Is there an easy way to temporarily turn off online activity during startup?

Transcript

When I’m travelling, I use a Sprint connection in my computer that has limited bandwidth available and/or internet cafés and the like. I want to turn off the automatic online things that happen when I start my computer: online backup, virus protection, checking for updates, Dropbox syncing, and even a few mysterious things Dell sent in my new computer. Is there a way to figure out what all is firing up to connect, turn it off when I don’t want it, and back on when back in my office?

So, I can give you a partial answer on that. I believe (and we’d actually have to test this)… I believe if you hold down the Shift key, everything that’s in your start up folder gets bypassed. It doesn’t run what’s listed in the start up menu. The problem with that is that (besides the fact that I could be wrong) it’s a vague memory, but I think that’s the way it works.

The problem with that is that of course not everything is in the Start menu. I know for a fact that things like Dropbox and so forth are not. And to be honest, I really don’t have a good solution for this particular problem. What I would be tempted to do is (since this is a bandwidth issue) is to make sure that the network connection hasn’t been made so that anything that is suspecting to connect to a remote service (Dropbox comes to mind) doesn’t.

It fails on start up until you then connect to the net, which for example, things like an internet café, Starbucks, and such typically end up having to accept an interstitial agreement anyway so a lot of that already happens that way. As far as some of the things that kind of automatically just start doing things like your anti-spyware, anti-malware tools, I don’t have a good solution for you.

If this were a serious enough problem, what I would do is have those services to the extent that you can, not be set to autostart. A lot of them you can do that and in fact for various reasons, Dropbox is an example that I use; I can’t start Dropbox automatically because in fact, my Dropbox folders are on a Truecrypt volume that haven’t mounted yet when Windows starts.

So, start what you can manually instead. That’s one approach. We have a suggestion, ‘Wouldn’t setting up a limited service account on the computer which doesn’t have all those automatic logons defaulted?’ That helps some. You can certainly do that. The downside is that (much like the start menu) not everything qualifies; not everything is controlled by logging on.

Let me go and re-read the question, yeah, ‘when I start my computer’ so when you reboot your computer a lot of things happen that aren’t necessarily controlled by your log on account and I think those are also some of the things you want to be able to have more control over in a situation like that. I think you’re anti-malware tools for example, are probably going to run regardless of whether or not you’re logged in.

Again, depends on the tool of course. So that is another partial solution that can certainly take care of some things but not all of them I’m afraid. So the short answer is I really don’t have a great solution for you. It turns out to be pretty piecemeal to make that kind of thing happen.