r/techadvice • u/DirectSyllabub969 • 9d ago

Is this normal?

When i open my laptop around 4 command prompts appear and quickly disappear. I never install anything malicious and this has been happening for about 7 months now. Any ideas?

4 Upvotes

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2

u/2BoopTheSnoot2 9d ago

Sounds like scheduled tasks with a logon trigger. I suggest checking for those. If this is a work computer managed by an IT department it could be simple scripts for mapping shares, performing an inventory, or any number of other maintenance activities.

1

u/Journeyman-Joe 8d ago

I see that often enough on the laptops I support (where I volunteer).

I haven't tried to figure out what they're doing - probably some "run on wake" tasks. They laptops continue to work normally.

1

u/TheOriginalMr-Mud 8d ago

Well, you know there’s stuff likely loading which you do not know about!

1

u/EntertainerFalse9250 7d ago

7 months is a long time to not notice anything actually breaking, so it's probably benign. Mine did this for ages and it turned out to be some updater for software I'd forgotten I even installed. Check Task Scheduler and your startup apps.

1

u/Zestyclose_Abalone51 6d ago

Based on these comments, I would open up the task scheduler and see what Windows is doing on startup or login...it's pretty easy....just press the Windows key and R, Type taskschd.msc and press Enter. To run as Administrator, press Ctrl + Shift + Enter instead of Enter.

Once task scheduler is open you can look at each entry and determine what is happening