Andre de Cavaignac

Let's blog it out...

Fixing and Disabling UrgeMS.exe (MTV Urge Music Service) (100% CPU or HD on Vista)

This thing is really frustrating me so I finally killed it for good and thought I'd let everyone else know how.

 If you have Windows Vista and use Windows Media Player, and you're seeing your hard drive or CPU usage spike and stay at 50% or 100%, you may be cursed by UrgeMS.exe.

This executable is for the Urge Music Store (which I highly reccomend) that runs inside of Windows Media Player.  UrgeMS.exe gathers information about songs on your hard drive for the "Auto-mix" features.  Why they haven't made this idle when you're using the computer (especially when on battery power) is beyond me, but you can force it yourself.

  • Press ctrl+shift+esc to bring up the task manager if it is not already open.
  • Go to the Processes tab and find UrgeMS.exe, click End Process
  • Open the start menu and type C:\Program Files\MTV Networks\urge and hit enter, this will open the Urge folder.
  • Rename UrgeMS.exe to something of your choice (such as UrgeMS_NoStart.exe)

When Urge starts, it will attempt to start this executable, if it fails, it does so silently, so theres no issue with just renaming it.

Enjoy!

Comments

Reg Braithwaite said:

Seriously, this is why computers frustrate me. Some executable, hidden from view and with no preference or even a configuration setting to control it, uses 100% f your CPU.

It scans your drive to learn about you.

And they way to stop it is to fool around with the task manager and its process, then find it on your hard drive and rename it?

Arrggh!

# August 14, 2007 7:19 PM

JeffQ said:

unfortunately, urge just recreates the exe file if you rename it. However, you can just remove it with "add/remove programs"

# September 9, 2007 2:46 AM

sempervirens said:

That didn't work.  WMP just recreated a new file named Urge.exe the next time I opened.

Back to the drawing board, I guess.

# September 11, 2007 9:57 PM
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