Speed Up Your Computer through Process Pruning
There are may causes for slow computers – spyware, fragmented hard drives, overzealous Internet security suites, or just plain too much junk running all the time. Most computer manufacturers pile on the junkware so even high-performance systems can be slow out of the box. Often this is the main cause of computer slowness.
To get a handle on all those processes you need to find out what they are. The easiest way to do this is to run Task Manager (right click the start menu, choose Task Manager). On the Processes tab, check “Show processes from all users”. Click on the User Name column to sort processes by user. Typically, you can ignore processes from LOCAL SERVICE, NETWORK SERVICE and SYSTEM, as they are part of the operating system and Windows needs them running to work properly.
Count the number of processes running under your user name. I have 6 running right now:
- taskmgr – Windows Task Manager, which I am using to look at processes
- WINWORD.EXE – Microsoft Word, which I am using to write this article
- explorer.exe – the main interface for Windows
- firefox.exe – Firefox web browser
- ctfmon.exe
- jusched.exe
- jucheck.exe
So I know what three of these processes are, but are the other three? Getting the answer was simple – I just typed the name of the processes into a Google search and got a pageful of sites with useful information:
- ctfmon.exe is a Microsoft Office feature for Alternative User Input as well as the language bar.
- jusched.exe is a program that checks for updates to Sun’s Java Runtime Environment.
- jucheck.exe appears to be the same thing as jusched.exe, a process that checks for updates for Java.
ctfmon.exe is very difficult to get rid of so I skipped over that one and decided that I really don’t need to update Java, despite the warnings on the website. To stop the Java programs from running at startup, I used MSConfig (Start Menu, Run, type “msconfig”, hit enter), a handy tool provided by Microsoft for controlling startup options. On the General tab, I made sure to choose “Selective Startup” and then I clicked the Startup tab to see at all the processes running at startup. You can see that I’ve only got four enabled:
- RUNDLL32 – runs the TweakUI control panel applet
- NvCpl – nVidia control panel for my video card
- ctfmon – Microsoft Office, one of the exe’s from Task Manager
- jusched.exe – the Java scheduler (which also controls jucheck.exe)
After unchecking “jusched”, I clicked OK and decided not to restart my computer. Once I do though, both jusched.exe and jucheck.exe won’t start and I’ll have two less processes taking up resources.
You can follow these steps to cleaning up other processes on your computer – find a process in Task Manager, look it up on Google, and then see if it is running on startup in MSConfig. Leave your anti-virus or security suite running but take a good hard look at all the other programs running – chances are you don’t need them on. The benefits are more speed while running your programs and faster boot time – after pruning down all of my processes, I can restart my three-year-old computer and be back to my desktop in about 45 seconds.