It is often the case that while downloading and installing a free software, a few unwanted processes get installed in your system too. The teatimer.exe is one such process. In this Techspirited article, we tell you what exactly the teatimer.exe is, its purpose, and how to remove it from your system.
Did You Know?
Many spyware, adware or pop-up programs disguise themselves as genuine programs and enter into your system. A good way to locate such counterfeit programs is to verify their location. The teatimer.exe for instance, by default is located at C:\Program Files\Spybot – Search & Destroy\TeaTimer.exe. So, if you find a similarly named file in some other location in your PC, it most likely is a counterfeit program and must be deleted.
The teatimer process is a part of the free Spybot Search & Destroy antispyware software. It gets installed along with the Spybot program, and automatically executes at startup. It runs in real-time scanning and protecting the PC and is frequently visible as ‘teatimer.exe’ in your system’s task manager.
This program is effective at containing spyware attacks and for protecting your PC. However, teatimer.exe uses a lot of memory and many users complain that the high CPU usage from it, adversely affects system performance and slows down the PC significantly.
It is also very intrusive such that, whenever it detects a possible threat, it throws up a pop-up box, demanding the user’s attention. This becomes very annoying, especially when you are in the middle of something important, and you find that the threat is only a false alarm.
So, in case you have installed teatimer.exe in your system, and are suffering from the above problems associated with it, you might want to get rid of it completely. This can be easily achieved through the following steps. Note that teatimer.exe isn’t an important process, and therefore, not having it anymore wouldn’t really cause any problems in your system.
How to Get Rid of Teatimer.exe
The following steps show you how to delete teatimer.exe from your system.
Step 1
Launch the Spybot Search & Destroy program on your system. Navigate the mouse to the top left hand side corner of the window and click on the ‘Mode’ option.
Step 2
In the drop-down menu list, select the ‘Advanced Mode’ option. A new window will open up requesting you to verify your selection. Click on ‘Yes’.
Step 3
At the left hand side bottom corner of the window, click on the ‘Tools’ button. From the list of options in the Tools menu, select ‘Resident’ by clicking on it once.
Step 4
Un-check the check box next to the label ‘Resident Tea Timer (Protection of over-all systems settings) active’. Close the Spybot Search & Destroy window.
Step 5
From your desktop, click on ‘Start’ and then on ‘My Computer’. In it, navigate to the drive where you had saved the Spybot Search & Destroy folder.
Step 6
Open up the ‘Updates’ folder and locate the ‘Teatimer’ file. Right click on it, and select the ‘Delete’ option.
Step 7
Delete the file named ‘Teatimer.zip’ and restart your computer to save the changes that you have made. This should effectively prevent the ‘Teatimer.zip’ program from launching at start-up.
Thus, the teatimer.exe is a largely intrusive process, which slows down your system’s performance. It is non-essential, and so by using the above steps, you can very easily get rid of it.