

 ••“Contact us (Archives, Home page…).” You can click any link on a Web page just by saying its name.

 ••“Double-click Recycle Bin.” You can tell Windows to “double-click” or “right-click” anything you see.

 ••“Go to Subject (Address, Body…).” In an email message, Web browser, or dialog box, “Go to” puts the insertion point into the text box you name. “Address,” for example, means the address bar.

 ••“Close that.” Closes the frontmost window. Also “Minimize that,” “Maximize that,” “Restore that.”

 ••“Scroll up (down, left, right).” Scrolls the window. You can say “up,” “down,” “left,” or “right,” and you can also append any number from one to 20 to indicate how many lines: “Scroll down 10.”

 ••“Press F (Shift+F, capital B, down arrow, X three times…).” Makes Windows press the key you named.

Tip: You don’t have to say “press” before certain critical keys: Delete, Home, End, Space, Tab, Enter, Backspace. Just say the key’s name: “Tab.”

Mousegrid

The voice commands described in this section are all well and good when it comes to clicking onscreen objects. But what about dragging them?

When you say the word “Mousegrid,” Speech Recognition superimposes an enormous 3 x 3 grid on your screen, its squares numbered 1 through 9.

Say “Five” and a new, much smaller 3 x 3 grid, also numbered, appears in the space previously occupied by the 5 square. You can keep shrinking the grid in this way until you’ve pinpointed a precise spot on the screen.

Dragging something—say, an icon across the desktop—is a two-step process.

First, use Mousegrid to home in on the exact spot on the screen where the icon lies; on your last homing-in, say, “Four mark.” (In this example, the icon you want lies within the 4 square. “Mark” means “This is what I’m going to want to drag.”)

When you say “mark,” the Mousegrid springs back to the full-screen size; now you’re supposed to home in on the destination point for your drag. Repeat the grid-shrinking exercise—but in the last step say, “Seven click.”

Watch in amazement as Windows magically grabs the icon at the “mark” position and drags it to the “click” position. You can use Mousegrid as a last resort for any kind of click or drag when the other techniques (like saying button or menu names, or saying, “Show numbers”) don’t quite cut it.

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