LOADQM.EXE -- another Microsoft disastrous Jewel
Category: Windows
by Dennis Faas, infopackets editor
http://www.infopackets.com
Whether you know it or not, Microsoft has a previous track-history
for releasing sub-standard software that is known to be less than
computer-friendly. What do I mean by "less than computer friendly?"
Quite simply: either there are lots of bugs present in Microsoft's software,
or
their software has been known to make systems run sluggish.
The Story
Recently, I was visiting my brother and decided to hop on his system and
surf the Internet. His machine consists of Microsoft Windows 98, has
128 meg of RAM, and is powered by a Celeron 600 MHz processor.
Certainly, this system is not excruciatingly "slow", even by today's
standards.
At least, that's what I thought to myself.
"
After
reading your article on LoadQM.EXE, my computer ran an easy 100% faster!
Thanks for such a great
newsletter."
Kevin L. Hickle | Sergeant Major, United States Army (Retired)
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Twiddling my thumbs for a minute-and-a-half
After waiting for almost what seemed to be an eternity for Internet
Explorer to load, I realized that something was not quite right.
That's when I decided to do a CTRL + ALT + DEL to bring up Task
Manager. You
may remember that I discussed Task Manager in last week's issue of the
Infopackets Gazette. It's a handy-dandy trick that I use to see
what's running on a system whenever I suspect something is wrong.
At any rate, Task Manager reported that a program called LOADQM.EXE was
running on his system. Of course, I did not recognize this to be part
of the genre of programs that are SUPPOSED to be present in Task Manager --
especially on a freshly rebooted system with no other programs launched.
As you can imagine, the presence of this strange program made my
spider-senses start to tingle.
The usual trick after finding a suspect file is to go to
google.com and do a query. Google
gave me a few links leading to some online discussion boards. From the
information presented in discussions, it was said that LOADQM.EXE comes bundled with a few popular Microsoft
products, but is not an essential component.
LOADQM.EXE -- the purpose
After weeding through debate on the discussion boards, the purpose of
LOADQM.EXE is not clear. Some refer to the program as Microsoft's
attempt to spy on you and report your every move to some sort of a central
database system. The honest truth is that there is much speculation
about what LOADQM.EXE does which causes the computer respond sluggishly.
How to remove LOADQM.EXE from the Startup
After running MSCONFIG (on Windows 98, click: START -> RUN -> msconfig,
then click the STARTUP tab), I disabled LOADQM.EXE from starting when
Windows first loads. After being told to reboot, it appeared that his
system was running much faster.
The lesson
The important thing to note here: having less programs execute during the
Windows startup has a direct effect on how long it takes a system to boot
(load for the first time) and its available resources. From what I
could understand (from the discussions I read online), many users noted that
disabling LOADQM.EXE did not interfere with MSN Messenger or any other
Microsoft programs that "use" it.
After this newsletter was emailed
I received an email from Greg T. stating that he found a link on
Microsoft's web site that describes the nature of LOADQM.EXE.
Apparently Microsoft says that LOADQM.EXE is only for MSN Messenger, and
that it has some auto-update feature which is always running and actively
checking for some sort of update. To what? It doesn't
specifically say.
I also received an email from a user named Satori. He writes:
" LoadQM is a component of the Background Intelligent File Transfer
Service, which is used by processes such as the Automatic Update tool for
Windows Update*.
It is not necessary for the normal functioning of the Windows
operating system in any of its incarnations that I am aware of.
If it is utilizing a great deal of system resources, it is either being
heavily used, or it is encountering difficulty performing its function for
one reason or another. There can be many reasons for this. "
Side note: It is possible that LoadQM is
responsible for delivering automatic updates for the Windows Operating
system, as Satori suggests. However, this does not appear to hold true
for
my Windows XP machine which has MSN Messenger disabled.
What does Microsoft say?
Microsoft does not go to any stride to say WHY anyone would
want to disable the auto-update feature -- only that you can. The
method described in the Microsoft article is much different from what I
described above. If you experience the same problem as I did (or if
you just want to have piece of mind knowing that you have more resources
free), use my method. It doesn't hurt to check out what Microsoft
says, either:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q309418
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