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A friend called me and told me their laptop took “forever” to load. I asked them some basic questions to help determine the problem and put it down to too many applications loading at startup. Rather than instruct them to run msconfig, I thought I’d show them the Troubleshooting tools so they could run them again, themselves, in the future.

If you’re someone who assists others with their computer problems, this could be a great tool in your belt. Or if you’re having performance problems with Windows 7, you can use the Troubleshooting tools that come bundled with the operating system. These tools will scan your computer’s configuration for known settings that cause issues.

Run Troubleshooting to Identify Settings that Cause Performance Issues

To run Troubleshooting:

1. Click the Start button, type trouble and click Troubleshooting.

2. Click Check for performance issues.

3. On the Performance screen, click Advanced.

4. Uncheck Apply repairs automatically (we want to see what changes are being made so we can know how to prevent future issues and, if the settings don’t work–or make it worse–, we can revert the changes.) Click Next.

5. Troubleshooting will now scan your settings to find problems:

6. Once complete, the tool will give you options to fix performance issues. I chose to Configure startup programs to improve performance.

7. If you chose this too, click Start System Configuration…

8. Uncheck the programs you don’t want to start when you start Windows. Want some clues on which ones you can uncheck? See this guide: 12 Programs You Can Remove From Boot Right Now.

Here are a bunch of other programs I choose not to let start:

9. Save your settings and click Close the troubleshooter.

This is just one example of how the Troubleshooter can help you fix your PC. In what ways has the Troubleshooting tool helped you?

About Rich

Rich is the owner and creator of Windows Guides; he spends his time breaking things on his PC so he can write how-to guides to fix them.

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Comments

7 thoughts on “Fix Windows 7 Performance Problems with Windows Troubleshooting Tools”

  1. Mautaz Tom Nesheiwat says:

    My laptop takes about 30 seconds to a minute, opening up, yahoo, me opening google chrome, and opening my gadgets and prepping everything. Its a small sacrifice to have everything open for me. 2.2 ghz Turion x2 m500 running my copy of win7 beautifully, ty AMD

  2. thenonhacker says:

    Short version:

    1. Press WIN+R
    2. Type msconfig, press Enter
    3. Click the Startup Tab.
    4. Unselect startup apps you don’t need. Cick OK, Restart.

    BONUS TIP:

    Install Soluto Beta so that you can view more apps that you either disable or delay from starting up.

    1. Anonymous says:

      Regarding Soluto, we did an article on it back in June: http://www.mintywhite.com/windows-7/7maintenance/antifrustration-software/

  3. Nez_tepe says:

    hey rich can you please tell me if this system config process can be done on xp coz my com is getting slower because of start up programs loading much appreciated thanks naz.

    1. Rich says:

      Yes this works in XP

    2. Rich says:

      Yes this works in XP

  4. Mathivanan says:

    Stating simply the above process,

    Start>Run>”msconfig”>”Press OK”
    StartUp Tab>”Uncheck unwanted items”>OK

    Restart your machine. All done.

Comments are closed.


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