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PMB.exe leeching your bandwidth
PeZzy
Member UncommonPosts: 154
In these days of bandwidth caps and over-usage charges, it's really nice of GamersFirst to include a hidden bittorrent client to use up your bandwidth. It's not like WoW which is optional and runs in the foreground.
I noticed a considerable amount of network activity from my computer and traced it to the Pando crapware. I uninstalled it but the GF client will probably attempt a reinstall later on.
I guess it's true what they say..."nothing is free".
Comments
Sounds like Pando Media Booster (http://www.pandonetworks.com/media-booster)
I think this crap installed automatically when i tried out LOTRO back in the day. I also uninstalled it pretty quickly.
Will be sure to do the same when *if* I decide to give APB another run.
Cheers for the heads-up.
hmm I will check for this crapware when I get home, thanks for the heads up. Did it install off the back of the Gamers First "game installer" they got you to download so you could download the client ?
The happy news is you can execute APB:R on its own without all the extra shite & copy the game directory to another computer if you wish & it works fine.
The company behind this program needs to be shut down ASAP. It's a POS that kills my connection, uses up my bandwidth, and is generally just malware thinly veiled with a legitimate purpose.
If a company wants to use it fine, but if they don't provide an alternate download method then I don't play their game. PERIOD. I'd suggest others do the same; it's the only way companies will get the message that we don't want this shit.
download game through it install it and than hmm maybe i dunno?
uninstall pando media booster? cant be that hard lol.
and if you pay attention to the downloader you install you actually see its installing it and starting it up.
i find it amazing that such a thread now all of a sudden pops up pando media booster is being used a few years now in games to download them and its a well known fact that it uses your bandwith even afterwards.
and no i actually dont play abp i just found it funny to see the drama about pando all of a sudden.
Net Limiter 3 is your friend.
If you can't figure out what I am saying, you wouldn't know how to use the program anyway.
Right, so let me get this straight: The information on the download page that clearly states that Gamers First uses a BitTorrent-type client wasn't a clue? Nor was the EULA you were meant to read and agree to, that clearly states that the downloader is powered by Pando Media Booster? You did actually bother reading the EULA, right? No?
Of course it's "leeching" bandwidth - it's a BitTorrent client! How else did you think you got your download in the first place if other users weren't seeding it?
The fact is, you could have chosen "I disagree" at that point and walked away without Pando Media Booster installed on your PC. But clearly, you thought the EULA was tl;dr so you hit "I agree" anyway and then immediately come running to these forums to bitch about it. FFS, just uninstall PMB and get on with your life.
I carefully read each EULA and consult with my lawyer every time.
Yeah, right. Like most people I take my chances and click on accept.
When I booted up my computer the GamersFirst client automatically reinstalled the Pando crapware, so I have now resorted to firewall blocking of the program.
jesus just uninstall pando after it finished downloading the client and get on with your life.
This.
You don't even have to uninstall it. If you are like me (trying new mmos all the time), you will need to install pando again almost each time you wanna try a F2P mmo...
Just remember to kill PMB.exe after you're done downloading and you're all good.
It is a horrible program. It sits there, AFTER you downloaded, and act like some kind of torrent seed. I had no idea what it was doing until I saw my ping all over the place.
Kill it, then never install it again. If you have to install it for a F2P game then uninstall it right after. This app should almost be classified as malware for autostarting, hiding and using up your bandwidth without you knowing about it.
My gaming blog
Anyone remember KaZaA? (name was really typed like that).
They had been packing in a product for mass cpu-farms to sell as a service to businesses. They didn't enable it for a while and then suddenly CPU usage 100%!
Turns out, it was in the Terms of Service and everything but nobody was reading it and as the South Park season premiere shows us, that's a rly bad idea.
Spec'ing properly is a gateway drug.
12 Million People have been meter spammed in heroics.
No one is reading it because companies intentionally put all kind of garbage in there so no normal person would have the time or energy to read it and even if they did would not understand half of it.
My gaming blog
Pando Media Booster gets installed with many F2P mmo's, i've had it pop up quite a few times over the year, so nothing really new there.
Just get rid of it after you install the game, it isn't required for any part of the game itself, so you will never see it again unless you reinstall.
you can run the programs from the game folder, no need to use the downloader that installs pando, and you can always uninstall pando. i also added registery key to forbid the program from ever starting on my system.
Don't see anywhere where it states 'this program will automatically run in the background and consume your upload bandwidth'.
Plenty of other games use torrents to share their software and patches without using shady practices or this POS software.
TLDR: the more people who don't support this type of crap the better.
Next.
Just for clarification, can't you simply just un-install PMB after you install APB? Seems like a quick look into the task manager and simply ending the PMB.exe process takes care of the problem. Is this a viable solution?
Man wow here I thought the only fools who used it was Turbine. If you download any of there games you will find pando there as well.
The good news is you can remove it from your system.
I refuse to install a game that uses pmb, that things a hunk of junk, and it just shows the dev staff to be lazy.
And what about those families who doesnt know much about the technical part of computers ?
I mean, my roomate installed DDO yesterday, where obviously pando was installed, our entire network was practically unusable due to that.
I had no idea that he installed DDO, and he certainly werent leeching our bandwith by downloading anything, where as he was barely capable of playing DDO due to extreme amount of latency.
He diddent know anything about pando (I fortunately did), where as he does absolutely in no way no anything about what programs are supposed to run on the computer and which is not, by looking at the task manager.
Even if its pando is being metioned in the EULA then I believe it should indeed be put on a list such as malware, as it does indeed not get turned off, after its finished installing, and as well keeps starting up everytime you start the computer and if you have no idea of its exsistence or what it does for that matter, how are you then supposed to know that you should either kill the process or uninstall it completely ?
Not only is Pando Media Booster a bandwidth thief, it also causes probs for web devs.
Chances are that if you run a webserver (for development or whatever) on your work/gaming machine, after installing PMB it will claim port 80 (and 443), causing your webserver to shut down.
"Pando Media Booster uses standard ports for communication that are open by default with the majority of firewalls"
Is that for a stealthy install and/or running a sneaky distributed webserver farm?!
For such a drastic effect, don't you think there should be a warning when installing this software?
It's a thinly veiled virus and nothing more.
Oh, I agree absolutely. Some major companies sometimes use short ToS and they are, at most, 2 pages long in larger than normal text. They tell you in plain and simple terms (literally) what you can and cannot do and amazingly those plain-english contracts hold up just as well.
That's what I meant with it being in the ToS the whole time and people didn't even know because noone was reading it.
Spec'ing properly is a gateway drug.
12 Million People have been meter spammed in heroics.
Even though I haven't installed APB Pando sounded familiar so i check my uninstall and sure enough there it was. Shared an install date with the Black Prophecy beta client I still had installed.
Needless to say both are now off my system.
I just had a look at Pando's terms of use, and apparently it says "This is a legal agreement between you, the end user, ("you" or "your"), and Pando Networks, Inc. ("Pando Networks"). By installing the software you agree to abide by the terms in this agreement." <-- I don't think I ever agreed to such things whenever I installed something else on my computer (though I might just be blind)
EDIT: After reading it through a couple of times, then to me it sounds as a way to legalize hacking into peoples computers - I am most likely wrong though, as I have no solid arguments to back it up with - and I am usually against conspiracy theories my self >_>
But I guess you can go have a look your self (its not particulary long to read) http://www.pandonetworks.com/termsofservice
Conspiracy
Conspiracy
Conspiracy
Conspiracy
Yeah basically install the F2P game, then uninstall pando. I remember when allods first came out, there were so many of my friends complaining about lag. I remember telling them to uninstall pando and it completely fixed it.
Pando Media Booster is quite annoying. I don't think it's spyware or even something malicious. It seems like a UI-free torrent client, which you have no control over, which is pretty worthless. I have had it on my computer three times now, with Lotro, DDO, and Black Prophecy. I uninstalled it immediately as well.
Thanks again for the heads up, I am pretty sure it installs the crapware when you install the Gamers First game manager/downloader thing.
I have APB on my dekstop and laptop but found the pando crapware only on my desktop which is where I downloaded the game to, I then copied the game files to my laptop over the network.
I launch both games from their own updaters direct & not through G1's shitty interphase.