Many of the background programs can be removed easily through the Add or Remove Programs utility in the Control Panel, even some of the annoying adware ones. Even if you don't have any immediate need to rid yourself of a background program, it's still a good idea to review your list of installed applications occasionally and take out anything you don't use.

To remove an application, follow these steps:

1. Select Start > Control Panel, and then select Add or Remove Programs. The installed programs appear.

Some programs have two separate buttons: Change and Remove. Others have a single Change/Remove button. This depends on how the software's designers have set it up to interact with Windows. Some of them have a maintenance mode where you can change how it's installed.

2. Click the Remove or Change/Remove button for an application you want to remove, as shown in Figure 2-6.

Figure 2-6: Select an application you no longer want and remove it.

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3. Follow the prompts that appear. They're different for different applications.

You may be prompted to restart your computer after removing a program. Do so if you're finished removing programs, but if you still have more programs to remove, you can restart later.

The trick, of course, is knowing what to remove and what to keep. Anything that looks like an update or patch for an application that you use should be kept. For example, in Figure 2-6, there's a line for HighMAT Extension to Microsoft Windows XP CD Writing Wizard. You don't have to know what HighMAT is to determine that it's something you should keep, because you know you want to write CDs.

When you highlight a program, there's a Last Used On section that tells you when the program was last used. You can use this to help you decide whether you need to keep the program.

Using an Application's Properties to Prevent It from Loading

As mentioned earlier, you can right-click an icon in the notification area to get a menu. On some of those menus, there is a command such as Options, Properties, Preferences, Configuration, or something similar. That command opens a dialog box where you can set options for that program. If you're lucky, one of those options is to prevent it from loading at startup.

For example, if you use Yahoo! Messenger, but don't want it to start automatically, you can right-click its icon in the notification area and select Preferences, and then clear the Automatically start Yahoo! Messenger checkbox, as shown in Figure 2-7.

Figure 2-7: Yahoo! Messenger Preferences dialog box.