If Windows 7 won’t start, troubleshooting the problem
usually involves trying various advanced startup options. It’s almost
always a time-consuming and tedious business.
However, what if Windows 7 will
start, but you encounter problems along the way? Or what if you want to
try a few different configurations to see whether you can eliminate
startup items or improve Windows 7’s overall performance? For these
scenarios, don’t bother trying out different startup configurations by
hand.
Launch the System Configuration utility (select Start, type msconfig, and press Enter) and display the General tab, which has three startup options:
Normal Startup— This option loads Windows 7 normally.
Diagnostic Startup—
This option loads only those device drivers and system services that
are necessary for Windows 7 to boot. This is equivalent to deactivating
all the check boxes associated with the Selective Startup option,
discussed next.
Selective Startup— When you activate this option, the following check boxes become available (see Figure 1):
Load System Services, Load Startup Items, and Use Original Boot
Configuration. I talk about this in more detail, but you use these check
boxes to select which portions of the startup should be processed.
For a selective
startup, you control how Windows 7 processes items using the following
two categories (the Use Original Boot Configuration option is selected
by default and can’t be turned off):
Load System Services—
This category refers to the system services that Windows 7 loads at
startup. The specific services loaded by Windows 7 are listed in the
Services tab.
Note
A service is a program
or process that performs a specific, low-level support function for the
operating system or for an installed program.
Load Startup Items—
This category refers to the items in your Windows 7 Startup group and
to the startup items listed in the Registry. For the latter, the
settings are stored in one of the following keys:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
The specific items loaded from the Startup group or the Registry are listed in the Startup tab.
To control these startup items, the System Configuration utility gives you two choices:
To prevent Windows 7
from loading every item in a particular category, activate Selective
Startup in the General tab, and then deactivate the check box for the
category you want. For example, to disable all the items in the Startup
tab, deactivate the Load Startup Items check box.
To
prevent Windows 7 from loading only specific items in a category,
display the category’s tab, and then deactivate the check box beside the
item or items you want to bypass at startup.
Here’s a basic procedure
you can follow to use the System Configuration utility to troubleshoot a
startup problem (assuming that you can start Windows 7 by using some
kind of Safe mode boot, as described earlier):
1. | In
the System Configuration utility, activate the Diagnostic Startup
option, and then reboot the computer. If the problem did not occur
during the restart, you know the cause lies in the system services or
the startup items.
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2. | In the System Configuration utility, activate the Selective Startup option.
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3. | Activate Load System Services, deactivate Load Startup Items, and then reboot the computer.
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4. | Deactivate Load System Services, activate Load Startup Items, and then reboot the computer.
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5. | The
problem will reoccur either during the step 3 reboot or the step 4
reboot. When this happens, you know that whatever item you activated
before rebooting is the source of the problem. Display the tab of the
item that is causing the problem. For example, if the problem reoccurred
after you activated the Load Startup Items check box, display the
Startup tab.
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6. | Click Disable All to clear all the check boxes.
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7. | Activate one of the check boxes to enable an item and then reboot the computer.
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8. | Repeat
step 7 for each of the other check boxes until the problem reoccurs.
When this happens, you know that whatever item you activated just before
rebooting is the source of the problem.
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If you have a large
number of check boxes to test (such as in the Services tab), activating
one check box at a time and rebooting can become very tedious very fast.
A faster method is to begin by activating the first half of the check
boxes and reboot. One of two things will happen:
- The problem doesn’t reoccur—
This means that one of the items represented by the deactivated check
boxes is the culprit. Clear all the check boxes, activate half of the
other check boxes, and then reboot.
- The problem reoccurs— This means that one of the activated check boxes is the problem. Activate only half of those check boxes and reboot.
Keep halving the number of activated check boxes until you isolate the offending item.
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9. | In the System Configuration utility’s General tab, activate the Normal Startup option.
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10. | Fix or work around the problem:
If the problem
is a system service, you can disable the service. Select Start, Control
Panel, click System and Security, Administrative Tools, Services.
Double-click the problematic service to open its property sheet. In the
Startup Type list, select Disabled, and then click OK. If the problem is a Startup item, either delete the item from the Startup group or delete the item from the appropriate Run key in the Registry. If the item is a program, consider uninstalling or reinstalling the program.
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