Autorun Angel

There are many less conventional ways of detecting and removing malware or spyware infections, besides traditional antivirus programs. One of them is Autorun Angel, which scans your autorun items for infections. Unlike conventional anti-malware scanners, Autorun Angel is cloud-based, which means that it doesn't rely on a local signatures database, which needs to be updated constantly.

Autorun Angel is freeware and it works on all Windows versions, from the obsolete Windows 95, to the fairly new Windows 8, as long as you have Internet Explorer 5 or a later version installed. Setting up the application on a computer is not a difficult task and it should take less than a minute.

All you have to do is launch Autorun Angel and let it look in your autorun section. After a brief scanning process, the application will populate a list with executables that are set to run automatically when Windows starts up. They are displayed together with various details and you may right click them to reveal a few options, for retrieving additional details and for looking up the files in the developer's own database or on Google.

You can start a new scanning process, with a single click, to check the status of each file and see if they are safe or not. If you encounter one or more unknown files, you can hit a different option, to send them to the developers for analysis. Autorun Angel may not hold your hand and fix everything for you automatically, but it is certainly a useful tool to have around. If your main security measures fail, this application will make it much easier to locate and remove infections manually.