Alfa Autorun Killer

Alfa Autorun Killer is a free security tool that helps protect your system by scanning for and removing viruses, worms, adware, and other autorun threats on your hard disks and removable drives and by preventing unauthorized programs from executing autorun processes. It includes secure delete and process, services, and startup managers, and automatic updates.

Alfa’s system-tray icon is the central access point for the software’s features and settings. We right-clicked the program’s icon to open its extensive menu, which stayed open even when other windows and apps were active–a small but welcome touch. From this menu, we could check for updates to the database and scan engine, enable automatic processes, view the log file, and access the program’s security tools. We opened the program’s dialog-based user interface, the Threats Scan Center, and clicked Settings. These mostly configured the program’s startup behavior, enabled sounds, and similar options, as well as allowed context menu integration in Windows. We initiated a system scan, which finished quickly and returned a clean report, thankfully. The program’s scan report contained a lot of information about our system and drives as well as what was scanned, including notification that vital system processes such as our antivirus software had been reactivated after the scan. We ran some scans with other tools and rebooted to ensure that Alfa had done no harm. While the report found no threats, it identified our hard disks as lacking protection. We opened the Protection Center, which let us select one of three autorun suppression levels for our system: Not Protected, Medium Protection, and Maximum Protection. The program recommended the medium setting, which prevents autorun programs from executing on your hard drives but not your CD-ROM or DVD drives; a good compromise since you must manually insert optical disks. However, the Maximum setting nixes autorun on your optical drives, which keeps sophisticated bugs from tricking your system into running them, but you have to run programs manually from CDs or DVDs.

Alfa’s various system managers are useful extras that basically augment or centralize Windows processes. A Search & Destroy feature securely deletes files using several methods. All in all, we found Alfa Autorun Killer a valuable addition to our security suite, preventing unwanted programs from running with a minimum of hassle.