Portable Starter

Portable Starter is a nifty application that performs a simple, but essential task: that of monitoring and managing startup items. It lists all the entries that load on boot and allows you to remove the ones that are not necessary and clog up the system.

Portable Starter has an awesome advantage over similar applications: it lists startup items by user, thus enabling you to decide what loads on boot for each of the accounts you have created on your computer. As a secondary goal, Portable Starter was also designed to facilitate to offer you the possibility to control running processes and services.

The user interface is extremely intuitive and user-friendly. All of the items are listed in a large area, from where you can remove or add new entries. Disabling a startup item is done at the click of a button, as well as editing and accessing file properties.

In the Processes section, you can choose to terminate or assign a priority level to any of the running processes, while the next tab shows active services. Starter’s behavior can be tweaked from the Options menu, where there are possibilities to configure appearance and language.

An added bonus is Starter’s ability to show memory / CPU usage and statistics at all times. This is accomplished by a toolbar that resides at the bottom of the main window, but it can easily be removed from the Configuration window if it bothers you.

In conclusion, Portable Starter is very reliable and user-friendly. It acts light on system resources and successfully fulfills its main purpose: to enable you to manage the items that load during system startup and to choose which ones preserve their spot and which are out the door.