Video:How to Disable Autorun

Transcript:How to Disable Autorun

Hi, my name is Greg Creech and I'm going to be your computer tutor today. I'm here today for About.com. I want to talk about one of the demanding things called autorun.

How Autorun Works

That's when you're in the middle of doing something and all of a sudden you get this screen that's checking for email messages, or it's trying to do a full system scan and it slows your system to a crawl. So let's look at that. Let's look at ways that you can have autorun work for you and not against you.

First of all, let me show you and I'm going to just be using Norton as my demonstration but they all offer this ability. You can see where it says 'autoprotect,' that's an automatic situation. You can turn these on and you can turn them off. So if I don't want to have that, I can turn that off right here just by clicking it.

Reasons to Keep Autorun On

Now I would be careful about doing something like that with my autoprotect because if I'm attacked by a virus, then I've just let the virus in my door. So some of these, like email scanning, I believe you definitely want to have that always on but you can go in here and turn these off and decide that you don't want these. That if it's going to slow down your system, you prefer not to have that kind of virus protection. So autorun is a terrific feature. However, you want the ability to control when it works and you can do that by pausing it, skipping the information or by deactivating it.

Thank you and safe computing. For more information, please see About.com.