Windows starts up noticeably slower, which may be due to applications that (unsolicited) start up together with the operating system. Continuing to run in the background can also lead to lower system performance during your sessions. Startup Sentinel helps you keep such intrusive applications under control.
Startup Sentinel
Price
For free
Language
English
OS
Windows
Website
www.kcsoftwares.com/?sus 5 Score 50 
- Pros
- Clear
- Ability to blacklist
- Negatives
- Limited number of autostart locations
- No help function
Windows itself does have its own module to manage automatically starting programs (press Ctrl+Shift+Esc and open the tab Startup), but here you can do little more than disable unwanted items. Startup Sentinel goes one step further.
car starters
Startup Sentinel is available in an installable and a portable version. When you start it for the first time, you will be given the opportunity to let the tool itself start automatically with Windows. This is necessary if you want to use the ‘blacklist’ option (see below). After a while, a list of detected autostarters will appear, including the autostart location, name and command.
Unfortunately, this list is not exhaustive, as Startup Sentinel basically only deals with third party self-starting applications (located mainly in the registry key HKCU:Run). You will not find Windows apps, processes and services here. For a complete list, you – as an advanced user – might be better off looking for an alternative like AutoRuns.
Actions
You can perform four actions on a selected item via the button bar. You can (force) run it, but you can also remove it from the list. As a result, the application would normally no longer start automatically. You can also add an item to a whitelist or blacklist. Unfortunately, you will find almost no explanation for these lists. A blacklist is useful if you want more certainty that a persistent app will not start during one of the next Windows sessions. On the other hand, you can add apps that you do trust to the whitelist, although it is not entirely clear what exactly happens under the skin. You can request and adjust both lists at any time from the menu. Finally, you can send an item from the context menu as a search term to the Google search engine.
Conclusion
Startup Sentinel is a simple startup manager and seems to us, thanks to the blacklist principle, especially useful in situations where third-party applications stubbornly want to add themselves to the list of autostarters. Keep in mind that not all autostart locations are read by this tool.
