AUTOMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE
You know the most annoying area of clutter on most PCs? The taskbar. More specifically, the notification area. There’s a lot in there that tries to hide itself, but clicking the up arrow icon will likely reveal a bunch of software that’s running without doing anything useful. We’re not suggesting you dump your antivirus (though Windows Defender is now very good indeed, so consider whether you need to give up the resources to anything else), and we’ll give a pass to certain hardware drivers that make our keyboards do cool things. The rest, though, can probably go.
The quickest and easiest way to kill programs that start automatically—and this isn’t limited to notification area apps—is to open Task Manager with CtrlShift-Esc, and head to the “Startup” tab. The list here gives an indication of how slow Windows thinks each program is when it comes to affecting your boot time, so click the header to list everything by “Startup Impact,” and go to work: Click the items you don’t want, hit “Disable,” and run those apps manually when you want to use them. For more granular control over what runs when Windows does, download Autoruns from http:// sysinternals.com. You can use it to also disable internal Windows components. By all means experiment, but bear in mind that we can’t be held responsible if you chop something critical, and that its results can often be as negative as they are positive.