You’d be astonished how many applications and devices install a program whose job is just to run in the background all the time, that serve no purpose at all other than occasionally pinging the company’s website to see if there’s a new version available. They sit in the background and do useful work. Sometimes, this is a good thing - I have apps like Discord and Dropbox that run automatically when I start Windows, because it makes sense for them to be running all the time. Often, when you install an application or utility, it’ll configure something to run automatically when Windows starts. But there’s some stuff that isn’t quite so easy to clean up. It’s out of sight, out of mind, and if you need it again, just search for it.

Just shove everything in a folder called Clutter (yes, really), and get on with your life. In most modern operating systems, including Windows, desktop search has got so good that cleaning up is easy. The operating system equivalent of the drawer in your kitchen that was empty when you moved in, and now somehow it’s full even though you never really decided what to put in it, or that pile of dead biros and scratched CDs that lives in the glovebox of your car. Clutter is the stuff you don’t know you’ve got. I’m sure it’s partly psychological, and I’m sure some of it is also related to security patches and essential updates (hey, it’s easy to go fast when you don’t care about data security) – but a large part of it is to do with clutter. A fresh installation of Windows is a joy - snappy, responsive, all those lovely acres of empty hard drive space… and then after a year or so, it’s just not so snappy any more. I’ve been using Microsoft Windows since version 2.1, and one of the things that has held true of almost every version of Windows I’ve ever run is that they get slower. Dylan's Advent of Cool Nerd Things Day 23: Autoruns Posted by Dylan Beattie on

Autoruns microsoft