Speed up Windows startup: turn off apps that launch themselves

You turn on the computer, and an eternity passes before you can actually work with it: a printer updater launches, a media player you never got rid of, three “little helpers” from the manufacturer, and apps you installed once for a single purpose. Each one chips away at performance on startup — and together they turn the first minutes of your day into waiting. Yet this list of self-launchers is fully within your control, and cleaning it up is a five-minute job.

How to do it

1. Open Settings → Apps → Startup. You'll see a list of apps that launch with the system, each with its own toggle.
2. Turn off anything you don't need running from minute one. A safe rule of thumb: turning it off doesn't uninstall anything — the app simply launches only when you open it yourself.
3. Task Manager (Ctrl + Shift + Esc) offers a more detailed view on its startup apps tab: the startup-impact column shows which culprits slow the boot down the most — start with the high-impact items.
4. Leave running anything that genuinely needs to run all the time: file sync (OneDrive, Google Drive), backup tools, your password manager, antivirus.
5. It works the other way too — add what you do want at startup: press Win + R, type shell:startup, and drop shortcuts to apps or files you use every day into the folder that opens. Windows will launch them for you.

A typical scenario

A common morning ritual in many offices: turn on the computer, go make coffee, because “it's still booting up.” After five minutes spent cleaning up the startup app list, the same computer wakes up in a fraction of the time — and coffee goes back to being a treat instead of a forced pause.

And the flip side of the trick: if you open the same three things every morning — mail, calendar, and a weekly spreadsheet — drop their shortcuts into the shell:startup folder. The computer then boots straight into your working setup instead of an empty desktop.

What you get out of it

• A faster start: fewer apps at startup means a usable computer tens of seconds to minutes sooner — every single day.
• A snappier system afterward too: what doesn't launch doesn't run in the background eating memory or battery.
• Mornings without clicking: with your own items in the Startup folder, your work environment is waiting for you, ready to go.

Pro tip

The built-in automatic app restore handles a similar “everything back in its place” effect after a restart — combining both means the computer starts fast and lands straight in your unfinished work. It's worth revisiting the startup list every few months: newly installed programs love to add themselves without asking.