How to Clean Boot Windows 11 & 10 (Find the Bad App)

Press Windows + R, type msconfig, Enter. On Services, check Hide all Microsoft services, then Disable all. On Startup, open Task Manager and disable everything. Restart.

And understand this before you start: a clean boot does not fix anything. If your problem disappears, you have not solved it — you have only proved that something you installed is causing it.

That is the entire point of it. A clean boot is a test, not a repair, and it answers exactly one question: is this Windows, or is this something I put on the machine?

Which makes the two most valuable parts of the process the ones most guides leave out — how to find the specific culprit afterwards without restarting fifty times, and how to put Windows back properly when you are done. People skip that second part constantly, and end up running a machine with its antivirus and backup software silently switched off, convinced they have optimized it.

The Laptop That Had Been "Optimized" for Eight Months

A laptop came into Jake's shop because its owner had lost a year of photos. The external drive she backed up to had not run a backup since the previous winter, and she had no idea.

The backup software was installed. It was licensed. It simply was not running, and had not been for eight months.

What Jake found in msconfig was a machine sitting in Selective startup with every third-party service disabled. The previous spring she had followed a guide to fix a printer problem, done the clean boot exactly as written, solved her printer problem, and stopped there. The guide had told her how to enter the state. It had said nothing memorable about leaving it.

Her antivirus was off too. So was the sync client that had been quietly holding her only other copy of those photos.

Ethan, when Jake described it: "She did the hard part correctly. She found the fault, which is the bit most people give up on. Then the instructions just ended, and a diagnostic mode with no exit written down is a trap — it looks like a finished job from the inside. Her machine even started faster afterwards, so every signal she had said it went well."

That is why this page spends as much space on finishing a clean boot as on starting one. The technique is genuinely one of the most useful things you can do to a misbehaving Windows machine. It is also the one people most often leave switched on.

Clean Boot Is Not Safe Mode

These two get recommended interchangeably and they are not interchangeable. Choosing the wrong one costs you an evening and tells you nothing.

The distinction is simple once stated: safe mode strips Windows down, a clean boot strips your software out.

	Clean boot	Safe mode
What runs	All of Windows, none of your software	A minimal Windows with basic drivers
Graphics and network	Normal — real drivers, normal resolution	Basic display, no network unless chosen
Use it when	The PC works but something misbehaves	The PC barely starts or crashes early
Answers the question	Is it something I installed?	Is it a driver or Windows itself?
Reached from	A working desktop, using msconfig	Recovery options, before Windows loads
Looks like	An ordinary Windows session	Obviously different — corners labeled, low resolution

That last row matters more than it looks. Safe mode announces itself, so nobody forgets they are in it. A clean boot looks exactly like a normal session, which is precisely how a machine ends up sitting in one for eight months.

If the description in the right-hand column fits your situation better, our guide on booting Windows into safe mode is the one you want, and getting back out of it has its own wrinkles worth knowing about first.

When It Is Worth Doing

A clean boot earns its time when a problem is reproducible but unexplained, and when third-party software is a plausible cause. That covers a lot of ground:

• An installer or update that keeps failing. Security software blocking an installer mid-run is one of the most common causes of an update that will not apply, and it almost never announces itself.
• Crashes or freezes with no pattern you can see. Especially ones that started after installing something, even weeks after.
• A device that stopped working properly while its driver is clearly installed — vendor utilities fight each other more often than people expect.
• Startup that has become slow in a way that a restart does not improve.
• Anything you suspect but cannot name. That is the honest case, and it is a good reason to use it.

It is the wrong tool when the machine will not reach a desktop at all, when a specific error code already names its cause, or when the problem only happens inside one application. In that last case, that application's own settings are a faster place to look.

One more thing worth setting expectations on: a clean boot cannot tell you why. It tells you what. Turning that into a fix is a separate step, and it is usually an update, a setting or an uninstall rather than anything dramatic.

Doing It, Both Halves

You need an administrator account. The steps are identical on Windows 11 and Windows 10.

1. Press Windows + R, type msconfig and press Enter. The System Configuration window opens — the same tool covered in our guide to finding your system configuration.
2. Go to the Services tab.
3. Check "Hide all Microsoft services" at the bottom first. Do this before anything else on this tab. What remains in the list is now only software you or your manufacturer installed.
4. Click Disable all. With the box checked, this touches nothing belonging to Windows.
5. Go to the Startup tab and click Open Task Manager. Windows has kept startup apps there since Windows 8, and msconfig only forwards you to it.
6. In Task Manager, disable every enabled entry in the list. Right-click, Disable, one at a time — there is no Disable all here.
7. Close Task Manager, click OK in msconfig, and restart when prompted.

When it comes back up, use the machine normally and try to make the problem happen. Give it a genuine attempt rather than a glance, because a result you do not trust is worth nothing and you will only do the whole thing again.

Step three is the one that goes wrong. Clicking Disable all without checking that box switches off Windows services alongside everything else. The machine may still start, but pieces of it will behave unpredictably, and the test is spoiled anyway — you can no longer tell your software apart from Windows, which was the entire purpose.

Finding the Culprit in About Seven Restarts

Your problem vanished in the clean boot. Something you installed is responsible. Now you have to find out which of eighty-odd entries it is, and this is where most people give up.

The instinct is to re-enable one service, restart, check, repeat. With eighty services that is eighty restarts, and nobody finishes it.

Re-enable half instead.

1. Open msconfig, Services tab, Hide all Microsoft services still checked.
2. Tick the top half of the list back on. Leave the bottom half off. Click OK and restart.
3. Problem back? The cause is in the half you just enabled. Still gone? It is in the half still disabled.
4. Take whichever half is guilty and split it in half. Restart. Repeat.
5. Each round halves what is left, so eighty entries take about seven rounds to reach a single name.

Seven restarts is an afternoon with the machine usable in between. Eighty is a project nobody completes, which is why so many clean boots end with the machine left disabled and the question never answered.

Do the services list first and the startup apps second, keeping the two separate. Mixing them means a returning problem no longer tells you which list it came from, and you have lost the round.

When you are down to one name that means nothing to you, search the exact service name rather than guessing. Most resolve to a printer utility, an audio enhancement, a game launcher, an updater or a security product — and at that point you have a specific decision to make about one specific program.

What Each Outcome Actually Tells You

Every result from a clean boot is informative, including the ones that feel like failure.

What happened	What it means	Do next
Problem gone	Third-party software is the cause	Halve your way to the name, then restore
Problem unchanged	Not your installed software	Restore, then try safe mode — drivers or Windows
Problem changed but did not clear	Probably two causes at once	Chase the part that did change first
A failing install now succeeds	Something was blocking it, often security software	Finish the install, restore, then watch it once
Machine is dramatically faster	Only that nothing is loading	Restore anyway — this is not a result
Something else broke	You disabled something you rely on	Expected, and temporary — restore when done

The second row is worth reading twice. "Nothing changed" feels like a wasted evening, and it is the opposite. You have eliminated every program on the machine in one restart, which is a large amount of ground cleared, and it points the next stage somewhere specific instead of leaving you guessing.

The fifth row is the trap in the cold open. Of course it is faster. It would be faster with the antivirus uninstalled too, and nobody would call that a tune-up.

Putting Windows Back Properly

Two steps, and the second is the one that gets missed, because msconfig does not do it for you and does not mention that it has not.

Step one, the services and the startup mode. Open msconfig, go to the General tab, select Normal startup, click OK, restart. That re-enables the services and takes the machine out of Selective startup.

Step two, the startup apps. Open Task Manager, go to Startup apps, and re-enable everything you disabled. Normal startup does not restore these, because they were never msconfig's to control — it only ever handed you over to Task Manager.

This is exactly where the laptop in the cold open was left. Services restored, startup apps never touched again, backup client sitting disabled for eight months while its owner assumed it was working.

So before you close anything, do this: write down what you disable before you disable it. A photograph of the Task Manager list on your phone takes three seconds and removes the entire problem. If you did not, re-enable everything you recognize and check the things that matter most by hand — open your antivirus and confirm it says it is protecting you, open your backup software and confirm the date of the last backup.

That last check is worth doing even if you are certain you restored everything, because it costs a minute and the failure mode is silent by nature.

When a Clean Boot Changes Nothing

Roughly half the time, the problem is still there afterwards. That result is worth as much as the other one, provided you read it correctly.

It means the cause is running in a clean boot, and a clean boot still runs all of Windows: every Microsoft service, every driver, all your hardware. So the field narrows to drivers, Windows components, hardware, or something in the user account rather than the system.

Sensible next moves, in order of effort:

• Safe mode. The natural next step, because it removes what a clean boot deliberately keeps — if the problem also survives safe mode, hardware moves up the list considerably.
• A second user account. Create one and reproduce the problem there. If it does not happen, the cause is in your profile rather than the machine, which is a different repair entirely.
• Recent driver changes. A Windows update swapping a manufacturer's driver for a generic one causes a surprising range of unrelated-looking faults — our post on slow boots after a driver update covers that pattern.
• Take the error message literally. If there is a code or a named component anywhere, that is a better lead than any general procedure.

Restore normal startup before you move on to any of these. Testing on a machine that is still half-disabled produces results you cannot trust, and you will end up repeating the work.

The Mistakes That Waste the Whole Exercise

Five failures account for nearly every clean boot that produces nothing useful, and all five are the procedure's fault rather than yours — each one is something the interface lets you do without a word of warning.

• Disable all without hiding Microsoft services. The checkbox sits below the button that does the damage, and nothing stops you clicking the button first.
• Doing services and skipping startup apps. msconfig sends you to Task Manager and then shows OK as though the job is complete, so a half-done clean boot looks finished.
• Not really trying to reproduce the problem. A quick look around proves very little, and an unreliable result costs you the entire round.
• Re-enabling one at a time. Nothing suggests halving, so people do the obvious thing and abandon it around restart fifteen.
• Leaving it switched on. The state is invisible, the machine feels quicker, and the only hint is a dialog most people dismiss permanently on the first boot.

None of that is carelessness. It is a tool built for administrators being handed to people following a support article, with the sharp edges left exactly where they were in 1998.

Ethan puts it more bluntly than we would: "Look at the order of the controls. The button that can break your machine sits above the checkbox that stops it doing that. Any dialog written this decade would either disable the button until the box is checked, or ask you once whether you meant it. Instead the guidance is a warning in someone's blog post, which is a strange place to keep a safety catch."

What This Page Said Before, and What It Covers Now

The version published in February 2016 gave the msconfig steps and ended at the restart. It was accurate, and it was the same shape as most guides on this subject: how to enter the state, nothing about leaving it, and nothing about what to do with the answer.

That shape is what left a backup client disabled on somebody's laptop for eight months, and it is the reason this rewrite exists.

New here: the difference between a clean boot and safe mode set out plainly, the halving method that turns eighty restarts into about seven, a table for reading every possible outcome including the ones that feel like failure, a restore procedure with both halves in it, and an honest account of what to do when a clean boot changes nothing at all.

Your Questions, Answered Straight

What is a clean boot in Windows?

It is a startup with every non-Microsoft service and startup app switched off, while Windows itself runs completely normally. It is a diagnostic state rather than a repair. Its whole purpose is to answer one question: is something you installed causing the problem, or is it Windows itself?

How do I clean boot Windows 11 and 10?

Press Windows and R, type msconfig and press Enter. On the Services tab, check Hide all Microsoft services first, then click Disable all. On the Startup tab, open Task Manager and disable every entry. Click OK and restart. The steps are identical on Windows 11 and Windows 10.

Is a clean boot the same as safe mode?

No, and the difference decides which one you should use. Safe mode strips Windows back to minimal drivers and services, so it is for a machine that will barely run. A clean boot keeps Windows fully normal and removes only third-party software, so it is for a machine that runs but misbehaves.

Why must I check Hide all Microsoft services first?

Because without it, Disable all switches off Windows components too. That can leave the machine unable to start properly, and it also ruins the test, since the point is to separate your software from Windows. Tick that box before you touch Disable all, every time.

The problem disappeared in a clean boot. What does that mean?

It means something you installed is responsible, and you have not fixed it yet. You have narrowed a whole computer down to one list. The next step is to re-enable in halves until the problem returns, which finds the culprit in roughly seven restarts rather than fifty.

How do I find which program is causing it?

Re-enable half the disabled services and restart. If the problem returns, the cause is in that half; if not, it is in the other. Split the guilty half again and repeat. Each restart halves what is left, so a hundred services take about seven restarts rather than a hundred.

How do I undo a clean boot?

Open msconfig again, choose Normal startup on the General tab, click OK and restart. Then re-enable your startup apps in Task Manager, because msconfig does not restore those. Both halves are needed, and the second one is the half people forget.

Is it safe to leave my computer in a clean boot state?

No, and this is the most common mistake with it. Your antivirus, backup software, printer services, VPN and sync tools are all switched off in that state. It is a temporary test, not a tuning trick, and a machine left that way is quietly missing protections its owner assumes are running.

Does a clean boot delete anything or change my files?

No. Nothing is uninstalled and no personal file is touched. All it changes is which services and startup apps run when Windows starts, and every one of those changes can be reversed from the same window that made them.

Why does a System Configuration message appear at every startup?

Because Windows is telling you the machine is not in its normal startup mode, which is genuinely useful information. It is the reminder that stops people forgetting they are mid-test. It disappears on its own once you set Normal startup back on the General tab.

The problem still happens in a clean boot. What now?

That is a useful result rather than a failure. It rules out third-party software, so attention moves to Windows components, drivers or hardware. Safe mode is the sensible next step, because it strips things a clean boot deliberately leaves running.

Should I disable startup apps in Task Manager as well?

Yes, and skipping it is why some clean boots prove nothing. Since Windows 8 the startup app list lives in Task Manager rather than in msconfig, so disabling services alone leaves a whole category of software still loading. A partial clean boot gives an unreliable answer.

Will a clean boot make my computer faster?

It will start faster, because almost nothing is loading, and that speed is misleading. Nothing has been optimized. Programs you depend on are switched off, and the moment you restore them the machine returns to its previous speed. Use it to find a fault, not to tune anything.

Can I clean boot if I cannot sign in to Windows?

Not usefully, because msconfig needs a working desktop. A machine that will not reach the sign-in screen or crashes immediately after it is a safe mode situation instead, since safe mode can be reached from the recovery options before Windows fully loads.

Do I need administrator rights for a clean boot?

Yes. Changing services and startup behavior affects the whole machine, so you need an administrator account and will see a prompt when msconfig opens. On a work laptop these settings are often managed centrally, in which case your IT team is the right place to start.

Does this apply to Windows 11 as well as Windows 10?

Yes. The msconfig window, the Hide all Microsoft services checkbox and the handover to Task Manager for startup apps are the same on both. Windows 11 restyles Task Manager, so the Startup apps list looks different while behaving identically.

Worth Reading Next

Revision note. Originally published February 16, 2016 as a short msconfig walkthrough. Rewritten August 22, 2026 for Windows 11 and Windows 10. The original told you how to enter a clean boot and stopped at the restart, which is the standard shape for this subject and the reason so many machines are still sitting in one. New here: clean boot set against safe mode so you can tell which you actually need, the halving method that turns eighty restarts into about seven, a table covering every outcome including the ones that feel like a wasted evening, a restore procedure with both of its halves, and what to do when nothing changes at all. If you are reading this because you have just discovered your own machine has been in Selective startup for months — check your backup date and your antivirus first, then restore, and know that the guide you originally followed simply did not tell you there was a way out. That was never something you should have had to work out for yourself.