Free Startup Manager

Some applications, depending on purpose and importance, take the liberty of adding themselves to the list of startup items. However, the more items on the list, the harder your computer boots, which can be a little frustrating. Luckily, you can rely on applications like Free Startup Manager to solve this issue.

The application keeps you busy for a little while until it integrates in your system, but also offers to automatically run right after setup, so you can easily see what it’s all about. A pretty simple, yet intuitive window shows up on launch, with items on the startup list already shown without you having to press a single button.

Items are enlisted in a table with column headers for program name, as well as the program path. Bringing up the context menu on an item allows you to jump to the location of the program for easy identification, remove the item from the list, or to refresh the entire view if you consider not all items are shown.

It’s a good idea to run the program with administrator privileges for a high chance of properly detecting items. Unfortunately, even so you might only see a few options. The application doesn’t show Microsoft startup items, and it might not even be able to properly detect some third-party programs.

You can only remove one item at a time, and a system restart is not required to put changes into effect. On the bright side of things, the application also allows you to add custom programs to the list of startup items with the help of the built-in browse dialog.

Taking everything into consideration, we can state that Free Startup Manager might not be a fully-fledged application to manage programs which run with Windows, but it does put a simple set of tools at your disposal to remove or add your own items.