Searching the web yields plenty of results for Get/Set-Service
, wmic
and sc
and plenty of GUI options with msconfig and Task Manager itself, but I need to setup an unattended install of a Windows machine, and therefore need to disable these startup programs via command line.
To find these apps, open Task Manager and click on the Startup tab. You will see a list of applications set to "Enabled" or "Disabled" along with their Startup impact.
The applications I am trying to keep from startup, for example, are Citrix and KeePass.
PowerShell's Get-Service
command does not show these services.
Running sc query
does not show these services, and wmic startup
also does not show these services. I am at a loss as to how I can disable these via command line.
Best Answer
Auto startup is located in the registry or scheduled tasks.
Find and delete those entries or delete them. However, if this is a corporate machine and you are not the a local admin, you will not be able to do this. Even if you are. If there are domain level GPO's that are enforced, they will start back up anyway.
How to Access or Modify StartUp Items in the Window Registry
You can use PowerShell to modify the associated registry keys. Have a look at the help for the registry provider
If you compare the entries in Task Manager with the output from SysInternals Autoruns then Task Manager is displaying programs from the following locations:
I guess there may be more locations depending on your exact configuration but the above is true for my machine.
Autoruns enables and disables startup programs by deleting and adding the registry keys
However, Task Manager doesn't remove the registry entries, it actually modifies registry entries in the following locations: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\StartupApproved\Run HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\StartupApproved\Run
Each program, listed in Task Manager, has an entry. It looks like a value of 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 is enabled and anything else is disabled. I've only experimented briefly though and had to close/open Task Manager to see it change from enabled to disabled.
Get/Stop-Process (normal apps, scripts, etc.).
Get/Stop-Service is for services not processes (real services, faux services).