January 9th, 2009 | 
Author: 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.
One such process is jqs.exe. Jqs.exe refers to the Java Quick Starter, a program that accompanies all builds of Java since Java SE 6 Update 10 and is meant to speed up the start-up time of the Java environment.
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.
The whole process usually consumes between 1 to 2 megabytes of RAM and around 2 megabytes of virtual memory, never using more than 20 megabytes. This means that on most recent machines (which often have more than 1 gigabyte of RAM) the program consumes an insignificant amount of resources.
Furthermore, the program will check if the machine is running low on memory or if the battery on a laptop is about to run out, in either of these two cases stopping from prefetching information in order to conserve resources.
The Java jqs.exe process runs a considerable amount of input and output processes on the computer system. The Windows operating system cleans that cache periodically to reduce the memory used by the process. The resource usage is minimal on most modern computer systems and users who make use of Java applets and applications regularly should consider keeping the process running.
The process can however be easily deactivated in Windows which would make sense if Java is only used frequently. To do that one would open the Windows Control Panel, locate the Java icon, double-click it and select the 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.
Martin blogs regularly about Windows tweaks on his Technology News portal including articles about Windows applications like jqs.exe.
Article Source: A detailed analysis of the jqs.exe process
