Bonjour, Someone smarter than me needs to know

Discussion in 'Software' started by kissey, Jan 16, 2010.

  1. kissey

    kissey Private E-2

    A few weeks ago my pc started freezing up, no idea why. It started doing this more frequently until it finally crashed. It continued to blue screen more frequently, until after about a week, it stayed up for about 15 minutes. Frantically, I tried to back up everything as quickly as I could, good lesson to back BEFORE this kind of thing happens. I ran Hijackthis and saw several questionable things, but one thing stood out, Bonjour. I removed it in uninstall programs, restarted Firefox, told it to cancel reinstalling it and my pc quit screwing up. Mu business partner, started the same thing happening, he removed Bonjour, and voila. My son's school is starting the same thing and they have just directed the kids not to get on Firefox. Is there an explanation or something I can tell them and this common? It seems to be a small epidemic in Missouri.
    Thank you in advance
     
  2. star17

    star17 MajorGeek

    Bonjour is something that is usually bundled with some Apple apps such as Itunes. When removed, it has a habit of breaking internet connectivity among other problems when not uninstalled properly. As far as I know, it's totally unrelated to Firefox.

    Some people want to classify it as borderline spyware, but it's more of an annoyance than anything else.

    More here:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonjour_(software)
     
  3. radiot

    radiot Private First Class

    Bonjour comes with recent builds of iTunes, so if everyone is installing iTunes, everyone will be getting Bonjour. I am one of those people that thinks it operates too much like spyware - if it walks like a duck......Rather than unistalling Bonjour, which is problematic particularly without unistalling iTunes, I set it to "disabled" in services.msc. It wont start at startup and iTunes can't start it, so it won't do the things its supposed to do in iTunes either.
     
  4. star17

    star17 MajorGeek

    Not exactly true.

    There are switchless versions of iTunes that don't come with the bloatware such as Bonjour, QuickTime and MobileMe support. This person wrote it and I've been using it trouble-free for quite some time.

    His initial post is here:
    http://www.ajuaonline.com/2008/08/01/itunes-without-quicktime/

    And his latest version is here:
    http://www.ajuaonline.com/2009/11/01/itunes-9-0-2-25-switchless-installers/

    There is no loss of function whatsoever.
     
  5. radiot

    radiot Private First Class

    Thanks star17 for the info. I haven't installed iTunes on my clean install because of spyware like behavior, bloat, and system demands, but I haven't found an alternative. So far I just play and wav files in audacity.....
     

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