Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Eat my cycles

I was noticing that my new Thinkpad was running very slowly. It would sometimes take several minutes to remove the screen saver (which is, if course, totally unnecessary for an LCD, but that's another story). Checking System Monitor in the wonderful Google Sidebar showed me the CPU was at 100%, and the Windows task manager showed that a process called QCTRAY.EXE was responsible. This proved to be the Thinkpad utility for switching between different location profiles. I also have this on my work Thinkpad, where it is somewhat useful, but for my home laptop I don't really need it. It's one of those annoying things that starts up on boot, off a key in the registry. It seems to work just as well if you start it manually, so deleting the key doesn't mean losing it completely. A quick edit to the registry and things get much better. Quite why it took all the CPU is a mystery. Lenovo's web site suggests it has a bad interaction with Symantec Anti-Virus, but I switched to MacAfee as Symantec is such a pile of poo, so that doesn't seem like why.

No comments: