Sunday, July 31, 2011

It's a bug, not a feature

Black Box, my trusty Compaq desktop has been running slow for some time. I had been thinking it was the network until youngest son complained the Black Box was slower than his laptop. So I started out on the traditional virus hunt. Ran Task Manager and saw an unknown process called jqs.exe. Some Googling on the name revealed that jqs stands for Java Quick Start, and the jqs process was loading up during boot time, downloading a good deal of java run time code, and constantly querying something to stay up to date. Unless you run Java programs every day (few of us do) you don’t want jqs sucking up your memory or your run time.
You gotta be careful what you see in Google. One Google reference gave a lengthy removal hand patch involving the always perilous Regedit, and then a download button that tried to sell me something called Spyware-Doctor. I backed out of that sales pitch and found another reference that suggested the Java Quick Start could be disabled thru Adminstrative Services.
Procedure.
Start->Settings->Control Panel
Click on “Administrative Tools
Click on “Services” (gear wheel shaped icon)
Find “Java Quick Starter” in the list of services.
Just to check things out, right click on the jqs service and select “Stop” . After a pause it should report jqs is stopped. This merely stops jqs from running right now, it will restart next time, and I do this just to make sure that the gear wheels are meshed and working right.
Now right click on jqs and select “Properties”.
Select the “General” tab and then set the “startup type” to “manual” There are three start up types, Automatic, Manual and Disabled. Automatic means load at boot time, every time. Manual means only load when needed, and disabled means never load no matter what.
When you reboot, you should no longer see jqs in task manager. On Black Box the improvement in Web surfing speed is very noticeable.

1 comment:

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