Autoruns is probably the most popular and advanced Windows startup manager. It is a portable lightweight application that can be used to configure practically anything that deals with files that are loaded during the Windows system start. It goes beyond a simple application that lists programs in some of the possible locations that can contain startup items including information about Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer, Scheduled Task or Print Monitors among others. The program divides the information into 17 different tabs that display the location the entry was found and a checkbox to enable or disable it.
Removing entries from the list of programs that get started during system start will prevent them to be loaded after the next reboot. Inexperienced users should be very cautious on the other hand as the program displays important files that are needed to run the operating system properly.
The update to Autoruns 9.5 added a new tab to the startup manager. Autoruns now displays multimedia codecs “which are gaining popularity as an extension mechanism used by malware gains automatic execution.”
A click on the Codecs tab in Autoruns displays now system codecs as well. It is probably a good idea to hide Microsoft and Windows codecs from the list to make it more accessible.
Autoruns can be downloaded from the Windows Sysinternals homepage. It is compatible with client and server operating systems starting with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.
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I’ve seen this around for what seems like forever. I was using SysInternals years ago. For some reason that currently eludes me, I’ve never bothered with Autoruns. I’ve happily used StartupCPL from mlin.net and it’s worked great, but this is just like it and far more complete. StartupCPL only does a couple things that this doesn’t, while this does a few that StartupCPL doesn’t — specifically, “Jump To”, showing other users’ stuff, and displaying stuff from far more places.
This is great. Why haven’t I been using it?
Rick StartupCPL is a nice tool as well but as I said earlier nothing beats Autoruns at the moment. It’s near perfect.