If disabling all 3rd party services and rebooting Windows help you resolve a problem, the next step is narrow down the *particular* service causing the problem. Narrow Down the Offending Program, Service or Module #2 Disable Startup EntriesĬlick the Logon tab, and uncheck all * the entries displayed.Ĭlick the Explorer tab, and disable all shell extensions displayed.Ĭlick the Services tab, and uncheck all the 3rd party services listed. If it doesn’t, refresh the view by clicking the Refresh button in the toolbar. This is to make sure you don’t accidentally remove any standard or Microsoft entries using this utility.Īutoruns starts scanning automatically. Right-click Autoruns.exe and choose Run as Administrator.įrom the Options menu, enable the option Hide Microsoft Entries. #1 Preliminary Steps: Create Restore Point and configure Autorunsįirst, create a Restore point. If the procedure in a step solves the problem, you don’t need to proceed to the next step. If that doesn’t help, proceed to next step and restart again. After completing each step (except for step #1), restart Windows and see if the problem persists. Note: Following this procedure, you may need to restart Windows multiple times until you narrow down the program causing the problem.

Autoruns is even better as it allows you to eliminate additional components, such as 3rd party shell extensions and scheduled tasks etc.) How to Clean Boot Windows Using Autoruns? This post tells you how to clean boot using the excellent Autoruns utility from Windows SysInternals. (Microsoft has a nice article on this topic How to perform a clean boot in Windows, which instructs how to do a clean boot using the System Configuration Utility (msconfig.exe) in Windows.

Autoruns program