TaskDoctor

In order to offer the user with as little hassle as possible, many of the routines performed by Windows are scheduled to run in the background with a specific frequency.

However, not all scheduled tasks are benign and some of the entries may be related to malicious activity trying to evade user detection.

TaskDoctor is a simple utility that retrieves all the tasks in Windows Task Scheduler and presents them in a more comfortable manner, complete with a brief description in order to make the tasks easier to identify and to assess.

Portable and straightforward

The application is portable, so it can be launched as soon as extracted from the archive, without having to install it.

Nothing is shown in the main screen until it scans for the scheduled tasks, a process that does not take too much time to complete and it is also easy on the resources.

Viewing the items can be customized so that related entries are grouped together or to be displayed as a list, without any of the details that would help identify them. TaskDoctor shows the current status of a task as well as the last time it has run.

Before retrieving the scheduled tasks you can enable the verification for valid signatures, very useful if you are trying to determine the validity of unknown processes.

A set of management options in the context menu enables you to enable or disable the selected tasks or to run them. There is also the possibility to add new tasks to the list by importing them from an XML file.

Also, for a better view of the tasks that are not initiated by the operating system you can instruct TaskDoctor to ignore Microsoft tasks. This way the list of results contains only third-party tasks, which have a greater chance of being malicious.

TaskDoctor is a simple way to inspect and manage the processes that set up scheduled tasks. It can help detect malicious activity as well as to get informed about the activity of some programs.