Resident programs. What they are, what they are for and how to disable memory resident programs.

En brief I want to start a series of articles to improve the security of our computers. In these articles we will see how to install various antispyware (antiSpyware) such as Spybot Search and Destroy or Ad-Aware and it is important that you know that it is a resident program so that later on we avoid headaches when we start talking about them in these articles.

PTo make it a little clearer, let's say that for example when you stop playing one of your games it completely frees the memory but if you use the antivirus to analyze a file, after having analyzed it, the antivirus remains in memory protecting your computer.

CAs you can see, it is good that programs such as antivirus start automatically when you turn on the computer and that they remain in memory to allow their continuous use. Other programs that also reside in memory are intended to speed up the loading of an application, for example the program Acrobat Reader, which is used to open PDF files, partially resides in memory waiting for you to want to open a PDF file, in this way when you open one of these files the program is already partially loaded and the load is done more quickly (if do you want a substitute for Acrobat Reader think about Foxit PDF).

POn the other hand, it may happen that you have many programs installed on your computer, something quite normal, and that many of those programs want to be partially loaded at startup to be available in a faster way, this means that the computer startup slows down enormously (one of the problems of a slow computer is this) and that all these resident programs in memory consume a large part of the memory available in the system. Therefore, what at first may seem like a benefit ends up being an inconvenience since the computer slows down, the consumption of the CPU unnecessarily and the latter can also lead to excessive heating of the processor (especially in summer).

PTrue, if you look at the lower right corner of your desktop (in Windows XP) you will see a lot of icons, each of them represents a program that started at startup and remains memory resident. We have already said that some are essential such as antivirus but others only consume resources unnecessarily. For example suppose you install the Winamp Because on weekends you like to listen to music with your computer, but during the week you are working with your computer and you do not use it, when you install Winamp it always starts up together with the computer so that it remains in memory as long as your computer is on waiting for you to use the player, but you only use it on weekends so Why keep that program in memory if you are not going to use it?. On the other hand, even if you use the program every day, the difference between starting it from scratch to starting it from memory is minimal and yet all the time you don't use the player it will be taking up resources. Wouldn't it be better to prevent the program from starting when the PC starts up and prevent it from residing in memory?.

PTo prevent a program from loading into memory and starting with the operating system we have several methods but we are going to see only one that for me is the easiest.

1º) Go to the "Start" menu and click on "Run":

2º) The window called "Run" will open, in which you must type "Msconfig" (without the quotes). Then click on "Accept".

3º) The window «System configuration utility» will open, click on the last tab above, where it says «Start».

4º) Now you can see all the programs that load when you turn on your computer.

5º) To prevent any of them from loading you must uncheck the corresponding box. To prevent Winamp from loading, for example, uncheck the box that appears next to "winampa" that corresponds to "winamp agent" the Winamp program that is loaded at startup.

6º) Once we have unchecked all the boxes corresponding to the programs that we DO NOT want to load at the beginning, we must click on "Apply" and then on "Close". It is important that you don't start unchecking boxes like crazy and that you only uncheck those that you know correspond to the programs you want to remove from the start. After clicking on «Close» the following window will appear in which you must choose between restarting the system now or later.

BWell, that's all, when you restart the computer, a window will appear informing you that the system configuration utility has been used, check the box so that it will not be shown to you again and close the window. The programs you have selected will no longer load, that does not mean that you have uninstalled them, you have simply prevented them from starting together with the operating system and consuming resources. Remember that there are resident programs such as antivirus and others of the operating system that you should not disable. For any questions use the comments. Vinegary greetings.