Fujitsu itself has a little surprise for you: You can take their autoupdater out of the startup sequence but if you ever decide to run it, it will reinstall itself. This is the height of obnoxious behavior.

The Startup behavior is an example of the “Prisoners’ Dilemma” model in game theory, in which each participant defects even though the result is worse for everyone. There needs to be some central authority monitoring the behavior, whether the user using a program such as Autoruns or the operating system requiring user approval for each item added.

Well said. I also try to disable all auto-update stuff including MS one. Apple, Google, MS, Sun, Adobe they all do this thing and I don’t appreciate it at all. The worst case could be Apple since there is no way to remove quicktime from startup. Well, to be exact, I can remove it but it comes back up there whenever I run iTunes. :(

You can filter out all these useless start up programs with a free standalone utility called Autoruns
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/ProcessesAndThreads/Autoruns.mspx

I’m glad I found your website. I was looking for a new podcast to listen to. I’ll definitely visit often.

Ditto, especially when recalling the time my Yahoo Music Engine just starting downloading a new version with no choice to not (they’ve fixed that since). My hard drive was almost full, about 800 meg left, so I was in a race, offloading files to an external hard drive. Don’t know what would have happened if I lost.

Boy, do I agree with you on this one.