The free version of Real Player is a useful app to have installed on your computer, as with it you can play files encoded with the Real Networks codec. It’s also a very useful app for use in ripping .rv or .flv files from online sources. – In fact you can use it to rip .flv files and instantly re-encode them to .wmv, or even .mp3 – if you want audio-only.

With so much versatility and usefulness, one would think that such a free app should be loaded onto everyone’s PC, just in case they should require it at some point in time. – But there is also a downside to having it installed: -

In short, RealPlayer is a resource-hog, and it runs processes by default 100% of the time if you have it installed; unless you do something about it.

You see, RealPlayer adds itself to your start-up-list as soon as it installs; so having installed it, it starts running when your PC boots. Whether or not you’re actually using it; RealPlayer runs several processes which consume a lot of processor-cycles, thereby adding to the load on your processor, and thus using up more wattage, which translates into you having a larger cumulative electricity bill for no good reason.

You might – rightly – think that disabling it from the command-line by typing msconfig into a command-prompt and disabling it in the start-up-menu would be a good answer to that. I agree that is one solution to the problem; but only a temporary one: RealPlayer requires frequent updating. – You’ll know when an update is required as you’ll suddenly find that you’re unable to rip .flv files etc with it. – So you go into RealPlayer’s Help menu and check for updates. When RealPlayer updates it places a fresh entry in the start-up-menu – so you’ll have to do the msconfig thing every time you update it if you want to go that way round.

But even if you disable it in that way, you’ll probably need to use it at some point in time. When you do, in whatever way, it activates several processes again, taking up a huge proportion of available CPU cycles; and it continues running, unless you intervene, until you shut down your PC – whether or not you’re using it, and whether or not you think it’s actually working.

There is basically only one way to overcome this; and that is to manually disable RealPlayer’s running processes.

If you have RealPlayer installed on your PC, and have recently used it, or if you haven’t disabled Real Player from starting with Windows and have booted-up your PC; you’ll notice that your CPU is running rather heavily-loaded. With RealPlayer’s processes running on my triple-cored AMD Phenom in Windows 7 64-bit, processor-usage can even hit almost 100% – completely unnecessarily.

The way to manually kill it is to activate the Windows Task Manager and look under the Processes tab. Click the head of the process name column to list running processes alphabetically. Now scroll down to where the processes starting with the letter R are: You’ll see anything up to ten processes called realplay.exe . – These are running in the background and taking up a huge amount of your CPU time.

– But simply killing off those processes alone won’t help that much. Why not? – Because they’ll simply restart after you’ve stopped looking at the Task Manager. The solution to that is to kill off the process called realsched.exe first. If you’ve got the processes listed alphabetically, you’ll find realsched.exe probably immediately below the group of realplay.exe processes, or thereabouts. – Kill realsched.exe first to prevent the realplay.exe processes being restarted after you’ve killed them off.

Remember, though, that as soon as you use RealPlayer again it’ll launch realsched.exe , which will then launch multiple instances of realplay.exe again. – Meaning that you’ll have to manually kill then off all over again.

As soon as you kill off the last realplay.exe process, you’ll notice a dramatic decrease in processor activity, with no effect on performance, other than perhaps making it a fraction of a second faster.

And that is how to recoup your processor time from the wasteful, resource-hogging, RealPlayer. – Either that or uninstall it. – It’s up to you.