When it comes to keeping your startup slim and fast under Windows, your best bet to do that is the excellent – and free – Autoruns program. Autoruns is an expert tool on the other hand and one false click can corrupt your system from booting properly.

Users who do not have that much experience with computers may prefer a simpler tool that restricts information to those that can be safely removed from the system.

The free version of WinPatrol is one of those programs. You may still ask yourself what you have gotten into when you start it for the first time, as it displays a lot of tabs in its program interface.

Do not worry though, as you do not need to look in all those tabs to check up on third party startup programs. You should take a look at the following tabs to control the start of your Windows operating system.

• Startup Programs – This is a list of third party apps that start with your operating system. This does not include native Windows programs, and you usually can disable them all without ill-effect. The only thing that you may notice, besides a faster startup, is a slower start of the programs when you need them. If you only use a program once a week, there is no reason to start it with Windows every day.
• IE Helpers – Helper plugins installed into Internet Explorer. While they do not slow down system start, you may want to block some that you do not really use or need.
• Scheduled Tasks – It is worth taking a look here as well, as you may find that some programs do not start with Windows, but scheduled as tasks instead.
• Services – All third party services that start with your operating system. You may lose some program functionality if you do disable those.

And that’s all there is to it. WinPatrol itself can do a lot more than that, like filtering cookies or displaying the active tasks on the system.