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One of my personal computing pet peeves is to have a cluttered and ridiculously overloaded system tray of applications and processes that are running at boot-up. For one thing, having all kinds of unnecessary processes running at start-up on the chance that you might use seems like a waste of resources to me.

If you’re running Windows XP Professional there’s a really easy way to configure at the operating system level what applications have set themselves up to run on startup and to disable them.

Just follow these steps:

1. Go to Start > Run
2. Type in “msconfig” in the window (minus the quotes) and click “OK”
3. Click on the “Startup” tab
4. Scroll through the identified programs and uncheck the programs you don’t think you need automatically starting up every time Windows starts

Be careful not to uncheck anything you’re not too sure about. The programs that you’ll probably want to turn-off should be easy to identify and uncheck.

I ran into a bit of an interesting issue today as we’re getting ready to launch a new application in an office. The application is an Access .ade file that’s hitting a SQL 2005 Express database on the server. The .ade file is located on a shared network drive. We wanted to email a shortcut .lnk file to all the users that they could drag from their email to their desktops and use.

Our first thought was that we could attach the shortcut file into the email using the standard attachment tool of clicking on the paperclip, but that attached the target file into the email as a full attachment. I then tried to drag the shortcut file into the email body and that attached just the .lnk like we wanted, but then those attachments are identified as a security risk and are blocked at the server level.

I then looked at what it would take to write a batch file to install a shortcut to their machines automatically. Granted I’ve never done this before so this would have been a stretch for me, but thought it was a possibility. I then decided the systems were locked down and may not let the batch file run in the first place. Wasn’t too sure.

My next step was to try and drag the shortcut .lnk file into the Word document I was creating as a training guide. After a number of attempts trying to do this, Word continued to lock-up every time I’d try to attach the shortcut file in this manner as well.

Should sharing a shortcut with someone really be that difficult?