Windows Diagnosis and Repair

Speeding Up Windows

Clean Your PC for Optimal Performance

Preventing Virus Attacks

Disaster Recovery

Learn to Resolve Software Conflicts

Looking for performance degradation

Tweeking and Optimizing your system

How to Avoid a PC Meltdown

How to avoid a Hard Drive Crash

Speed Up Your Hard Disk

Disk Clean Up

Clean Up Your System Tray

Have you noticed that your taskbar clock has a lot more company lately?

That area is called the System Tray, and programs can tell Windows to load an icon there to give you status information and let you right- or left-click to perform operations. This is a handy thing, but it can be done to excess, and too many programs are loading at start-up and slowing down your system. Sometimes the program provides a friendly way to clean up the System Tray.

Right-click on the program's tray icon to see whenter you have the option of turning it off. If all you want to do is clean the icons out of your System Tray (while still having the programs load), check out PC Magazine's TrayManager. If you're running Windows 95: Go to the Windows\Start Menu\Programs\ Startup folder in Windows Explorer. You can add or remove programs here for start-up.

If you're running Windows 98: Go to Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > System Information. Then select Tools > System Configuration from the Menu.

From that dialog box, click on the Startup tab. Now you can deselect those programs you want to load at start-up.

If your program wasn't in the StartUp folder, check the Registry. Go to Start > Run and type regedit. Go to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion section.

Look for the Run key, which contains a number of strings—programs Windows loads. You can delete keys at your discretion.