Programs that think too much of themselves...

I have spent yet another morning with Safe Mode and msconfig, dealing with programs that think they're special. No, this isn't spyware or viruses - it's real programs, mostly commercial, that decide they deserve to slow down my system startup time.

Problem programs included Quicktime, Adobe Reader (it loads faster now, because it conceals 80% of its hideous load time in a program that runs on startup), NikonView 6, NeroCheck.exe, NMBGMonitor (Nero again!), and worst of all: The appallingly irritating ATI Catalyst Control center, which not only puts itself back into startup tasks whenever I update it, but also locks up half the system because of its absurd profiles thing.
There is also CTHelper which I have removed... I'll see what happens to the sound. There probably won't be a difference.

I now have 6 enabled startup processes out of a total of 17!

I also had to go through and (again) fix the Windows Document Image Viewer, which foolishly uses the Tif extension for its files! Not only that, but it also has the weird idea that it will be more frequently used through explorer to view its Tif files than Photoshop will be to view real Tif files. (And photoshop, Quicktime, Adobe Reader, + a few others, all have the weird idea that they deserve the right to update themselves in a more obtrusive and annoying manner than Windows itself.)


Uhm... sorry about the rant. I hope that it helps someone else clean their system, too.

On with my question:
Is there a setting I can change, or a utility that warns me, when a program writes itself to Startup processes?

Don't install crap. It's that simple. :)

the quicktime thing is annoying. It keeps enabling itself. So does the realplayer update thingy. You should have a look at services your computer doesn't need, to speed XP(if your using it) up a little.


Hindsight is a great thing.

It's gotten to the point where I don't install software unless I absolutely have to.

For example, in recent months I have purchased a digital camera and an mp3 player. I don't even know what the supplied software does as I have never installed it. I just move files to and from the devices as if they were external drives.

This is mostly off-topic, but I recently learned of how the digital artist Cory Arcangel took advantage of a failing in Quicktime. He did this a while ago so I don't know if this is still true of Quicktime, but he found that there wasn't any error checking, so if he fed it a movie file with a header that says the movie is several minutes long, but the file has no actual movie data, Quicktime would just start playing whatever random data happened to be in RAM. Every day for a month he recorded a video of his RAM. Awesome!

http://www.turbulence.org/Works/arcangel/

I know of some Kodak cam that wanted certain software to run in the background, so that it would run some image-browser when you'd connect the cam @ USB.
That same app was the cause for not being able to print a score from Logic Audio. :D

Solution? Buy a 15$ cardreader, and use that instead.

Oh, and send an angry email to Kodak, accusing them of nincompoopness. Make clear that not the whole world consists of n00bs who need to be tought how to breathe air, there're also normal ppl that just want to browse a cam, since it's a removable drive, and use their own image-viewer for that, e.g. ACDSee.

tripy videos. REminds me of the first time I pointed the Amiga viewport at the RAM! Used it to rip images and sounds later on. Then when I found you could point it at itself slightly offset to get an "inifinite mirrors" effect, I was also impressed. Simple things ah.

Yeah I hate that RealSched task that ALWAYS reappears after I use real player just once. Think I might uninstall it right now! Also QTtask gah!

Yeah, the camera software is a joke... Just copy across the files and delete the ones you don't need.

Installations are like cancer, each time you use one it puts a strain on your PC that can never ever be undone, even when uninstalled.

I never install games anymore, if I can't extract a zip into a directory and then delete it later then the game obviously isn't worth playing.

cool got rid of it. I've actually only got 2 items in msconfig startup now, nice. I often clean up peoples PCs of spyware and virii and you look at msconfig and they have 20+ items. One person recently have >50 and most were spyware. Their PC had 256MB RAM and XP (underpowered) plus all this cr*p running. It took about 5 minutes to load and IE was a pig, so was anything else in fact. I stuffed in another 512MB RAM cleaned it off (Avast and Adware), upgraded to SP2, Did MS Update, and it totally rocks now, very different PC.

What amazes me is the amount of stupid system tray icons people have. I have 3: Avast, Speaker and Safely Remove Hardware (due to USB devices). Anything I might want to use such as InCD I have in an Apps folder on the desktop, as let's face it you don't need most of this stuff most of the time!

It would be interesting to know if Microsoft supports such use of the Startup processes stuff... It can't be good for dumb people's (the same dumb people who buy a new version of Windows with every new computer they buy every 6 months) opinions on Windows when it takes forever to boot as a result of their 20 installations of Adobe Reader all preloading themselves whenever they start up!

They can't prevent programs from putting themselves there, because there are a few things like virus scanners and keyboard drivers that need that.
Would be nice if they limited it a bit. Does anyone know if Vista is going to do this differently?

Solution : Quicktime Alternative (filehippo.com will do).


Solution : FoxIt Reader (about 300k I think, single file exe, no install, works flawlessly)


Now here's a good one - I use MS Antispyware which warns me every time Nero makes changes like these and I clicked Block for most of them to no detrimental effect that I can see.


Wow, exact same thing with nVidia drivers. Two registry startup entries and a crash prone helper service. I have removed/disabled them all. =]


I try to keep these to a minimum, but atm I'm settling for Avast (only one thank you, merged that other one in with this), Outlook, MSN Messenger, Daemon-Tools, Google Web Accelerator (in beta, appears to be no way to remove it) and WinAmp, whenever it's running, which is practically all the time.


Wow. Just wow. You must still be using Win98 or something.


Logitech drivers have similar problem apps that conflict with others. What is wrong with these people...


I removed that too I think. I kept the EAX one and AGFP or whatever it was called (drives my front panel controls).

I use FoxIt as well. Excellent program :)
I keep Acrobat installed, though, because it has some features that the free version of FoxIt doesn't have :(
I may change my mind very soon, though.

Toby: Yeah I've merged AND turned of VRDB generation as I don't care.

There's a good startup monitor (among other things) on http://www.mlin.net/

James: ha, sounds useful, although of course it probably puts itself in your startup!! Ironic.

don't forget to disable your system recovery and all those
services that microsoft thinks are important like online help and stupid debugger unless you are running visual studio which needs a few of those.

Yeah I already disabled some non-essential services. I switched off windows help.

I just run msconfig on a regualr basis and kill all the crap that should not be running. I have also stop a great deal of the services that are not required.

I'm with you all the way. Why do these application developers think we want our system tray filled up with 'quick start' icons and update checkers?

The only things I have in my tray are AVG Antivirus and WinPatrol. I don't want to wait 3 weeks each time my PC is rebooted.

WinPatrol. It has more handy features built in too.

As Toby says, use Quicktime Alternative and RealPlayer Alternative. They strip all the crap out.

I'm the same. A lot of software supplied with such devices uses poor non-standard GUI interfaces with OTT eye candy.

Quick tip for Adobe Acrobat users - To speed up the loading of Adobes PDF viewer rename the plugins folder (to xxxplugins for instance).

This site is well worth bookmarking:

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/OptimizeXP.html

Yeah I hate this. I recently bought my mother a new system. The first thing I did was uninstall all the pre-installed crap and that system FLIES now!

I was cleaning out my system tray icons, and got them down to a minimum. There is only one problem: My new computer seems to think that there is a device in every USB port on my tower. Every time I turn on my computer, I get that little XP icon 'Safely Remove Hardware'. All of my empty USB drives are listed in it. I can't get rid of it. Any ideas?

I also hope you lot have gone back to windows classic theme and switched off all the fancy effects (except font smoothing) for ultra fast interface.

Actually, there is a fix for the ridiculous long load times for Adobe Acrobat Reader:

They made an patently insane design choice in that program: When you launch it, it will automatically load a truckload of different plugins, which is what takes so much time.
However: the vast majority of the time, you don't need need these plugins. And even more insane: if you DO have a document that requires one of the plugins and it is not already loaded, it will load it when needed anyway (!!!!)
There is a free 3rd party tool called Adobe Reader Speedup (Google for a download link) which will change some of the Acrobat reader system settings, and instruct it to NOT load ANY plugins upon startup, which thereby launches so much faster it's not funny anymore... Any if you load a file that requires a particular plugin anyway, it will still automatically do so.

Pre-loading all plugins might make sense if you keep going to File -> Open in acrobat reader all day opening new PDF files, but in reality 99% of the people will just close the reader when done, and double-click on the next PDF in the list. Anyway, very highly recommended, it will cut down the time to launch Acrobat Reader to a tenth of the time it otherwise takes.

I feel I should stress that these Alternative packages actually use the offical dlls from the latest versions of said software - but yes, the crap (like players you don't need) are stripped out - and the major part of these packages are the DirectShow codecs that run these dlls - so now you can use -any- player or video editing software (that supports DirectShow) to load these files.


No, I don't want 'performance', I settle for usablility. =]

Use Linux! :o

exactly how does fade/scroll effect on menus and shadows under menus improve useability? :-p

Actually I do have shadows on and the show window contents while dragging too.

For a long time i've been toying with the idea of writing a program that simply monitors the task list every minute and lists any new tasks not in it's safe database... I must get around to actually writing it...

*YOINK*

Never mind Banshee.

I'll write it.

I'll do it for you, All you have to do is add the mile long list ;)

Taken to an extreme, in exactly the same way endorphins are released when you eat chocolate or gork at a gorgeous girl. Looking at a pleasant interface heightens my mood, which in turn heightens my productivity. =]

PS Linux is not good. =]

Toby: OK you win :-)

Sure, i've only got a dozen or so tasks running - it's not a mile long... I'll add to the database as I go...

It's a suprisingly simple application really, provided one can remember the .dll call to list active tasks.

What, a thread titled "Programs that think too much of themselves" and noone even mentioned Word? The one program that thinks it knows better than you what you're trying to type?

Oh, I always just let Word do it's thing, because it's obviously smarter than I am ;]

I take it you've never saved a document in HTML format in word then. One line of text will generate a ~200-line HTML file. It's absolutely insane what kind of pointless garbage it feels the need to cram in there.

The worst part about its HTML editing is how Word seems to be tethered to its HTML capabilities - it's almost impossible to just create a free-form document where I can just add an image and drag it wherever I want on the page.

Frontpage is no better for quality of HTML, though. Have you seen the number redundant tags that it throws in? The nonstandard bits and pieces that only Internet Explorer understands? (and sometimes not even that). Dreamweaver isn't much better either.
There is one advantage here; if I want to find out what tools someone used to make a web site, I can just look at what kinds of messy HTML that looks so bad that it must have been done on purpose are there.

Of course I have. I just know, as a web developer, that Word's HTML save feature isn't worth spending the time it takes to right click it and select Delete, even.


<coughs> Frontpage XP and up is much better than ... any version of Word. It even doesn't mess up hand coded html anymore. I think I counted about 3 useless lines of code it created (as well as all the tags willy nilly, of course).

I think I'll bump this, as I have a new thing to rant about and only 5 minutes to do it!

What ever happened to My Documents being mine?
It seems that every game, program, gimicky feature (MSN's Winks), update to anything made by Adobe, programs which have been unistalled for years, and even 3d modelling programs which I have never used in my life has decided to put all of its junk inside of my documents folder.

Do the developers of this software not understand why I chose where to put it instead of dumping it in each user's My Documents? As I recall, there is a choice here to easily do per-user files: The program's data can be placed in its own folder (using an incredibly complicated system that creates a subdirectory with the user's account name), the folder BEFORE the user's My Documents (preferably in Application Data), or the user's My Documents.

Which one sounds most appealing? I think most people will prefer the first two; the developers don't!
I have counted 15 directories in my documents that were placed there by stupid programs.
One of them, funnily, is geniusly called Updater. Take one guess at what program left this? The answer: Adobe! (*GASP* Adobe, obsessing over their updater? Preposterous!)
Adobe so much thinks that "My Documents" belongs to it, that also has an Adobe folder in addition to Updater.
Most of the programs that have put themselves there are games, many of which also feature in-game profiles. (Since when does a game need two profile systems?!).

Want more redundancy?
There is an EA Games folder. The only game in there is The Sims 2. Both NFS Most Wanted and Battlefield 2 (which I think are both at least published by EA) have their own folder outside of that.

Another really weird thing here is that these are all paid programs. I have lots of open source and free stuff on here, and it all puts itself in a good, non-obtrusive place with the exception of Eclipse SDK.

Various other good programs that aren't stupid about this are igLoader and Midnight Mars Browser. There are also numerous programs that put their stuff in the place that Microsoft explicitly points out it should be put, (Application Data). Many of them have long since been uninstalled and failed to remove themselves properly, and there are many programs here that give me a bit of hope.
Most of these, however, have no reason to go in there anyways or are storing single tiny files with information that could easily simply apply to all users. (With the advantage being that the thing would uninstall properly!)

Why do programs that I have never used, but another user installed, put themselves in My Documents or my Application Data or my Documents and Settings in the first place? Wouldn't it be a bit easier for the programmers to make the program to put its data there only when a new user runs it, than to figure out each individual user and his Documents folder when it installs? I know it would be easier for the user to put up with, anyway!
(And it's what I do!)

I think that Microsoft should patch Windows so that a program can not determine the position of My Documents. (Instead it gets the folder that it SHOULD be looking at).
In fact, that comes to the reason for this rant:
Has anyone heard of such a thing? I would like to have back the place where I put my stuff. It annoys me immensely that the "My Documents" folder even exists at this point, because this clutter makes it almost completely useless.



Err... I think that took more than 5 minutes...

It's still yours, just that your use of it is expanding without you realising it ;] My Documents are for the currently logged in user. Therefore any program that saves a file can legitimately write to that user's directory - because we all know programs don't create random files unless the user tells them to.

Argh... I take that whole rant back.

I just learned that having Application Data take up too much space (darnit, Mozilla!) causes Windows to log out REALLY slowly.
I don't know how, but as soon as I uninstalled Google Earth and stopped Thunderbird from downloading all my email messages to the hard drive and got it to remove them properly (then changed its local directory to My Documents :/) my logout time became normal.
Previously, logout hanged on "Saving Your Settings" and the only fixes were for Windows 2000.

So, if Windows hangs for you upon logging out, that may be the solution :)
And no, this isn't really Mozilla's fault. Microsoft is to blame, of course.


Here's a question to make this thread relevent to something:
I finally decided that my My Documents folder had been truly taken over by an infestation of obsese programs. (Who'd have though Portable Document Format could get so incredibly complicated that the program to read it is no longer actually portable and to install it we need to first download a State-Of-The-Art Internet Download Manager to acquire it from Adobe and *GASP* install it automatically?).

To escape the infestation, I created a shared folder called My Real Documents which flawlessly gives the illusion of being how My Documents used to be except that it is not accessible quickly through Explorer's Places list. With what little faith I have left in this operating system's file management functions, I will ask this:
Is there a way to customize Explorer's Places List so that "My Real Documents" becomes accessible from the little sidebar and the "Other Places" list?

I thought everyone knew about:

Real Alternative : A no spyware, no malware, open source software that gives all the functionality of Real Player with none of the headaches.

http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Real_Alternative.htm

Also Quicktime Alternative: Which does the same for Quicktime.

http://www.free-codecs.com/download/QuickTime_Alternative.htm

There's no way you should be installing the full versions of that bloaty, resource hogging junk on your PC, though wonder you have problems.

Darkheart

Is there a divx 6.2 alternative too.

Cause I hate the fact that the new drivers call home and add a toolbar icon when a divx movie is playing.