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| View and Modify Startup Tasks SUMMARY: Use Spybot Search and Destroy to help determine if spyware or adware is starting up on your machine.
Normally, when you boot a Windows machine, startup tasks automatically run that may perform functions such as initiating a virus protection guard, initializing multimedia settings, logging into networks to access remote shares, etc. However, it is possible that spyware or adware could also start up with Windows to initialize ad viewers, open back doors into your system, and more.
To help keep spyware and adware from running on startup, Spybot Search and Destroy lets you view, and if desired, turn off selected startup tasks.
1. Click "Mode", selecting "Advanced Mode".
2. Click "Tools" in the left pane.
3. Click "System Startup" in the right pane.
A list of startup tasks appears in a list in the right pane. This list includes:
* Key - How an item starts up (a command, service, etc.)
* Value - A name given to the startup item
* Command line - The actual command run to execute the startup option.
Note that entries added since the last snapshot (or when you first ran Spybot Search and Destroy) are in bold, letting you see recently added entries.
Tasks include:
* To toggle a startup task on or off, check or uncheck the box. You should not toggle tasks off unless you know exactly what you are doing, as turning off the wrong task could disable security software, keep multimedia from playing, deny you access to network shares, and more.
* To edit a startup task's command line, click the task then the "Edit" button.
* To add a startup task, press the "Insert" button and follow the onscreen prompts.
* To completely remove a startup task, click a task and then "Delete". Note that you should first toggle tasks off to see if it affects the system then later remove the task, unless you are positive the task is spyware.
* To save the list of startup tasks to a text file so you can potentially give it to a computer professional to ask them whether or not startup tasks are legitimate or spyware, click the "Export" button and give the log file a name.
* To copy the list of startup tasks to the clipboard, right-click on a task and choose "Copy to clipboard". You can then paste the clipboard into a text editor such as notepad and view detailed information about each task, including the executable's MD5 checksum.
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