Showing posts with label Bonjour. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bonjour. Show all posts

Sunday, January 3, 2016

Washing Windows 8 (again)

Today's Windows 8 crapware kill is a service called "Bonjour".   Bonjour is an Apple invention for "hands off networking".  Bonjour works by going on the local network and finding all the other computers, shared printers, and other useful stuff, and with such info it can then support programs that want to talk with other stuff on the network.  All of these activity runs in parallel with the regular Microsoft networking support which has been there since Win98 and has gotten better over the years.
  Itunes is the program that wants Bonjour support.  I don't have an Ipad, so I don't run Itunes.  There are a bunch of other Apple programs, none of which I had ever heard of, which Wikipedia lists as wanting Bonjour as well.  I don't care about them and so adieu to Bonjour. 
  Bonjour being a service, is best killed using the Windows services tool.   Get to "Control Panel".  I have "Control Panel" as an icon on the desktop.  Some long ago tweaking of "Personalizations" gave me that very useful desktop icon.  If you don't have the icon, do the bang-the-mouse-on-the-righthand-screen-edge thing to bring up the Charms bar.  Select the "Settings" charm.  Inside "settings"  select "control panel". 
   Once in Control panel select "Administrative Tools".  Then select "Services".  This  shows every service in the machine and allows you to stop them, start them, and program Windows useage of the service.  Services are programs that Windows loads into RAM at boot time, or upon demand.  STOP means just shut down the copy in RAM.  I usually STOP a service, just to make sure I have control.  Then reprogram the "Startup type" to "manual" or "disabled".  Manual means don't load and run the service until some program asks for that service.  I set Bonjour to "manual" and it never started up, indicating that no program every requested the Bonjour service.  "Disabled" means never load and run the service no matter how hard programs beg and plead for the service. 
  With Bonjour service turned off, I could still access my desktop from the laptop and transfer fines back and forth.  Home networking runs just fine without Bonjour, the regular Microsoft networking carrying the freight.