I haven’t used a windows machine for like 15 years, but back when I was a teenager I could swear computer magazines included all kinds of tips about unchecking things from the auto startup menu, some modifying the registry.

Did this pattern stop being a thing and we’re back to it now? Or was it just “forgotten”?

Startup shortcuts are one thing to manage but it’s gotten pretty out of control for most standard software now. Perhaps it used to be one-off annoying programs like 15 years ago.

Now there’s scrolling through hundreds of scheduled tasks called dfddg.exe with no title or description and located in c:/windows or %appdata%. Disabling the wrong identically named one bricks your system or software licenses.

Then you also have to check the registry and group policy and environment variables and spot the unwanted item that is again often bundled into a critical windows dll. Usually with the same name as the dll and its permissions are set as SYSTEM so you can’t edit it by normal means.

Then after every change you have to do a full rebooting and review all steps again. Often, they will regenerate themselves if deleted in the wrong way or the wrong order.

After all the startup things are killed there may still be kernel level startup recovery processes for things like Adobe.

Oof. Yeah it definitely wasn’t this bad, I remember that having an unclearly named app in your startup menu was considered a clear tell that you had a malware infection.

This sounds like Microsoft is failing spectacularly at enforcing strict limits on what software can do.

Autoruns utility still exists.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/aut...

I wonder if old rules still apply:

Uncheck one thing. Reboot. Test system.Proceed to the next item.

I bet that loop is way faster nowadays than when I was messing around as a teen trying to get our new 1Gb hard drive desktop to boot faster.

Safari does the same thing on macOS; it has a launch agent to speed the first instance of opening Safari up, as well as a process to send notifications presumably from web apps you've allowed to do so.

Other operating systems do the same. Windows even has a dedicated system component built for the hard drive age that will load commonly used files of any type into RAM if you have some leftover.