Autoruns – What is Running on Your Windows 7 PC

If you have wondered what programs are automatically configured and loaded when you startup, Autoruns, by Microsoft will give you that information. Autoruns is an MS download program that will show you locations, and startup order of many programs. It will provide you with information about Explorer shell extensions, and toolbars, as well as helper objects, auto-start services and Winlogon.

AutoRuns Winlogon

What does Autorun provide?

• It shows you the currently configured auto-start applications
• The full list of the Registry settings used.
• File system locations used for auto-start configuration.
• There are 18 tabs that can focus your attention to individual performance or configuration options.

AutoRuns - The Everything Tab: Places information about all settings

It is a configuration tool that can be used by administrators to monitor and tweak the performance of the system. There are multiple tabs to work with.  Here is the Logon tab which contains information about what programs load at logon.

AutoRuns-Logon: Files that Load Upon Logon

Another important component is that it allows you to see third party auto-starting programs. Through Autoruns’ Hide Signed Microsoft Entries option you can see third-party programs that have been added to your system.

AutoRuns - Other Options Available

If you prefer the command-line equivalent you can run Autorunsc from the command prompt which is automatically included in the download package. The output result is in CSV format.

AutoRunSC - The command line executable

There are a number of command switches that can be used with AutorunSC:

autorunsc [-a] | [-c] [-b] [-d] [-e] [-g] [-h] [-i] [-l] [-m] [-n] [-p] [-r] [-s] [-v] [-w] [-x] [user]

You can download the Autoruns executable from the following locations, and there is a forum available as well:

http://live.sysinternals.com/

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx

The Autoruns forum can be found at http://forum.sysinternals.com/forum_topics.asp?FID=16