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What is pnkbstrB.exe and pnkbstrA.exe, Can I Stop Them

After a long time, I am back with this type of post which deals with the useless process running on your computer and let you know what those process are meant for and whether you can stop them.

Previously we have written post on various other useless process like stopping google updater, stopping windows media player network sharing process, stopping mdm.exe and some other process including how to stop ctfmon.exe and lot more you can see here

Today we have come up two process named pnkbstrA and pnkbstrB

pnkbstrA

Let’s see why both or any of these process in running on your computer and whether you can stop them.

What is pnkbstrA.exe ?

pnkbstrA or pnkbstrB is installed with many different games including NFS UNDERCOVER, and it is the punkbuster anti-cheat module. It must be running as it looks for updating punkbuster when gaming if necessary and always runs in the background now.

Note: pnkbstrA or pnkbstrB is not considered malware or spyware, so you can let it run.

As stopping pnkbstrA or pnkbstrB does affect any thing on the game play, you can stop it from consuming your CPU and Internet Bandwidth

But you should not disable it if you play online in multiplayer mode, other wise you can disable it you don’t play in multiplayer mode.

Stop pnkbstrA or pnkbstrB

pnkbstrA or pnkbstrB gets installed as service in windows so, you will need to disable the service associated with it.

Follow the procedure below to stop pnkbstrA or pnkbstrB

1. Open Start Menu >> Run, type services.msc and press Enter

2. Now Locate the service named PnkbstrA 

pnkbstrA-service

3. Right click on PnkbstrA, select Properties

pnkbstrA-properties 

4. Stop the Service if it is already running and then click the startup type – select disabled and click Ok

pnkbstrA-disabled      

5. That’s it done, none of pnkbstrA or pnkbstrB will run in the background again.

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