The latest version of the Nero CD/DVD burning suite,
Nero 7, installs a media database component called Nero
Scout. This also adds several entries to your Windows
startup, including
NmBgMonitor.exe and
NMFirstStart.exe which can hog system
resources. Nero Scout has also been reported to cause
all sorts of problems in Windows and with Nero. In this
article we'll tell you how to disable Nero Scout.
It should be noted that NmBgMonitor.exe
and NMFirstStart.exe are not
spyware.
What does Nero Scout do?
Ahead Software, the makers of Nero, have a web page
for Nero Scout which can be
viewed here.
Basically, the program is a media indexer. It
constantly runs in the background, looking for new media
files, i.e. MP3s, videos, and photos. When it finds such
a file, it adds it to its own internal database. The
database is used by other Nero programs, such as Wave
Editor, Burning ROM, and PhotoSnap. The only purpose for
the database is to give you a more convenient way to
access those media files, without having to navigate the
folders on your hard drive.
Unless you are a hard-core user of all of Nero's
programs, Nero Scout is a useless piece of software
bloat.
How do I get rid of Nero Scout?
The first thing to do is to disable Nero Scout via
its own interface. To do so, double-click on the
My Computer icon. Right-click on the
Nero Scout icon and choose Options.
Then uncheck the option for Enable Nero Scout.
Reboot your PC and see if you are still experiencing
problems. If you are, and you are running Nero 7, you
can also perform the following actions:
Click on the Start button and choose Run. Type the
following line exactly as it appears:
regsvr32 /u "%COMMONPROGRAMFILES%\Ahead\Lib\MediaLibraryNSE.dll"
Then click OK and reboot your PC.
We hope that future versions of Nero will make it
easier to disable system resource hogs like this
program. Otherwise, Ahead Software will start to see
their loyal fan base disappear.
