Questions About Stopping Automatic Startup Of Executables In Winpatrol

In WinPatrol, I notice that for many "general applications" (software bundles?) - such as RealPlayer or AMD, to name two - different executables appear in Startup Programs and Services.

For example, in Startup Programs, the following AMD executables appear:

AMD AVT (kdbsync.exe ami) from Microsoft, and
StartCCC (CLIStart.exe MSRun) from Advanced Micro Devices,

but in Services, the following AMD executables appear:

AMD External Events Utility (ATIESRXX.EXE) and
AMD FUEL Service (FUEL.SERVICE.EXE),

both from Advanced Micro Devices.

And somewhat counter-intuitively, it seems to me, the user's ability to set an executable's Startup state to Manual or Automatic is in Services, not Startup Programs.

Firstly, can anyone please tell me why this is so, and how WinPatrol decides whether to list an executable under Startup Programs or Services?

And secondly, if I see an executable in Startup Programs (but not in Services) that I'd like to NOT have Startup on bootup, how should I do that?

Rick-clicking on an excutable in Startup Programs gives three options that seem applicable:

Remove
Disable
Remove file on Reboot

The last of these seems self-explanatory.

But what about the first two? Does Remove accomplish the same thing as setting Startup to Manual in Services, and does Disable also accomplish the same thing, except leaving the executable visible in Startup Programs?

 

The Startup Program launches the Service(s) associated with it. Normally, they would be Automatic and if set to Manual the Program may not work.

The first option (Remove) would do just that but, some Programs can't be Removed this way because of their interaction with the System so, you'd need to Remove the file on Reboot.

Disable would disable the Program's launching at Startup (and it's Services if there are any).

Some Programs that launch at Startup don't necessarily launch Services.

 

Thanks for responding, mdonah. I hope you won't think I'm nitpicking or playing devil's advocate here, and maybe I'm just dense, but I'm not following you too well.

Of course that's what I was expecting, but I see quite a few Services that don't seem to appear in Startup Programs.

I'm not sure what you mean. Do you mean that the default for most Services is Automatic? Because there were quite a few that were set to Manual before I even changed any of them from Automatic to Manual.

Again, I'm not sure what you mean. Do you mean that some Services, if they're set to Manual, might not work right, or work at all, even if they are then called? Because I've changed a bunch of them from Automatic to Manual (because of the low memory problem I had been having), and so far it seems to have caused no problems.

Do you mean remove them from the set of programs that are launched at bootup, or uninstall them?

Maybe I'm not seeing something obvious here, but I can't think of what programs would cause system problems if shutdown after bootup, but not if they were never launched.

Do you mean just prevent them from being launched at bootup, or prevent them from EVER being launched, at least until they were re-enabled?

Understood.

Sorry, I'm sure it sounds like I'm being difficult, but I really am not getting what you're saying yet.

 

The best thing for you would to be to click on the blue question mark in the upper right of WinPatrol (see att'd). It will bring up an online help file that can do a much better job of describing things than I can.

 

I forgot to mention that you must be in the tab for what you want help with ie. if you want help with startup programs you have to be in that tab and if you want help with services you have to be in that tab.

 

Excellent - thanks, mdonah!

 

You're welcome.

 

Did you read the documentation?
http://www.winpatrol.com/startup.html

And more http://www.winpatrol.com/features.html

 

Thanks, plodr, I should have thanked you earlier.

Firstly, I just want to mention that using Winpatrol has pared down my RAM usage somewhat. (See my thread "Questions About Stopping Automatic Startup Of Executables In Winpatrol".)

Now then:

I had the free version of AVS Video Editor installed, but I wasn't using it, so I wanted to uninstall it. But for some reason it didn't show up in Programs and Features or in IObit Uninstaller (and I checked under Online Media Technologies as well as under AVS Video Editor). I don't know if it appeared in WinPatrol or not, as I didn't think to check that. Anyway, I had no problem uninstalling it by using its own uninstaller.

This immediately lowered my RAM usage from 78% to 60% (of a total of 4 GB of RAM), and then over another half hour or so the RAM usage had dropped to 42%. This all happened with no other programs launched.

I had been using the free version of iDrive as a redundant system (in addition to OneDrive and my own inhouse backup). But they say they give you 5 GB for free, but they were cutting me off at 3.57 GB, to try to pressure me to upgrade to their paid service. So I wanted to uninstall iDrive. But it didn't show up in Programs and Features or in IObit Uninstaller, so I uninstalled with its own uninstaller.

For some reason, I got this message: "iDrive uninstall complete. Some elements could not be removed. These can be removed manually."

Anyway, after a while RAM usage dropped, but only by 1 or 2 percent.

So I mention all this just as a report that AVS Video Editor seems to be a memory hog.

But also, I do have one question: Should I just delete the AVS4YOU and IDriveWindows folders in the Program Files (x86) folder in order to reclaim disk space?

 

Sorry, I meant to post the above to my thread "Possible Memory Leak?"

I had written it in Notepad and pasted it into the wrong thread. Sorry, my bad. Moderator (Eldon?): If there's any way to easily move that post to the correct thread and you feel like doing so, please do.

 

Regarding uninstalling AVS and iDrive I suspect there must be file problems on your system as on a test install of both they do appear in Programs & Features, Revo Uninstaller and IoBit Uninstaller on a Windows 10 system.
As far as program folders are concerned, if you uninstall a program that you no longer need then yes they should be deleted which is standard practice, unless you are carrying out some troubleshooting or are intending to update or reinstall.
Using Revo or IoBit will normally remove those folders.
Running CCleaner after an uninstall and restart will also safely and easily find left overs. Making that a habit is good system maintenance practice.

 

As an added note for everyone to the below - after using IoBit Uninstaller including its 'Powerscan' for left over entries to uninstall each of those two programs, when restarting the system and running CCleaner it found literally 100s of redundant and orphaned registry entries for both those programs, so a simple uninstall alone doesn't remove all left overs.