The configuration utility MSconfig, managing startup items, boot options, and services and quite a bit more.

BeYourOwnIT is going to run you through the functions of msconfig and what you can use its capabilities for.

Hello, and welcome to another free computer learning lesson. Brought to you by beyourownit.com. This one is a little bit about MSCONFIG. It’s a free utility that comes with Windows. And we talk a little bit in depth in this lesson about how you can use it to speed up your computer, and diagnose problems. The first thing to keep in mind is to actually how to do it, or how to launch the program. …Simply by going to Start, Run, and then typing in MSCONFIG. We’re not going to show you all of that right now, we’re just going to talk a little bit about what MSCONFIG does, and how you can use it to increase the performance of your computer.

It has several tabs. The one that you’ll use the most is going to be the start up tab. This tab shows you all of the programs that start when your computer turns on. Basically everything you see running in your task bar often, some things you don’t. It’s generally a good practice to keep your start up items as few as reasonably possible.

You always need to have your anti‑virus, you need to always do your research. Find out exactly what they are, before you remove them. Just to show you, if I run MSCONFIG, and hit Enter, we’ll get a start up tab. You have the start up item, which is what’s actually starting up. Often times it will tell you exactly what it is. Who is the manufacturer, not necessarily important… The command, what actually runs it, and the location in the registry, where you’re going to find the Start command.

Having too many things starting up, things you don’t need can slow down your computer. It can cause lock ups and a wide variety of other things. You can also use MSCONFIG to diagnose problems when you have random lock ups or general slowness. You can remove the programs one at a time to figure out which one may be causing the problem. Always, always, always just do it one or two at a time, because if you remove 20 things or all of them, and your computer works fine, that’s great.

But you’re never going to know what caused it, and inevitably down the road you’re probably going to run into the problem again. It also has a services tab. It’s pretty similar to the start up tab, it’s going to show you all of the Windows software that’s running as a service in your background. It also gives you a nice little thing about what’s critical to Windows, and tells you what’s important. The services tab is really just for troubleshooting purposes only. I wouldn’t go in there all willy‑nilly, disabling things, and checking things out that way.

But really the bottom line of MSCONFIG is that it can be very helpful in both troubleshooting and optimization. And if you’re ever going to want to fix computers, or just get to know your own, it’s something you’re going to want to be very comfortable with. I’m going to show you the services tab here, right next to start up. And you’ll see it looks a lot like the start up tab.

You can enable or disable things. You can see I’ve got AVG, the anti‑virus is running. There’s a bunch of services also running in the background. And here they give you this nifty little option to hide all Microsoft services. So we can hide it, and you can see the list gets much smaller. The reason that is, is because typically a Microsoft related service is required to run the computer.

If you really, really get into tweaking things out, and getting every ounce of potential out of your computer you can start going through and finding out what you really need. …Using Google and other research tools to find out. Or you can always email us at support@beyourownit.com for additional information. To find this lesson and much more, come on over to beyourownit.com and make sure you sign up for our free training program. Thanks and have a great night.