WINDOWS UPDATE WARNING
Make sure your PC survives es the latest changes
Autorun Organizer
Autorun Organizer ( www. snipca.com/25719) is a very good program. This free, newly updated tool checks your PC’S startup items for malware, displays their boot times on a graph, and lets you enable and disable them. It would’ve been worthy of a spot in Best Free Software, if only it weren’t ferrying a PUP on to users’ computers.
Finding ‘Bonus Software’ in its installer was much more disappointing than being junked by notorious Pup-peddlers like Adobe Flash Player (last issue’s junk offender) and Java (Issue 508). It was like finding a worm in a delicious apple. You can untick the PUP, just as you can remove the worm – but it doesn’t half put you off installing or eating.
Maybe I’m overreacting. Autorun Organizer’s PUP, a sibling tool called Reg Organizer, is hardly the worst I’ve
ever seen. I waved it on to my PC just to see what would happen, and it didn’t hijack my browser or even insert itself into startup, which is more than can be said for the Safezone horror that Avast re-installs every time it updates my antivirus.
But the point about unwanted extras is that they’re unwanted extras. Reg Organizer is pre-ticked, clocks in at 64.55MB – larger than the program it’s hitching a lift with – and is described as “the top selling program of the ‘Registry Utilities’ category, according to the Softkey.ru online software store statistics” (see screenshot). Well, isn’t that packed with comfort? A paid-for program designed to tinker with your registry, recommended by Russian software floggers. Just what you always wanted.
The fact that you can opt out of Reg Organizer, or that you may even decide you like it, does not make it OK. It sneaks in when you’re installing other software, and that’s precisely what this page is designed to warn you about.