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Autostart – Background information
Programs in the System Tray: Many auto-launch programs are visible as icons in the System Tray, which is the little box at the right-hand end of the taskbar at the bottom of your screen. Other automatically-started programs are completely invisible – they’re running in the background but you never know anything about them or what they’re doing!
Badly-behaved and malicious auto-launch programs and viruses
But that’s not all – some automatically-launched programs are annoying or even downright malicious. For example they interrupt you with advice and advertising that you don’t want to see, or connect to Internet sites and transfer information or install updates without even telling you, let alone asking you.
For quite a while there has also been a spate of genuinely malicious auto-launch programs that you can easily install accidentally if you’re not careful when you’re surfing on the Internet. The best example of these are the “dialer” applications that replace your normal Internet connection with a telephone number that charges you a very high price per minute. But there are also others, like advertising applications that only serve to inform Internet sites about your preferences and activities, and so on. This is where we start to cross the line between programs and viruses.
Control what gets started with Ashampoo Core Tuner 2!
Windows® provides many facilities that can be used to launch programs automatically. Some of them are obvious and easy to locate, others are hidden so well that even experienced users sometimes have trouble finding them.
Ashampoo Core Tuner 2 knows about every hiding place. It doggedly seeks out shows you all of the auto-launch programs on your system and lets you decide whether you want them to be run or not. Furthermore, it lets you activate and deactive your auto-launch programs at will, so that you can “turn them on” when you need them and disable them when you don’t have any use for them.
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