Open apps at start-up

I'm really impressed with this old MBP. Th only problem I'm having that I haven't been able to figure out so far is the flood of apps that open when I start it. Safari, Outlook, Word, ITunes Preview and maybe a couple of more. What did I do? What do I do to stop it. This is an early 2008 2.4gh 15.4" MBP. I know it's due for a little more memory, only 2gb right now.

What version of OS X are you running? Under System Preferences->Users & Groups, click on your name and then the Login Items tab and remove whatever you don't want to start up.

Depending on your version of OS X, if you power-down your Mac daily, during the shutdown process a dialog appears with a check box indicating if you want to re-start all the currently running apps the next time, uncheck that..

THANKS1 I've done some checking and found that it's better to quit apps than to hit the little red dot, to.
I forgot to include the OS, its 10.7.5. I've been meaning to ask, but would I experience any quality of life benefits by upgrading to Mavericks? Would it be a good thing, or should I stick with what I have for now.

In most OS X Apps, clicking the red dot just closes the window without quitting the app. This makes it easy to open a new window without having to re-launch the app especially if you are doing that constantly. But otherwise, it's quite CMD+q the apps to properly close them. The small light under the icon in the Dock will tell you if the app is running or not..

I you are content with Lion right now and are not experiencing any issues, I would hold off on upgrading to Mavericks. You should upgrade the memory to the maximum to prolong the life of your MBP and with that upgrade, Mavericks might be fun if you decide to upgrade..

Thanks. Memory is on the shopping list. Probably just 4gb for now. The 4gb modules I'd need to make the 6 gb max I've found so far seem to run a little more than half what I gave for the machine. I'll probably end out doing it anyway.

I definitely recommend the bump to 4 gigs of RAM. I have an early 2008 MacBook that peforms a whole lot better with 4 over 2... The single best upgrade I did for it was replace the slow slow hard drive with an SSD. I think I've added a few years of usefulness to that machine with that $80 upgrade.

That was my next question. My Thinkpad both have 7200rpm hdd's. They can be real battery killers. It's even more noticeable in the old PowerBook G4. Another thing to add to the shopping list.
Maybe I should consider the bargain basement price (there were parts machines on eBay that wouldn't boot selling for more) as just giving me more to put into it.