HP Does Bad Things

Me and the kids, we love to play us some Lego Star Wars on the weekends. (the PC version, thanks for asking.)

But lately, it hasn't been working so well. Every fifteen minutes or so, some program runs that somehow forces the game to minimize. Sometimes you can re-enter the game, but more often than not it hangs and you have to restart. This is a cause for some frustration (mild understatement) as most levels take about 20 minutes and there is no way to save your progress mid-level.

After the third time trying to get through the last level of the game (aka "the lava level") with Cameron, we were both frustrated enough to get me started on some research.

Turns out my HP printer is responsible. hpcmpmgr.exe is an HP application that checks for driver and software updates - Every Fifteen Minutes. I'm not sure what's more ridiculous - that it requires such an enormous portion of the system resources to do this, or that it checks every 15 minutes.

I went into MSConfig and disabled it. Once again the dark side has been vanquished.

(Save your "get a game console" speeches. I know.)