| A detailed analysis of the jqs.exe process |
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| Computers - Windows Tips and Tricks |
| Written by Martin Brinkmann |
| Wednesday, 04 February 2009 10:26 |
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Starting the Task Manager in Windows 2000 or XP and navigating to the process bar will usually reveal several applications running in the background. Most of these are necessary in order to keep Windows active or speed up loading times for some commonly used programs.
Starting the Task Manager in Windows 2000 or XP and navigating to the process bar will usually reveal several applications running in the background. Most of these are necessary in order to keep Windows active or speed up loading times for some commonly used programs. A process that is appearing quite often is jqs.exe. It is the Java Quick Starter which gets installed alongside the Java Runtime Environment on Windows XP and Windows 2000. Its purposes is to speed up the launch of Java applets on the computer system. Jqs.exe preloads several important Java Runtime Environment files into the computer's memory. What this means is that these files will always be in computer memory in case a Java application gets loaded to speed up that Java program. The effect is a faster startup time and better user experience when loading and working with Java applets on websites and the Windows operating system. The whole process usually consumes between 1 to 2 megabytes of RAM and around 2 megabytes of virtual memory, never using more than 20 megabytes. This means that on most recent machines (which often have more than 1 gigabyte of RAM) the program consumes an insignificant amount of resources. Furthermore, the program will check if the machine is running low on memory or if the battery on a laptop is about to run out, in either of these two cases stopping from prefetching information in order to conserve resources. Many users have reported high input and output processes by the jqs.exe running on their computer system. The load and memory usage is somewhat regulated by Windows which will regularly clean the cache to reduce system load and memory usage. The process should not make to much problems on modern computer systems with lots of computer memory and processing power though. Users with older hardware and those that do not make use of Java regularly (or at all) should consider deactivating the process to save memory and processing power. This can be done by opening the Control Panel in Windows, double-clicking the Java icon and selecting the advanced options when the panel opens. The miscellaneous section contains the option to disable the Java Quick Starter. The option is active by default on Windows 2000 and Windows XP computer systems. Unchecking that option will disable the jqs.exe process from being loaded during system startup and from running in the background. It could however lead to a slighter higher startup time for Java applications. On Windows Vista jqs wont be active since the system uses its own pre-loading system. About the Author: Martin writes regularly about Windows tips on his Technology News website including articles about system applications like jqs.exe. |