Quicktime annoyances and GNotify.exe memory usage

Quicktime sucks

I loathe annoying software. I am reminded of this every time I encounter .MOV formatted media files. I recently tried to play some movie in Firefox, but it didn't have the QT plug-in, so I went off to install it. In the process, the setup script installed something called QTTask.EXE in the system tray. This little program sucks up about 2megs of memory and doesn't seem to have any real purpose.

Trying to remove it was a hassle, as every time I rebooted it would mysteriously be restored. Deleting it also didn't work, it would rise from the grave every time.

Finally, I got it to go away. It took a little bit of registry hacking, file deleting, and praying to the computer gods to smite Apple.

To remove QTTask.exe permanently (in WinXP and other NT derivatives):

1) Open Task Manager and find qttask.exe in the process list.
2) Right click it and Select End Process. I suppose you could use Exit from the QTTask context menu, but I don't trust it. Better to let the OS kill it for you.
3) Open RegEdit and navigate to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

4) Locate QTTask and delete it. This will stop it from reappearing on bootup.
5) Open Explorer and navigate to C:\Program Files\QuickTime
6) Delete qttask.exe

Now your system should be free of that scourge without any lingering harm to your system. There may be some psychological damage inflicted on your Apple-worshipping friends, but be strong in your resistance to Apple's evil system-groping software.

Google, how much memory do you need?

In the process of trying to kill the Quicktime scourge, I noticed something very interesting and not very good. GNotify.exe, Google's GMail notification applet, uses 10 megabytes of memory. According to Task Manager, it is currently using 10,420K memory. All that memory just to authenticate with the server, retrieve new mails, display a snippet of the mail, and launch a browser when asked to? Something seems amiss.

There doesn't seem to be much discussion of this on the web, but it is a very significant chunk of memory on a memory-limited machine like mine at home. In future versions, I hope the memory usage is reduced. In the meantime, I have no option but to disable it at home.