I stumbled across an update for Autoruns for Windows, Microsoft’s sysinternals utility for viewing which processes are executed at startup. It claims the “most comprehensive” knowledge of auto-starting locations of any utility.  It then goes on to say

Autoruns‘ Hide Signed Microsoft Entries option helps you to zoom in on third-party auto-starting images that have been added to your system and it has support for looking at the auto-starting images configured for other accounts configured on a system. Also included in the download package is a command-line equivalent that can output in CSV format, Autorunsc.

You’ll probably be surprised at how many executables are launched automatically!

Microsoft Auto-Starting Process Is Broken

Ironically, the existence of this utility, and the three statements made by the developers which are supposed to shine a good light on their utility actually shine a very bright light on a growing and already giant problem with Microsoft operation systems like Windows XP and Windows Vista and one that isn’t likely to get any better under Windows 7.

Every one of these executables and processes that gets launched at startup both slows down your boot time and wastes resources by sucking away memory and threads that could be used by applications the user actually wants to be running.  These vampire processes sap your computer of power that it could be using for real work instead of wasting them while waiting for Seaport.exe to find an update to a search program that no one is using!

There are so many nooks and crannies where a developer can hide their auto-starting processes that no user can hope to know them all.  From the Startup folder, to registry keys, to Automatic processes, and numerous other places, software that decides it wants to run at startup can find a place to hide from users so that they cannot be stopped from running at startup.  This is a major flaw.

The fact that this utility can brag about the “most comprehensive knowledge of auto-starting locations” demonstrates the problem.  There are too many auto-start places and some of them are little known.  As a user, I should get to decide what does and does not run at any time on my computer, including start-up.  Maybe Microsoft wouldn’t have to endure so many horror stories about how long Vista takes to boot or how much longer Windows takes to startup than other operating systems if it didn’t let everyone and their dog (including themselves) throw any process they want to into a users startup process.

If I have a simple task to do on my computer and just need to login and do it quickly, I still have to endure all manner of software pre-loading itself on my computer either to camouflage how slow it is (Adobe Acrobat Reader) or because someone insists it is essential regardless of whether or not I’m actually using it.  I’m looking at you Seaport and GrooveMonitor, both Microsoft processes that they have decided MUST run at startup regardless of what I am going to be doing on my computer.  Killing Seaport is a pain in the neck that users shouldn’t even have to go through if the software did the right thing at install and asked you if you even wanted it.

The second problem is Microsoft’s continuing insistence on jamming more and more junk into the startup sequence for whatever marketing goal or end reason they can come up with.  Things like Seaport and Groove Monitor are just the beginning.  Dozens of services are set to automatic despite the fact that they will never be used by certain users.  Just shutting down all the extra service MS runs on your home PC as automatic can speed up your start time and computer speed by a lot.

The most laughable part is that we might be surprised at how many executables are launched automatically and the tool provides a way for us to not show Microsoft’s auto-starting executables so that we can see all of those OTHER processes.  Either this is a big denial of reality or stunning ignorance.  Microsoft is one of the worst offenders of this whole auto-start mess.  Which also tells you why, there won’t be a reasonable solution coming from Redmond in the near future.

I’ve used Firefox for years now and always been very impressed with it.  Sure, it was a memory hog, and still is to a certain extent, but in all fairness, when you routinely have over 20 tabs open as you go through your day, you can’t expect a tiny footprint.

However, after a recent ill-advised attempt at speeding up a certain process that uses runs in a browser but isn’t a website per se, by tweaking the Firefox about:config file, I had an issue with my tabs taking forever to load, especially when I tried to open several tabs at once by CTRL-click.

I would click to open multiple tabs and then notice that they just sat there spinning the little circle graphic and taking forever to load.

The culprit?

First, were the lame network.http settings recommended all over the Internet.

Second, was the Speed Dial plug-in.

Speed Dial Plug-In Slows Down Firefox

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Speed Dial plug-in, it is the greatest improvement to Firefox, or any web browser since tabs.  Functionality similar to Speed Dial’s should be the default home page of every web browser instead of just a list of the 9 most used or most recently used web sites.

Instead of just a list of sites, like bookmarks, Speed Dial has thumbnails of each site to help both with navigation and to jog your memory about what each site is based on a quick look.  It can even be used to tell if a website has been updated with a quick glance.  For example, one of my sites in one of my Speed Dial pages is Woot.  I can take a quick look and see if it is worth a click to go check out the deal of the day.

The functionality is taken from Opera’s Speed Dial which allows a user to set their own websites on a screen just like the home page for Google Chrome.  There are 9 (configurable) spaces per page and multiple pages can be added.  They appear along the top as tabs. This allows you to setup your own go-to list of sites according to task or function or time of day, or whatever you want.

I have several groupings ranging from my own sites, to sites with great online deals, to sites with Microsoft news, to sites with webmaster tools, and so on.

Speed Dial Firefox plug-in is very configurable and yet, works great without any configuration if you choose. You can set the name for each website, or have it dynamically generated.  You can also configure how the thumbnails are generated. 

This is where I got into to trouble.  Having never really thought about it, I just set all of my thumbnails to refresh every 1 hour or something like that.  For normal users, that might cause any issues, but as a power Internet user, who has come to love Speed Dial, I have 8 pages each with 9 websites on them.  For certain tasks, I might open one or two sites from each page.  I do this by pressing the control-click combination to open each site in a new tab so I can just get all of the sites launched at once.

So, here is what is happening in the background that I didn’t consider.  As I open each page, it has most likely been more than 1 hour, so the thumbnail tries to refresh for all 9 sites on every page.  Do the math, and I am trying to open maybe 81 websites if I happen to select one off of each page.  That is in addition to whatever I am actually trying to do in the foreground.  Depending upon how many “Persistent” connections you have setup and how many total connections, those slow loading webpages probably aren’t loading slow, they are waiting for time-outs to elapse before doing anything.

Setting my Speed Dial thumbnails, particularly those that don’t update in a way that is very readable in the thumbnail, or those that I don’t care what the current page looks like, to only refresh every 14 days or 21 days or whatever, fixes the issue.  Now, when I click on the 2nd Speed Dial page maybe only one of the 9 websites is trying to refresh its thumbnail.

By, the way, I put back all of the network.http back to realistic numbers and my Firefox is indeed faster, but pumping them way up doesn’t help anything.

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