Background Services Have Been Disabled Preventing The App From Starting

[Bazara Benavides]

ProductEA Desktop

Platform:PC

Error Report ID (learn how to create an Error Report ID in the sticky post) 74945649-7c92-4979-acbb-5865da3f219c

Which client functionality are you experiencing this bug with? Other (Please Describe)

Please describe EA Desktop Background Services not disabling using the setting in Application Settings

When did this happen? (dd.mm.yy hh:mm) 13.10.20 12:34 (Today)

Summarize your bug In EA Desktop Application Settings, the toggle for Background Services shows as if it is turned off, but when looking in Windows Services Management Console, the EABackgroundService remains enabled and running.

How often does the bug occur? Every time (100%)

Steps: How can we find the bug ourselves? Go to EA Desktop Application Settings, then toggle off the setting for Background Services. After that, open Services Management Console in windows and look for EABackgroundService and see service status (running) and startup type (automatic).

What happens when the bug occurs? Background Services for EA Desktop remains enabled and running in spite of turning it off in Application Settings.

What do you expect to see? The service should be stopped and/or disabled when it is turned off in EA Desktop Application Settings.

In EA Desktop Application Settings, the toggle for Background Services shows as turned off, but when looking in Windows Services Management Console, the service EABackgroundService remains enabled and running.

Go to EA Desktop Application Settings, then toggle off the setting for Background Services. After that, open Services Management Console in windows and look for EABackgroundService and see service status (running) and startup type (automatic).

Windows key --> type in services --> click on the services app new windows opens --> click in it --> type "e" to navigate to the "EABackgroundService" --> right click --> properties --> change start type to "manually"

On several occasions, I've seen an "EA Background Service" with the Desktop App logo listed in the Task Manager's background processes despite my not having opened the EA Desktop App. At least twice, this happened when I'd restarted my computer since the last time I opened the app. Today, I got a "stopped working" error from the service, even though I'd restarted multiple times since the last time I opened the app. If anyone's interested in the error:

I was playing a game not from Origin/EA Desktop and had huge lags. I thought it was my internet connection messing up but eventually I checked task manager and saw the EA desktop app running in the background (despite me not opening it in a few days) consuming 30 MBPS of bandwidth thus causing huge lag in game.

I'd like to add that disabling the Background Service causes EA Desktop to fail to start. If we could disable it, as the settings in EA Desktop suggest, then why does EA Desktop critically fail when the background service can't be reached?

Right now I'm using a workaround of not allowing the service to start at system boot (change startup type to manual) and then I use scripts to kill the service after I'm done playing any EA game. This 100% isn't the way it should be but unfortunately it is how I see things going. I don't trust that EA will actually allow us to disable the background service since I'm fairly certain it does more than manage downloads when EA Desktop isn't running.

Despite what I've heard, there is no "background services" option in its settings, nor does EAD even show up as an app in the "background apps" windows settings menu. It uses an inordinate amount of processing power for a background application AND pops up in a window on the bottom when I close it. Is there any real, actual way to disable it, or is all this difficulty on purpose so that I have to have an EA app constantly run in my background just to play one or two games sometimes?

I observe the same behavior and it is bad and needs to be fixed. If whatever needs to run while the launcher is open and I'm playing games, fine. But it should NOT be running when I manually close and exit the application. Please address this issue or make it an issue if this was the intention with creating EABackgroundService.exe to run permanently on every person's machine at all times.

status SERVICE - This will tell us if a converted service is running or not. Note that this is deprecated in favor of start, stop, status & restart. It will also tell us if a service has not yet been converted to upstart:

where the stanza manual will stop Upstart from automatically loading the service on next boot. Any service with the .override ending will take precedence over the original service file. You will only be able to start the service manually afterwards. If you do not want this then simply delete the .override.For example:

and Reboot for the service to start automatically again. Of course to enable a service, the most common way is by installing it. If you install Apache, Nginx, MySQL or others, they automatically start upon finishing installation and will start every time the computer boots. Disabling, as mentioned above, will make use of the service manual.

Currently there are actually three different ways for software to be started as a service in Ubuntu, SysV, Upstart and systemd. A service is defined here as a program run by the system in the background, as opposed to one started and run directly by the user.

One major issue with SysV was that when booting the system, everything had to be done in serial, one thing after another, making system boot times really slow. Attempts were made to parallelize this, but they were haphazard and hard to take full advantage of. This was the main reason that Upstart was created.

Upstart uses job definition files in /etc/init to define on what events a service should be started. So, while the system is booting, upstart processes various events, and then can start multiple services in parallel. This allows them to fully utilize the resources of the system, for instance, by starting a disk-bound service up while another CPU-bound service runs, or while the network is waiting for a dynamic IP address to be assigned.

Not all services have been converted to upstart. While working on the server team at Canonical for the past few months, I've worked on a number of converted job files, and the nicest part is that it allows one to get rid of all the script "magic" and just put in a few commands here and there to define exactly how to start the service, and nothing more. But for now, only a handful of traditional network services, like squid and samba, have been converted.

If you want to still be able to manually start it, then you need to comment out the start on condition. Say you want to install samba, but not have it start automatically. Here is the job file (in natty):

Screenshot borrowed from this blogpost, which also shows sysv-rc-conf - a similar tool that also lets you set the runlevel. (For those who happen to care enough about runlevels to wish to change them :)

By taking a look at man 5 init one will find a more appropriate solution: using an override config. Short example: Say we have a service called "foobar", so there would be a file called /etc/init/foobar.conf with its upstart configuration. Now you don't want to remove that file, nor to modify it -- but neither you want this service to run? So place an override file next to it: /etc/init/foobar.override, containing (optionally the header with the description and) instead the start on / stop on lines you place a line with one word: manual. This way you tell upstart to basically use the foobar.conf, but override the startup definition to only start that service when manually enforced (via service foobar start in our example).

This is happening to me on Windows 10 Pro 64-bit. When I first installed Dropbox 3.14.7 I thought it it was well-behaved, because it offered an option to disabled "Start Dropbox on system startup". But that doesn't work.

I have certain drives that aren't mounted when the system starts. I have moved the Dropbox configuration files (via an NTFS symbolic link) to that drive, but I make sure that I mount the drive before starting the Dropbox desktop application. I have disabled "Start Dropbox on system startup".

Yet still when I boot Windows 10, Dropbox throws up a dialog informing me that it has failed to start. *I had told it not to start automatically! Of course it will have a problem---I haven't mounted its settings drive yet. *But I told it not to start!*

If Dropbox has a "Start Dropbox on system startup" option, it should honor that options. Don't control my system while pretending to give me options to disable the software. Please tell me how to *really* stop Dropbox from starting automatically, even the secret whatever-it-does-to muck-around-with-my-system, or I am removing the software from my computer. Thanks.

Same problem. Windows 10. Dropbox never requested or installed, not welcome, do not want it to intercept pdf downloads. But cannot stop it. Changed all startup and asssociate settinga to Adobe but DropBox will not go away. It is malware that cannot be removed and DropBox support keeps posting "fixes" that are fake news..

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1 - My Bluetooth services have been disabled. Excuse me?

2 - Several system specific drivers have been disabled (this includes my Bluetooth adapter)

3 - Windows Defender has been wiped from the plane of existence

4 - Sleep has been disabled

5 - Email and Calendar have been removed (No biggie, they can be re-added like OneDrive)

How is this trustworthy? This OS was designed to "Streamline and Maximise my systems performance" Yet I can no longer put my PC to sleep, connect Bluetooth devices, and my CMOS System Clock driver has been literally disabled, along with some Hyper-V drivers and other things that sound pretty important.

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