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.

This is done by loading necessary files used by the Java Runtime Environment that would otherwise be loaded upon file execution. This does mean that those files will reside in computer memory all the time being regularly preloaded into memory.

Java applets and applications will be loaded faster thanks to the preloading process which users can experience both on the Internet and the computer desktop.

If you look at the system resources consumed by the jqs.exe process you notice that is it using between 1-2 Megabytes of computer memory and virtual memory most of the time which can sometimes raise to about 20 Megabytes. The amount should not be significant on modern computer systems but could still be seen as a waste of space.

Jqs.exe will automatically check system resources before prefetching information. If the system is in a high load situation the process of prefetching data will be stopped until the situation clears up.

Also, despite the high number of Input / Output processes the program initiates Windows will periodically clean the cache, assuring that jqs isnt using too much of a machines memory. The fact that this program uses very small amounts of resources means that leaving it active is not a bad idea, especially if one makes use of the Java Runtime Environment quite often.

However, if one desires to stop the program from starting as the PC boots up this can be easily achieved from the Java control panel. First enter the Windows control panel and locate the Java icon, double click it and select advanced options.

Locate the miscellaneous entry in the menu and uncheck the Java Quick Start box to disable the jqs.exe process from being launched. The box is active on Windows XP and Windows 2000 systems by default. Unchecking it will have the result that the jqs.exe process will not be loaded during system startup. It might have the result that Java applications will have a higher startup time.

Windows Vista users will not notice the process as it is deactivated by default on their computer system.

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