Remember how fast your computer used to run when you first brought it home? It probably kept humming along at its original speed for some time but eventually, a Windows system will start to get slower… and slower… and slower still until you’re frustrated with your PC and wondering what happened to reduce its performance so much. It may be tempting to take the nearest brick to your computer and start fresh with a new PC, but there are some things you should try first.
The longer you have your computer, the more software you tend to install and uninstall. This can eventually take its toll on performance; many programs run automatically in the background by default. One of the things users commonly do when trying to identify the cause of their PC’s slowdown is to have a look in the Windows Task Manager to see just what is running.
You’ll see a lot of different processes listed here, most are parts of your operating system and should be left alone. However, there are usually quite a few unnecessary processes which are associated with software you’ve installed and by and large, these processes can be stopped with no ill effects. One of the processes I see the most people puzzled about is qttask.exe; what is this process? Is it safe to stop it from running, or is it a necessary system file? Is it a virus or some other piece of malware?
You can relax – qttask.exe is not a malicious program trying to damage your computer or send your financial information to nefarious hackers. It’s very common to have this running on your PC; which is why it causes so many to worry. The qt in qttask stands for QuickTime – that’s right, the video and audio player which you may have either as a standalone program or as part of iTunes. If you have iTunes, you’ll probably see this process in your task manager.
So what is this process and what exactly is it doing? This process is the QuickTime player’s update function and its job is to look for updates to the player. This process can become a problem for users in that it runs constantly in the background, taking up system resources which could be better used elsewhere.
Is it safe to stop qttask.exe? The answer is yes – you can safely stop this process from the Task Manager without causing any problems. It will still run again the next time you restart your computer though. If you’d like to keep it from running automatically, there is a simple solution. Open up QuickTime and go to the preferences menu (under Edit>Preferences>QuickTime Preferences) and select Update Check from the menu. On the menu which comes up, uncheck the box next to “Check for Updates Automatically” and this particular unnecessary process will stop using up memory.
Note: you will have to manually check for Quick Time updates or re-enable the process after doing this.
While qttask.exe isn’t a threat to your computer or to the security of your private information, there are serious threats out there. Keep yourself and your PC protected by using anti-spyware, anti-virus and registry cleaner software regularly. The data you save may be your own!
Tags: Processes