Even after these many years of software development, there are some applications that still bother user with a lot of processes and memory consumption. I am not surprised if such applications are from the novice software vendors, but the matured technology companies like Google and Real Networks do develop some applications that annoy me.
As soon as i boot my windows machine, these process would start and sometimes i wonder how does my machine hit on the performance. Now, i go and kill both of the Google Updater, Real Networks processes in the process explorer.
Recently Google has the Video plugin and it still sucks (:-(). There are so many times that i kill this process and i get the same process spawned multiple times. I cant kill this process for some reason and it always spawns a new process, each time i kill (Google might think it is a smart thing to do) . I was under the impression that Google does some magic by not using any dlls or exes but i was wrong. They do use the gooletalkplugin.exe directly attached to the browser.
I am sure that a simple home user would not mind (to some extent) having all these *^$*^$ processes around, but as a programmer i do not feel this is a good practice and as a consumer, i feel cheated. e.g. Google could have just asked users to install the Google Talk and use it for the Video chat, instead of giving an impression that it runs right from the browser.
This is a good example for me how NOT to build products and how NOT to ignore what goes inside the processes and memory. I am sure many of the readers would have seen similar situations and sometimes even would have felt frustrated. Do you think such sort of things from software vendors is fair ? What are your experiences ?
Realplayer? Really?
you can use Spybot, that will not allow unwanted process to start.
Hi Suresh,
this is really an impressive blog you have here! Keep going!
Yeah, a lot of softwares (free/otherwise) do annoy me when it comes to initiating processes on their own. They label them – updater, speed launcher, helper, etc. to confuse the amatuer guy into believing that these are very important! 🙂 I am not much of an expert though. I use CCleaner to keep tab on the startup processes. I use Vista Home Premium at home and having such unnecessary processes running does slows it down dramatically.
Ravi.