Trying to find the cause of your PC's problems can be a daunting task. One place to begin looking is with your start up programs and services. We found two web sites that can help you identify these and recommend whether they're needed.

In the past twenty years, I've seen many changes to personal computers. Throughout this time, two issues have remained — poor performance and memory resources. Part of the problem is more programs are adding to our start up process. And I'm not just talking about viruses and spyware. It's not until something goes wrong do we look under the hood to find a cause.

Unfortunately, looking under the hood can be downright intimidating. Depending on your operating system, there are various ways you can see what's running. A good primer is available from Paul Collins of Pacman's Portal. Paul also identifies some third party utilities that help identify and control start up programs.

Finding which programs start up is half the battle. The other half is determining if the program is needed. It would be fine if some of these programs had useful names, or at least pointed you in the right direction. For example, I have a friend who removed a start up program called F–stopw because he thought it was related to digital camera software. Other friends have removed programs believing they were viruses.

So, how does one find out about these programs? Previously, I relied on web sites such as Google to tell me about these items, but there is a more efficient site — Answers That Work. This site is nicely laid out in a table fashion with included recommendations. For example, I can click the F button to jump to an alphabetical listing of task list programs starting with that letter. Below is the listing for F–stopw. From the description, I can see the file is the On-Access scanner for an anti–virus package.

Referenced Resources

• http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_index.htm
• http://www.answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist.htm

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