Disable Third Party Services and Programs for Clean Boot in Windows

I have to admit that I never liked troubleshooting computer problems on Windows Vista computers. Until today I still think that Vista is buggy even after installing the latest Service Pack 2. One example of a problem that I am still facing until today is the latest Nero 9 hangs my laptop running Vista when starting to burn a disc. Yesterday I had to repair a laptop random crashing problem running Vista because it belongs to my boss. Can’t say no to boss right?

It takes time and not easy to find the cause of the crash which happens intermittently because it could be a software problem, could be virus or spyware, maybe the operating system got corrupted, conflict between softwares and finally hardware problem. Since it is my boss laptop, I dare not simply install or uninstall anything. I checked Windows Task Manager and there are a total of 79 processes!




So the first step I did was to disable all third party software and services from Windows startup and let my boss continue using it for a few days. It is possible to do that from Windows itself using the built-in System Configuration Utility (msconfig). Let me show you how.


Go to Start > Run and type msconfig. Alternatively, if you’re not using the Classic start menu, simply click the Windows Orb button and at the Start Search box, type msconfig.

Go to Startup tab and click Disable All button.

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Now go to Services tab, check “Hide All Microsoft Services” and click Disable All button.

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Click OK and restart your computer.

When Windows has finished booting up, run Windows Task Manager again and there’s only 40 processes compared to 79 just now.

At the General tab in MSCONFIG, there’s a selective startup which I can easily uncheck Load System Services and Load Startup Items but I did not want to use that. Reason is when I disable Load System Services from Selective Startup, it also disables Microsoft services such as Networking, Plug and Play, Event Logging, and Error Reporting. It actually causes more problems if you disable all of the services.

To enable them back, just run MSCONFIG, follow the steps above, except this time use the Enable All button. No harm done and you’d be surprise to know that most of the time a computer problem is caused by software conflicts.