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Popular programs come and go. What was highly used a few years ago may no longer be used much at all, and in fact could even be inviting hackers into your computer. Why keep an unsecure program that you don’t even use anymore?
The program I’m referring to specifically today is QuickTime.
QuickTime is a media player, which means it can play audio or video files. It’s made by Apple, but it is commonly seen on both Mac and Windows computers. It used to be very popular and was often used to play movie files that ended with the “.mov” extension.
These days it’s not really used much. Apple has not come out with a new version of the software in more than 10 years, and in terms of computer software that means it’s very outdated. They also just announced recently that they won’t be issuing any new security updates for QuickTime programs running on Windows computers. They are going to continue to support it on Apple computers.
That means whenever a new security flaw is found in QuickTime, it won’t get fixed if you’re running Windows. So hackers or scammers would be free to exploit that security problem on your Windows computer, because they know the problem is not going to be fixed by Apple. So you should just get rid of it.
To remove QuickTime, just go to Control Panel – Programs and Features and find it in the list. Do a right-click on the name and choose “uninstall”. Doesn’t get much easier than that!
Of course, the next question might be “If I have some .MOV video files saved on my computer, and I no longer have QuickTime to play those video files, how can I play them?” Good question! You have a couple of options, at least:
Windows Media Player is already on your Windows computer, and VLC Media Player is a free download at http://www.videolan.org/vlc/.
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Popular programs come and go. What was highly used a few years ago may no longer be used much at all, and in fact could even be inviting hackers into your computer. Why keep an unsecure program that you don’t even use anymore?
The program I’m referring to specifically today is QuickTime.
QuickTime is a media player, which means it can play audio or video files. It’s made by Apple, but it is commonly seen on both Mac and Windows computers. It used to be very popular and was often used to play movie files that ended with the “.mov” extension.
These days it’s not really used much. Apple has not come out with a new version of the software in more than 10 years, and in terms of computer software that means it’s very outdated. They also just announced recently that they won’t be issuing any new security updates for QuickTime programs running on Windows computers. They are going to continue to support it on Apple computers.
That means whenever a new security flaw is found in QuickTime, it won’t get fixed if you’re running Windows. So hackers or scammers would be free to exploit that security problem on your Windows computer, because they know the problem is not going to be fixed by Apple. So you should just get rid of it.
To remove QuickTime, just go to Control Panel – Programs and Features and find it in the list. Do a right-click on the name and choose “uninstall”. Doesn’t get much easier than that!
Of course, the next question might be “If I have some .MOV video files saved on my computer, and I no longer have QuickTime to play those video files, how can I play them?” Good question! You have a couple of options, at least:
Windows Media Player is already on your Windows computer, and VLC Media Player is a free download at http://www.videolan.org/vlc/.