Spring Cleaning Your PC by Jason Levine

Over time, dust isn't the only thing that can accumulate in your system. Programs can be installed to try out and forgotten. These forgotten programs can litter your hard drive and possibly even destabilize your system. So while the first step was a physical cleaning, this cleaning is more digital in nature. Click on your Start Menu, select Settings, and then choose Control Panel. Once you're in the Control Panel, select Add/Remove Programs. Go through the list and uninstall and programs you don't need. You may need to reboot your system after some of the uninstall routines.

As a corollary to this second step, you should clean out your Start Menu. Some uninstallers won't remove their Start Menu shortcuts properly. Start Menu Cleaner is a good freeware tool for this task. Simply run the program and click Start to let it scan your system. As a deleted shortcut might leave behind an empty folder, I recommend multiple scans until the program identifies no more removed files or folders.

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Now that you're down to the essential programs for your system, it's time to make sure that those programs aren't running at startup unless you want them to. To accomplish that, Windows 98/ME users can use the built-in tool "msconfig," but I went looking for something that could be used from Windows 95 through XP. What I found was a freeware tool called Startup Control Panel by Mike Lin.

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As the name implies, Startup Control Panel installs itself as a "Startup" applet in the Control Panel. From this applet, you can then view, disable, edit and even delete startup entries. (And at 66K, it's not a burdensome download.) My recommendation would be to disable any processes you aren't sure about. Then, if no problems crop up after a few days, delete the entry. You might also want to check out another of Mike's free programs, StartupMonitor, to make sure that no program adds itself to startup without your approval.