Showing posts with label Regedit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Regedit. Show all posts

Monday, June 5, 2017

Cortana: What can it do and do I care?

According to net rumor, Cortana does some searching and accepts voice commands and gives voice responses and does snooping for Microsoft.   It used to suck up better than 100 Mbytes of RAM and a smidgen of CPU time.  Since putting in Creator's update big patch the other day it is down to 66.6 Mbytes of RAM and zip for CPU time. 
   After go rounds with Dragon Dictate and the average robocaller, I am not impressed with voice recognition.  I haven't gone thru a training session with Cortana.  I don't think I'm using it at all. I think I want to blow it away to save RAM and speed up things.
   So far, net searching only say you can use Regedit to add a key to the registry  (AllowCortana = 0) that inhibits Cortana from doing something while searching.  No directions for blowing Cortana clean off the hard  drive.   The only searching I ever do is with a web browser and Google, or on my harddrive with Windows Explorer.  
  Question:  Is it worth  adding the magic key to the registry?   Will it recover that 66.6 Mbytes of RAM, or does it leave Cortana sucking up RAM and doing nothing?  
   

Thursday, January 7, 2016

Washing Windows 8, yet again

Killing off crapware, specifically hpservice.exe.  This baby shows up in Task Manager as a "process", ie a program loaded into ram and running, but does not show a window to control it or observe results.  I tried to DISABLE it in task managers startup tab.  Did not work, when I powered up next day hpservice.exe was still running.  Net searching had told me that hpservice.exe was not a regular Windows service but just got loaded by a key in the registry.  So I started up regedit (more difficult to do in Win 8 than in XP) and searched for a key that said "run" or "runonce" and the hpservice.exe name.  No dice.  Could not find the desired key let alone zap it.
   Went back to Task Manager, and yup, the SOB was still there, big as life.  Some fumbling around and I tried "Control Panel"," Administrative Tools",  "Services"  And there it was, a service, set to "AUTOMATIC" start, which means load and run every time the computer boots up.  I changed that to "DISABLED".  
   I checked for hpservices in Task Manager this morning, and he is dead and gone.
   Moral of story: Don't believe everything you see on the net. 
   And, Win 8 works just fine without hpservice.exe.