My new laptop is a little slow and stuttery and seems to always be loading something, even though I've not installed anything on it yet except Windows 10. I looked on task manager and there are tonnes of background tasks running. Could this be the reason? Which of these are safe for me to disable and how do I do it please?
Laptops generally come with a lot of crapware installed by manufacturer, check which programs start with windows, some of them are probably unnecessary.
Yes, crapware might well be a reason. There might also be helpful tools, like tools, which come with your graphics card. Such tools may be helpful, but running them often is not necessary. You can use the tool "msconfig" to configure, which programs start when you boot the PC.
If you think that tasks are the problem, then you should tell us (or post us a screenshot) of which tasks are running! In fact I believe that you actually mean "services" and not "tasks" - services can also be viewed in msconfig. As far as these services are not from Microsoft, you might in many cases be able to deactivate them without causing problems.
Yes you're probably right! I've set a lot of services to manual (I checked on the Windows website which ones were safe to do this with) and it's helped a bit but still isn't great. This is a screenshot of my startup items. Which of them are safe to disable?
You can disable anything "HP", Catalyst Control Center, Realtek Audio Manager, and OneDrive if you do not use OneDrive.
Also the touchpad will continue working, if you disable the Synaptics program. However, "special features" might/will then no longer be there. Just disable it, restart the PC and see, if it's ok for you. If you in fact use an external mouse, then you can safely disable that tool.
Next point: Do you use the Dropbox application on your PC? If not, you can uninstall the Dropbox application. According to your screenshot, that one has a rather high impact on your startup speed.
I haven't gotten around to tweaking the Windows10 start-ups yet, but here's a good website that suggests what's good and not good to turn off. Looks like he just updated it for Win10 about a month ago.
Link: Black Vipers Windows 10 Service Configurations » Black Viper | www.blackviper.com
I used (most) of his suggestions labeled as "Safe" on Windows-7, and the O.S. started/loaded much faster, @ 32 seconds. Looking forward to doing the same for Win10, because it takes over a minute. Just do a few of the tweaks, restart your PC and do a few more. You have to be careful when you're disabling system start-up items.
Can I ask why to disable catalyst control center? What will it gain/lose? I have an AMD R9 270x on my other desktop (my lappy has 5850 but I backed off back to Win 7 after it started locking up after updating to 15.7x driver...
Just curious so I can take that into account on the other desktop. I did skip their latest driver on it as well just so I didn't run into any issues. On my lappy I got a memory_* BSOD and it looks like I'll need to revert back to the image I did before going to Win10 originally on it. But that's another story for another time...I rolled back drivers but it is still locking up and date in device mgr is June 2015 so not sure if that was a clean rollback or not....
Thanks!
Mike
