One of the first ports of call (at least for me) when troubleshooting performance issues on standalone PC’s is to have a look at the start-up programs using ‘msconfig.exe.’ While msconfig.exe is fine for IT Pros it’s not the most friendly of things for the average end user.

I was recently helping out a friend over IM and explaining the concepts and working out which entries to remove was taking a long time. I did some research and found this handy command.

wmic startup get caption,command,description > outputfile

Simply get the person at the other end to run this command and then they can send you the full list for you to inspect.