VAIO issue between vCPM and iTunes SOLVED

Hi,

Got a new VAIO about a month ago, and i quickly noticed that iTunes was pretty much unusable. It would start fine, but then it would freeze up for minutes at a time and use up >1.5 gigs of memory, and would eventually have to "end process" in the task manager.

I figured out there was an issue with some of the bloatware Sony installed on the VAIO. I believe it was the Vaio Content Folder Watcher (vCFW.exe), and possibly another one but I can't remember which one. I'm pretty sure it's just cVFW anyway ... I noticed these were using up a lot of memory when looking at the task manager.

vCPM.exe is found at C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Sony Shared\VAIO Content Folder Watcher

What I did is I went into the Security Tab under Properties, and I clicked the "Edit" (to change permissions) button, and denied full control of that file.

Every since then, iTunes has been working flawlessly.

DOWN WITH SONY BLOATWARE!!!

 

hi, did u really need itunes??
sony apps may be bloadware and maybe came free, but still they're very decent.
u should have bought a mac based laptop if you needed itunes that bad, assuming that u have a gadget that needs itunes.

 

iTunes is guaranteed to slow your computer down. It's one of the worst-written Windows programs ever. (the cynical part of me thinks this is some sort of OSX marketing, but it's pretty crappy on a Mac as well)

It will also install more bloatware than Sony does.

 

Need iTunes for my iPod...

Yeah iTunes is a ridiculously big program, but at least it only runs when I want it to run. I've tried other programs to sync my iPod and nothing works better than iTunes... and that's the only reason to use iTunes, to sync. to play music, I use Winamp. I doubt iTunes will install more bloatware than Sony...i can think of 2 maybe 3. there was probably about 15-20 Sony programs pre-installed on my computer, some good, some bad, some useless.

 

It installs a hell of a lot of crap, like all that Bonjour rubbish & the 'waiting for an iPod' service etc (yay, let's just ignore Windows' built in plug & play API cos we know better!)

The program itself is also woeful; if you don't change the default settings it not only seems to create 5 copies of all your music, and also (& to anyone who cares about sound quality this is absolutely criminal) defaults to transcoding mp3 to AAC, even though iPods play mp3s absolutely fine.

I used to have an iPod a few years ago because as much as I generally dislike Apple products, they are some of the best mp3 players you can get.

Once I fully realised how much I loathe iTunes, I sold the iPod.

Check Task Manager when it's not running - it'll be using about 50MB of your RAM to do absolutely nothing.

If you want even more laughs: install iTunes 'for this user account only'. Then create a new user account, log on to it, and without even starting iTunes once or installing it for that user, check Task Manager - it still runs all the same crap.

 

interesting... thanks for that info. i'll look into all that when i get home this evening.

if i were to get a non-apple mp3 player, which one would you recommend?

 

I just use my phone (HTC Desire) these days because I got bored of carrying loads of stuff around, so I'm not the best person to ask really.

I used an iRiver for a while after the iPod & it required a bit more fiddling, but the sound quality (particularly the headphone amp, although I mainly used an external one) blew the iPod out of the water.

The Desire has a reasonably good headphone amp (much better than the iPod, much better than any other phone I tried, not quite as good as the iRiver), but I'm definitely going to try and find something with line out for my next upgrade so I can use my external headphone amp again.