Over time, many people experience that their computer is getting slower over the years. Most of the time the cause of this problem is that whenever you install new software, often additional helper software is installed that's automatically loaded when your computer starts.

Most of the time many of these tiny helper software is displayed beside the Windows clock on your taskbar. These tiny programs are sometimes helpful, however these programs often slow down your computer considerably. Often you don't need these helper programs, so it's better not to load them automatically whenever your computer starts. Personally, I limit the programs that are allowed to start automatically at computer startup.

You can manage the programs that automatically start by running a Microsoft program: msconfig. You can start this program by clicking on the Windows 'Start' button and next on 'Run'. You can also press and hold the Windows key on your keyboard and then press the 'r' button. In the windows that appears you type: msconfig and then press enter.

Under Windows Vista the 'Run' item in the Windows start-menu is not visible by default. You can enable this by right-clicking on the taskbar and choose 'properties'. Next click on the tabpage 'Start Menu' and click 'Customize'. Search in the list and check the 'Run Command' checkbox.

In msconfig click on the tabpage 'Startup'. On that tabpage you can control which programs are launched whenever your computer is started. Make sure you know which programs in the list you don't allow to automatically start. By finetuning the list of automatically started programs you can considerable boost the performance of your computer.

Although msconfig shows many programs that are loaded at computer startup, the list is not complete. Whenever you want to see all of the programs that are loaded at computer startup, I recommend taking a look at a program called 'Autoruns'.

You can download this program from the security section of the Microsoft Sysinternals site:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/default.aspx