Disabling the Nero Scout services

Continuing on my quest to disable and remove unneeded Windows services, in this post I will talk about 3 services that are running on my machine that were installed together with the Ultra Edition of Nero v8:

• NMBgMonitor.exe
• NMIndexingService.exe
• NMIndexStoreSvr.exe

These 3 services are installed when you decide to install Nero Scout, one of the applications included in Nero. Nero Scout is a media indexer and keeps this information in an internal database that is shared among the other Nero applications. These are system resources that you can free up.

Here is an excerpt from the Nero - Support - FAQ web site on how to disable Nero Scout but this information is not accurate:

You can either disable Nero Scout completely or you can only remove the “search” option from the task bar.

• Open "My Computer", make a right click on "Nero Scout", select "options".
• Uncheck the box “enable Nero Scout” in order to disable Nero Scout.

If you want to remove Nero Scout from the task bar, uncheck the box „Show NeroDesktop Search“.

So let's disable Nero Scout the correct way. From the Start - All Programs - Nero 8 - Nero Toolkit menu choose Nero Scout.

This will open the Nero Scout Options dialog.

Uncheck Enable Nero Scout and click OK. This will shutdown the services except for the NMIndexingService.exe which will shutdown the next reboot. The lesson learned here is to always "customize" the installation of software and only installing the components you need.