hi i have downloaded autoruns as suggested in start up. yes great program but alarming! i have used msconfig and win patrol to keep an eye on whats happening at start up and both show nothing has immense has autoruns, my start up programs total over 600 all are either c\windows\system\- or c\program file\- does this make them safe or do i have to check every file to see what it does or starts, my laptop is 1ghz, 256 ram and 30gig hard drive it as always been a little slow but nothing that i would experiment with, i use ccleaner and a full scan once aweek and secuna inspector once a month and up to now i have very few problems with the machine so should i leave well alone cheers

flavius,

Autoruns shows much more than startup programs. Much of what it shows are system dlls and drivers. You usually don't want to mess with an entry in there unless you know what it does. One time I accidentally unchecked one of the boxes, and upon reboot I had no keyboard or mouse control.... Safe to say it's a powerful tool.

600 entries does not sound abnormal for an autoruns. My system has 780 autoruns lines.

Billy3

hello billy3 thanks for your quick reply, i take it that at 780 start ups your desktop/laptop has a lot more memory than mine, your figure makes me less inclined to go experimenting, win patrol will tell me if anything out of the ordinary is starting up and if it does avg8 and spybot will scan it so it wont go unoticed cheers

You're welcome

My system has 2 GB ram.. Windows Vista Ultimate SP1

Billy3