Every week, Microsoft releases a new build for Insider users that allows us to test, before anyone else, the news that the company is preparing for its operating system. Most of the changes and novelties are reflected in the Microsoft article that accompanies each release, and they allow us to get an idea of how the system is changing. However, it is not the first time that something new has been left to the company in the inkwell. And some as interesting as this new function that will notify us when a program is running in the background in Windows 10 .
Since always, most of the programs that we install on the computer are usually configured to execute certain processes at the start of Windows . These processes are responsible for carrying out certain monitoring tasks, controlling the automatic updates of the program, and even loading it into memory from the start of the system to have it ready when we want to use it.
Background programs can have several benefits, but they also have drawbacks. For example, many startup programs make Windows take longer to start up. And also that it consumes more memory. Also, when we have a lot of programs in the background, our laptop’s battery lasts much less than it should.
Windows lets us remove programs from startup very easily. However, if we are not watching, we do not know when a new program is registered when we turn on the computer. Fortunately, this is going to change very soon.
Windows 10 will warn when a program runs at startup
The latest build 20231 of Windows 10 21H1 , released last week, brought with it a hidden novelty that did not echo much: a new warning system that will show us a notification when a program is automatically executed when the PC is turned on.
Windows 10 will be able to notify us when any program is added at startup, for example, from a runonce service or from scheduled tasks. To do this, what it does is instruct Windows Defender (specifically the PUA protection module) to monitor the list of programs that run at startup within the Windows 10 Settings menu and, when a new program is registered, it shows us the notification we just saw.
Clicking on the notification takes us directly to the apps section at the start of Windows. And from here we can activate or deactivate the ones we want.
It is not a professional feature, but for all users with little experience it will be really useful. Thanks to this notification, everyone will now be able to control the apps that run at Windows startup and, every time a program tries to configure itself to run, they can avoid it with a couple of clicks.
Programs to prevent background applications
Although this feature will be part of Windows 10 for the launch of 21H1, there are already programs that allow us to control much better everything that runs at startup and see notifications when new entries are created.
One of the best known programs for this purpose is Autoruns . Although there is also another much simpler and more intuitive program, which even helps us to choose the programs we want to disable, called Autorun Organizer.