windows freezes because of compatelrunner.exe ?

[William Gaatjes]

I noticed that my pc at home and my pc at work have been slowing down when compatelrunner.exe is running and other telemetry services of windows.
It seems microsoft did a hell of a job to prevent user from disabling them.
Ever since i got this "security update" a few months ago, my pc at home will freeze about 3 to 5 times after starting up for a duration of about 10 seconds. After those freezes, everything is normal.

My pc at work, comes to a grinding halt with the hdd led lit permanently and the pc becoming non responsive for a few minutes. I noticed that compatelrunner.exe is running and another service i forgot the name. Just like at home. My work pc is a 32bit windows 7. My home pc is a 64bit windows 7.

I did notice, that at work it is not run every day. So there must be a scheduler. Anybody have an idea how to disable these services or to get in the scheduler ? Windows does not allow me to remove them, since it mentions the trustedinstaller.
I have been looking around with the sysinternals process explorer tools and the task manager /source control program.


Can anybody explain why this happens all the time ?

It is becoming annoying. I do not want my pc to constantly sent telemetry data.

 

[William Gaatjes]

Why i ask it now, id that i have been waiting in vain for a KB update that would solve this issue. I am still waiting.

 

[Elixer]

Yeah, I was sitting around, when all of the sudden one of my machines starts scanning everything... at first I thought it was the trojan that encrypts files was working, then I noticed it was CompatTelRunner.exe.

It is a task scheduler item, I just disabled it.

http://superuser.com/questions/944067/windows-disk-i-o-100-at-boot-for-20-minutes

 

[William Gaatjes]

Yeah, I was sitting around, when all of the sudden one of my machines starts scanning everything... at first I thought it was the trojan that encrypts files was working, then I noticed it was CompatTelRunner.exe.

It is a task scheduler item, I just disabled it.

http://superuser.com/questions/944067/windows-disk-i-o-100-at-boot-for-20-minutes

Thank you. I googled for it but i did not find this link or gave up.

I did as suggested :

You can disable the scheduled tasks that starts CompatTelTunner.exe by looking in the Task Scheduler. (Computer Management – System Tools – Task Schedule Library – Microsoft – Windows – Application Experience) Name: Microsoft Compatibility Appraiser Location: \Microsoft\Windows\Application Experience Collects program telemetry information if opted-in to the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program. Right click on “Microsoft Compatibility Appraiser” and select “Disable” By default, it is set to start if there is ANY network connection.

The executable is located here: C:\Windows\System32\CompatTelRunner.exe

You may also want to look at the following: Customer Experience Improvement Program (states If the user has consented to participate in the Windows Customer Experience Improvement Program, this job collects and sends usage data to Microsoft. However, it is set to run even if opted out) Siuf (under Feedback)

I disabled everything in those two folders and restarted my pc at work.
And the compatelrunner.exe is not running and there are less services running while starting up. I am keeping resource monitor open to see what happens. But my pc at work is already a lot more responsive now and boots up faster after login. I will do this at home as well and i will keep a log what happens for the next few days.

Thanks. :thumbsup:

 

[Ketchup]

Is this something that just started for you two, or are the machines mentioned new (to Windows 10)? I have two machines running 10 right now (VMs) and the background app is not present. The task is there, and it says it ran this morning, but I didn't notice a thing, and WU says that they are both current.

 

[William Gaatjes]

Well, sometimes the update causes problems for some users, especially with windows 7. i found that out after googling for the issue.
If i can believe the many investigations into the kb, it is re-issued several times, probably to solve these issues. But it does not seem to help all.
Most solution are about uninstalling the kb update. But when searching for it in the windows update list (at my home pc) it is not present. So it seems that the update is re-issued under several different kb numbers. Not all are known.

as a side note, my home pc is a ssd and a hdd combination.
The pc at work is a 2 hdd model and it does a backup of data to the server during startup after login. The slower response from my work pc may be related to that.
But both do slow down to a point that it becomes annoying.

 

[William Gaatjes]

I disabled it on my home pc and although i still see freezes, it now happens only for about a second.
So it has improved but i am not there yet. I will see what happens for the next few days when i start my pc.


I also noticed something interesting, gwxconfig task.
This is about getting the silent windows 10 installer.
I am the admin on my pc and when i log in as admin, i can still not disable that task.
How is it possible that microsoft locks down my pc like this ?

For more information :

http://www.myce.com/news/windows-update-silently-installs-windows-10-downloader-75647/

 

[Elixer]

Is this something that just started for you two, or are the machines mentioned new (to Windows 10)? I have two machines running 10 right now (VMs) and the background app is not present. The task is there, and it says it ran this morning, but I didn't notice a thing, and WU says that they are both current.

This is on one of my win 8 machines.
The only reason I noticed it was, a saw a huge spike on my NAS activity, when I knew I wasn't doing anything to cause it.

I still have another win 8 machine that I didn't disable this on, just to see if it will get force fed win 10.

 

[William Gaatjes]

I also found out that netsvcs is running a lot on my home pc and i found some tip to clean up the event log files once in a while to see if that helps. (administrative tools)
Well, i checked the freezes on my home pc for the last couple of days. It is now less, usually only 2 times now. And it is for about two seconds max. So it has improved. I am not there yet but it is a lot better.
I also found on my home pc a service running that is for touch screens. I disabled that service.

The pc at work was scheduled to do a weekly defragmentation. It tried to do this during work hours. D: No wonder my work pc would be so slow.
I disabled the defragmentation schedule. I check for defragmentation myself once every few months and when needed i let the program do its task. I have always done this. I do not understand why microsoft schedules defragmentation to be executed once every week. (at 0 AM on wednesday to be exact, when the pc is off)


So, all in all my home pc and work pc have improved.
It is what i always say, windows when just installed needs to be schooled. Unfortunately, it can happen that services are enabled when not needed. Especially with updates. As with my work pc where windows defender was enabled after an update while i have a virus scanner.

Try using a pc with both virus scanners running and defragmentation...

 

[William Gaatjes]

Well, i just found out something interesting. The music continuous to play during the now two freeze. But the input is delayed as is the updating of the screen. I will be sifting through the event log to see if i can match some log with the two second freeze. This means the pc itself is not freezing, no 100 % cpu or something.

 

[William Gaatjes]

I finally found out how it can be that i am not administrator on my own pc. The trustedinstaller.exe takes ownership.

Here they explain how to change the security settings in windows, so that you can modify certain settings. The whole windows 10 installer and notification is probably also protected by the trusted installer.

http://helpdeskgeek.com/windows-7/windows-7-how-to-delete-files-protected-by-trustedinstaller/

I am not going to start deleting files just like that, but it can be handy to change service settings in the administrative tools.

 

[bruceb]

You can disable a lot of telemetry using Ultimate Windows Tweaker 4.0
Also while most people (even me) are stuck with Windows 10 Home 64 from the laptop maker (in this case Toshiba) the use of Widows 10 Enterprise gives you much more control over telemetry and updates.

 

[William Gaatjes]

Well, i am in luck with my home pc.
I have had several windows updates again and on my home pc i have not noticed any freezes any more. Could be that that is solved.

Work pc has become slow again, to the point of annoying. I have to look into that. I did get the windows 10 update notification.

 

[sverris]

Just my 2 cents: I had for month a problem with too much disk activity (almost always 100%) on a WIN 7 (64) machine, making this machine very slow and unresponsive. I tried all sorts of thing to solve the problem, checking what might cause this crazy activity. No virusses found, no change without virus scanners, enough RAM, CPU normal. Killing processes / services by hand: Windows update, indexer, defragmentation et al. No change... Then I have seen (rather by conincidence) that compattelrunner.exe was another process showing strange behavior. I killed it by hand - and bammm! - HD was all of a sudden behaving normal and my system became responsive again...

(I just hope, it stays that way...)

 

[John Henderson]

I was having the exact same issue and i removed the CompatTelRunner.exe file from taskschd. Everytime, the PC rebooted this task was scheduled to laucnh CompatTelRunner.exe

 

[TheRyuu]

It shouldn't be happening that often. AFAIK if you just let it run it shouldn't really run again.

 

[Elixer]

It seems to run after certain windows updates again, even though I had set it to disabled.
Pesky program!

 

[escrow4]

You need SSDs OP. Eliminate the grind period.