The Computer Corner
By Charles Miller, Feb 2, 2007

The taming of the shrewd

In last week’s tirade, I excoriated Apple Computer for the way in which it implemented its QuickTime Viewer. Please read that last sentence carefully. I am not condemning Apple Computer or its QuickTime Viewer program—only Apple’s methods. The mistake Apple made was to take a great little program that is free to the Internet community and add to it a completely unnecessary and annoying tray icon.

The QuickTime Viewer could be called a browser plug-in. It is a program that expands and enhances the capabilities of your web browser. QuickTime makes it possible for your computer to play certain video files via the internet.

A polite browser plug-in is inconspicuous and does not hog your computer resources unnecessarily. When it is needed, it will activate automatically, and when you are finished using the plug-in, it should shut itself off and return to obscurity until the next time you summon it.

Take a look at your Windows taskbar. In the lower right corner near the clock, you should see a number of small icons such as volume control, anti-virus, and so forth. If you see a blue letter “Q,” try hovering your mouse over it to see if it says “QuickTime.” If it does, that means the qttask.exe program is running and using up some of your memory and processor cycles. It might have been months since the last time you actually used it, but it is still running and constantly wasting your resources, waiting to be used again.

The culprit is not the QuickTime Viewer program but an “extra” program, qttask.exe, which apparently has nothing whatsoever to do with playing videos. You can turn off or even delete qttime.exe and the QuickTime View continues to work just fine.

Read the newsgroups on the internet and you will find accusations that the qttask.exe program causes computers to freeze up. Some users report that their laptop will not hibernate properly when qttime.exe is present. Most worrisome of all are the insinuations that qttask.exe spies on users and reports to Apple the names of all the videos you play on your computer.

So what is a computer user to do if you want to continue using the QuickTime Viewer to play videos, but avoid all the problems?

To our rescue comes a fine fellow, Tim Hibbard, a software architect from Lawrence, Kansas, who has written a program to tame the nasty behavior of QuickTime. His program removes the QuickTime startup information and stops the background QuickTime process. The program does all this without any effect on the functionality of the QuickTime Viewer, which still works perfectly.

Point your browser to “http://tinyurl.com/zcmu5” (without the quotes) to download “EnGraph QuickTime Killer 1.0.” Click on the [Download Now] button to download the program, then install it.

The next time you reboot, the QuickTime Killer will tame this bad-mannered behavior by removing QuickTime from startup and kill any running QuickTime processes while leaving the functionality of QuickTime intact.

The QuickTime Killer application runs silently at start-up and closes itself out as soon as it puts QuickTime back in its proper place.

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044-415-101-8528 or email FAQ@SMAguru.com.