Freeware Spotlight — Autorun Organizer

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BEST UTILITIES By Deanna McElveen Making breakfast. Washing the dog. Getting a haircut. If you have time to do any of these while your computer finish
[See the full post at: Freeware Spotlight — Autorun Organizer]

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wavy, WSAnklebuster, WSnonurban, SueW, windbg, plodr, abbodi86

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Hi Deanna,

Autorun Analyzer seems like a great program.  However, I have a question.  Does Autorun Analyzer find any programs that load at startup, which don’t show up when you load Task Manager, and choose Startup tab?  Or does Autorun Analyzer simply duplicate the list of startup programs that you find when you use Task Manager?

Thank you.

Gary

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Good morning, Deanna…

In as much of a ‘nutshell’ as I can keep this, I tried Autorun Organizer on my Win 10 computer yesterday, and then just decided to go to the whoismyDNS . com website to check it, just for the heck of it. It should have told me that I was still using Quad9 as my DNS provider, but instead displayed 38.88.8.34  / Ripe NCC (I am reciting this from history / memory, as I restored my DNS back to my preferred DNS provider, and just decided to comment on this today) Anyone who has installed this (or any of ChemTable’s software) should check to see if their DNS provider has been changed without them knowing it. I would be very interested to know if anyone else has had this happen to them. Isn’t it very strange that on ChemTable’s website there is no listing anywhere of where this company is located? Ripe NCC is based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and the photo on ChemTable’s “About” pages has Russian(?) lettering above the main entrance. Something is a little fishy about all this… Has anyone else had a similar experience? Thanks for letting me post this!

1 user thanked author for this post.

wavy

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Here is an update to the mysterious changing DNS numbers: I initially had my DNS #s set to CleanBrowsing . org ‘s Adult Filtering numbers, and using whoismydns . com , 38.88.8.34 came up, which actually corresponds to PSINet. (That’s OK–it’s in Virginia) Now, after reinstalling Autorun Organizer, the Primary DNS Server comes up as 147.75.75.137 / RIPE Network Coordination Center, which is not OK, being across the Atlantic Ocean. So I can only surmise that Autorun Organizer may be changing my DNS settings. I think I will try to get in touch with Anton Maksimov, who is the Marketing Director at ChemTable Software. (BTW, by searching for his name on the internet, I found out that ChemTable is a Russian company) Stay tuned…

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MYSTERY SOLVED! Someone from CleanBrowsing support set me straight after reassuring me that the DNS Server I mentioned is “one of our servers with Equinix“. In addition, here is their latest reply: “Whoismydns is not very accurate and they look at the IP address doing the DNS requests to their servers to try to find what service are you using. We leverage multiple datacenters throughout the world , including Equinix, Cogent and others. RIPE is just the IP registration company from Europe, which they display incorrectly.” CB also gave me this website: DNSleaktest . com — It’s a great website! So there you have it; Things aren’t always what they seem to be. I really hope all this helps us in our quest for the best computing and internet experience possible. I like alternative / filtered DNS Servers. They’re safer and usually faster. Again, thanks for letting me post these messages!

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anonymous wrote:

Anyone who has installed this (or any of ChemTable’s software) should check to see if their DNS provider has been changed without them knowing it.

I noted my DNS provider (using Get-DnsClientServerAddress in an elevated PowerShell console) both before and after installation of Autorun Organizer… nothing was changed.

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garycahn wrote:

Does Autorun Analyzer find any programs that load at startup, which don’t show up when you load Task Manager, and choose Startup tab? Or does Autorun Analyzer simply duplicate the list of startup programs that you find when you use Task Manager?

Autorun Organizer is more granular than just duplicating Task Manager‘s Start-up tab results.

For example, even Autorun Organizer‘s default setting of ‘Most Important’ includes tasks in Task Scheduler (including those that are disabled):

Two things to note:

1. Autorun Organizer suggested an optimisation of a startup item (BraveSoftware Updater), even though it was disabled:

2. If you have used Sysinternals/TechNet’s Autoruns and disabled any startup items from within it then Autorun Organizer will not show these disabled items (because Autoruns moves them to a different registry key away from their default [and known] location).

Hope this helps…

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Hi Deanna,

Thanks for this Autorun Organizer. I used to use Nirsoft’s utilities.

To answer your question about right-clicking an entry and then selecting Add to Startup…, this allows you to add a new program to Startup. 🙂

 

Cheers,

 

Mitch

 

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So which utility would be the better one to have, Autoruns or Autorun Organiser?

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anonymous wrote:

and the photo on ChemTable’s “About” pages has Russian(?) lettering above the main entrance.

It is a Russian based registrant.
I generally avoid anything from there.

🍻

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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Autorun Organizer doesn’t make any suggestions about how to optimize startup time.   For the last 5 days mine has varied thus: 89 sec., 767, 141, 1166 (NOT a typo!), 286.   I feel like I’m just making random guesses about what to change and by how much.  Also, I had Backblaze delayed for 300 sec., but my network meter and Task Manager showed it was active way before that!  I wish Autorun Organizer would make suggestions, and also make it easier to roll back changes.  The “Undo Changes Center” doesn’t keep track of all changes on a trial by trial basis, so it’s not granular enough to be useful.

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anonymous wrote:

So which utility would be the better one to have, Autoruns or Autorun Organiser?

In my experience, I would suggest Autoruns has a longer established pedigree.

Having said that… I regret to say that Autoruns and other Sysinternals/Technet utilities (like Process Monitor) are showing an increasing number of bugs since responsibility was devolved away from the original author – Mark Russinovich – to others.

It’s now quite normal to see both new and outstanding un-fixed bugs reported in the Microsoft Q&A > Sysinternals support forums (e.g. Autoruns)… a sad state of affairs.

These days I would NEVER update my Sysinternals utilities automatically without first reading the Sysinternals support forums for reported problems.

I’m still using Autoruns v13.94 which – thank goodness – is apparently free of the bugs which have plagued all/most iterations of v14.x.

Hope this helps…

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