Speed Your Startup By Cleaning Up the System Tray

Reader Tami writes: My laptop takes forever to open Windows and there are MANY unused program icons on the bottom blue bar, next to the time. How do I get rid of them?

That "blue bar next to the time" is known as the "system tray," and that's where Windows dumps all kinds of things, primarily programs that load during startup and remain there until you shut down. Paring down the system tray can indeed help Windows load faster. (Note that all these tips are for XP but many will work with Vista, too.)

Unfortunately there's no single way to clean up the tray, so here's a toolkit of methods to help you restore sanity to that part of your PC.

First, identify which icons are important and which you can get rid of. It's probably good to have an antivirus status icon and perhaps the battery indicator there, but do you need the Quicktime icon or your office application "quick starter"? Probably not.

Attack the useless ones by right-clicking each icon. Many will offer an option right there (OpenOffice.org, for example, has a "Load OpenOffice.org During System Start-Up" option that, when unchecked, removes it from the system tray and speeds up startup when you reboot.) Some apps hide this option under more menus: QuickTime, for example, requires you right-click the icon, then enter QuickTime Preferences. Click the Advanced tab and uncheck "Install QuickTime Icon in system tray" to disable the system tray icon. Poke around and you should be able to remove most of the system tray interlopers this way.

Your next stop should be the Startup folder. Click Start > All Programs > Startup. Here you'll find a number of entries that set themselves to auto-load when you launch your PC. To stop that from happening, just right-click on each program you want to get rid of and click Delete (Google Updater? Adobe Reader Speed Launch? Gone!). Remember, you aren't deleting any actual programs here, just stopping them from loading at boot time.

If you're a more experienced user, you can check out one last tool by clicking Start > Run and typing msconfig. This is Windows' System Configuration Utility, and if you click the Startup tab, you'll see everything that loads when you start your machine (including lots of stuff not in the Startup folder). Uncheck anything you don't want to load at boot time, but use a light hand: You don't want to disable something that keeps your PC working properly. That said, it's fairly easy to re-check anything it turns out you actually need.