EF StartUp Manager

Software developers love to see their creations up and running on your PC all the time. That is why most of them designed their products so they add themselves to your Windows startup during installation so that they launch as soon as you switch on your computer.

EF StartUp Manager lets you see which programs follow this behavior and enable or disable them at will with just one click.

While some apps need to be active at all times in order to serve their purpose in a satisfactory way – such as anti-virus and system management tools – many others simply like to be there active in the background for no clear reason. In the best of cases, they delay the overall startup time, take up a chunk of your system resources, and slow down the overall performance of your machine. In the worst case, they are there to gather information about your computer and your habits and use it without your permission. Either way, there is no real benefit in having a bunch of software programs running in the background just for the sake of it, and that is why having a tool like EF StartUp Manager handy is always a good idea.

EF StartUp Manager is a one-task tool devoted exclusively to enable or disable those programs that have installed themselves on your Windows startup without your consent. The average user can easily manage this task using the options provided by Windows itself (within the System Configuration Utility in Windows 7 and the Task Manager of Windows 8 and 10), and in that sense, this program doesn’t add much to what we already have for free. In both cases, you are presented with a list of the programs launching at startup and the option to enable or disable each of them according to what they do. Additionally, you can define the order in which the remaining programs will launch, and even set a delay between them to save valuable resources for other apps or the OS itself. The program also tells you where in the Registry you can find traces about the selected app, the command and parameters associated with them, and their current state. You can also take a look at all the environmental variables and the Windows error codes, in case you’re interested.

Startup managers are a classic component of most system management tools, and – as mentioned – are also present in the latest versions of Windows. Unless you install a significant number of new apps every week, the average user will check this function once in a blue moon, and there are free ways of doing it without adding another icon to your desktop. More savvy users, however, may well find that the more technical angle that EF StartUp Manager provides about your startup is worth paying a small fee and having a dedicated tool for this purpose only.