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Comment by knlam | Hacker News Reader

The adobe apps acted like malware. Open your TaskManager(Activity Monitor on Mac) to see how much craps run on your computer when you installed Creative Cloud.

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They even wrote their own “Cleaner tool”:

https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/kb/cc-cleaner-tool-in...

I wish I knew this existed the other day, I spent about 10 minutes tracing all the crapware creative cloud had installed onto my macbook and deleted it. Some of it was using 5% cpu occationally, to do what?

Last time I needed it even their cleanup tool didn't manage to completely remove everything. We ended up reinstalling the whole machine to fix it.

Which put them in class with such esteemed companies as McAfee and EA Games, both who also need cleaners to clean up crap after install often enough to have cleaners in their soft/malware.

as a windows user, killing adobe from autostart can't be done from task manager "start-up apps" tab. I need to go to resource manager sort entries by auto-start and look for all adobe based processes (it's more than one) and then set them to "run manually". and I'm still not sure If I have completely disabled adobe apps from running passively in background.

Not enough, there few more in services tab

Why do Adobe need to do these things? Even database apps don't do this shenanigan, and they're legitimately need to start running when the computer turned on. Is it to stop piracy? But their apps are one of the most popular pirated apps anyway, so it's clearly not working.

Task manager "start-up apps" is to blame, though, as it is restricted to only show a subset of startup locations. Use Mark Russinovich/Sysinternals Autoruns [0] as Windows has just too damn many places where the application can hook up to autostart. This advice has been true since at least "Win2000" days...

Whilst you are there, you might want to look at Process Explorer and never look back at Task manager.

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/auto...

While the tool is spectacular and I use it when necessary (like the rest of Sysinternals' tools), on the other hand complaining that Task Manager is not listing all of the is like complaining that you cannot edit your cron entries or daemons on the Gnome settings app. In other words, it's by design, as a developer one should use task scheduler like cron and services like daemons: Adobe is the one to blame here for misusing task scheduler and NT services.

The GP has been complaining about Adobe services that start in Services (automatically or on trigger) - as far as I remember, none of those are visual apps, so they indeed behave like daemons. It's like complaining that Gnome Tweak Tool only shows stuff from ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/autostart instead of also showing systemd service entries from user or global lists.

Use of a persistent background tasks/helpers instead of Task Scheduler (or cron, on Unix-like world) for background updates is a pattern that is unfortunately accepted by now thanks to OS vendors doing exactly the same. "edgeupdate" et co are a great example if we are staying in the Windows world.

I don't like how many services/tasks/applications Adobe registers and starts for their CC and DC products, but it should not be a surprise that some are getting registered in other places than HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Wndows\CurrentVersion\Run or the Wow6432Node version - it should be considered basic admin knowledge that there are other locations where the process may get started on log in, so it is not reliable to just look in Task Manager or Control Panel "start-up" items.

However it's not just admins who'll be trying to keep Adobe products/services from autostarting and making it hard for those people who aren't sometimes seems like it's an Adobe goal.

thank you for suggesting these tools. Used autoruns and just disabled hidden (autorun) entries like figma agent, onedrivesetup, clicktorunsvc, postgresql-x64-12

Commenting for a bookmark in future.

Please use the 'favorite' feature in HN instead. It will then show up in the link 'favorite submissions / comments' in your profile. Alternatively browsers have a bookmark feature.

I can't find the favorite or flag feature for some reason, next to reply. I don't think browsers can bookmark this comment either, if they can't get the url of the link. It's weird because I used the favourite feature a few months back without qualms.

Not only do you have to disable them from Windows Startup and Windows Services, but you also need to go into the Windows Task Scheduler and disable the various times a day they're scheduled to auto-restart or auto-update. Disabling that nonsense makes for a much snappier machine.

Definitely noticed that every single time I open Mac Activity Viewer, right at the top there is Adobes anti-piracy tool with 10-30% usage before scuttling off down the list.

Presumably it's taking up CPU checking every single application I run so in opening Activity Viewer it's visible at the top checking it?

Here's a writeup on how to address that (slightly out of date but gets you most of the way there) https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop/how-to-disable-bloa...

Yep.

https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop/adobe-gc-invoker-ut...

in your launch agents...

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