Pando Media Booster
Not installed here as far as I can see. I haven’t seen any indication of it being used by GW2. It’s used by LOTRO if memory serves.
If you haven’t pressed Call Target at least once today, please go press it now.
I read that, but I’ve never played LOTRO.
Also I just found this: http://us.ncsoft.com/en/launcher/ncsoft-launcher.html
“Why is the NCsoft Launcher asking me to install Pando?
Pando Media Booster is a small application that accelerates the streaming and downloading of high quality media. The NCsoft Launcher uses Pando to download media from multiple sources at blazing-fast speed, so you start enjoying your games faster”
I read that this is a major bandwidth leech, so I’d like to know if I can safely remove it.
i never had it installed nor requested to be installed when play GW (but in my case i was copying GW from a friend). i have no idea what’s that for.
That would depend on whether you’re using the NCsoft Launcher. That is a separate application from GW2 itself. GW2 has its own independent launcher & downloader which does not appear to use Pando at all (thankfully).
In essence, PMB is installed on your machine because at some point you used a program that needed it. Until you know what that was, it’s hard to state from a remote viewpoint that it’s safe to remove it. It would certainly appear that that program was not GW2 though.
If you haven’t pressed Call Target at least once today, please go press it now.
I was looking through my startup folder and found a program called Pando Media Booster. On investigation it seems it’s some sort of p2p program used by NCsoft amongst others. Is this program used by Guild Wars 2 and, if so, can I safely remove it?
Did you play Aion by any chance? At one point they made that rubbish mandatory to download a large update.
Kill it.
The only MMOs I’ve had installed on my machine are EVE Online and WoW. After a bit more investigation it turns out EVE uses it. Seeing as I don’t play EVE any more I’m going to remove it.
You can usually remove Pando Media Booster anyway, even if the game that you installed through it is still on your machine, because normally speaking it only downloads the game’s latest installer file and once you have installed from that PMB becomes useless as further updates are handled through the game’s own launcher and not Pando.
And I always suggest removing Pando as soon as you’re done with it, since it’ll continue uploading in the background for all eternity if you don’t – and while that’s nice for other users, it can cause serious connectivity issues if Pando starts aggressively hogging all your upload bandwidth. At the very least each time Pando is installed on your system you should go into it configuration menu (you can find this in the windows Control Panel -> PMB / Pando 32-bit ) and make sure the upload limit is set low enough that you always have some spare upload bandwidth left, otherwise it might throttle your connection, which can slow down browsing and make playing online games nearly impossible.
The greatest irony of Pando is that it’s such a rubbish tool it even throttles itself – back when LOTRO F2P went into beta and everyone was downloading it for the weekend a lot of people noticed speeds were atrocious, but not because of the huge number of people trying to download… no, the speeds were low because Pando was so busy uploading it was bottlenecking its OWN download speeds! If you told it to cap the upload at just a few notches below your max upload speed the download speed skyrocketed.
(edited by Amarinth.8534)
If you have League of Legends, it uses it as well. You can uninstall but any time you update league it will re-install itself.
The initial league of legends download installs it automatically. It can be removed safely by using “Programs and Features” in the control panel and simply uninstalling. If anything needs to use it, it will install again.