Out of all the operating systems out there, Windows 10 stands out as one of the most popular operating systems. A huge reason for its popularity is because it focuses more on user-friendliness and usability than providing pro enthusiast features typically found in Linux distributions. But, one of the major shortcomings of Windows is Microsoft’s opaque approach to defining what various built-in applications do on your PC.
One of the applications that often leaves people confused and worried at the same time is yourphone.exe in Windows. So, what in the world is yourphone.exe? Should you be worried about it? Let’s find out in this article. Here’s a list of what we’ll cover in this article.
Yourphone.exe is not a virus or trojan.
Microsoft’s Your Phone is an app built to connect your Android or iOS device to Windows to receive calls/make calls, SMSes, and read app notifications directly on your Windows PC.
If you own an Android device, you can basically imitate how devices in the Apple ecosystem seamlessly communicate with each other.
When you go ahead and launch a program on Windows, it creates what’s called a “process.”
The reason why you’re able to read this article is that there’s a browser process running in the background, which, in this case, is also called an executable process.
Pretty simple right?
The good news is, if you don’t want any unknown application to run in the background and suck memory, you can essentially kill it from the task manager.
Do note that not all apps are “unnecessary.” Many of them help your OS stay alive; hence, killing them would not be a good idea.
Hence, we don’t recommend fiddling with anything except what’s mentioned in this article.
As an Android enthusiast, I think the Your Phone app is pretty useful and, more importantly, not at all harmful but, if your old potato PC has so much to deal with that it can hardly handle the operating system, you might want to disable it to save memory for other system components.
Another thing worth mentioning is, Your Phone doesn’t need mobile data or Wi-Fi. It uses Bluetooth to connect and make/receive calls/SMS.
Not much.
The yourphone.exe process itself weighs just 19 KB. On average, the Your Phone application consumes anywhere around 14-20 Megabytes of memory.
Well, as I previously mentioned, if you’re running apps on an ancient PC that can hardly keep up on opening a couple of Chrome tabs, you should consider disabling or uninstalling Your Phone application.
Bear in mind that this is just a temporary solution to free up memory space on your PC. To permanently disable it, follow the steps given below.
Also read, 11 Easy Ways To Solve Windows 10 Taskbar Not Hiding In Full-screen Issue
yourphone.exe utilizing too many GPU/CPU resources? All you need to do to stop it from doing so is disable it.
Disabling yourphone.exe involves restricting the app to run in the background. This way, the app will not consume system resources. To disable it.
You might think that’s pretty much it, right? But Microsoft tends to be dense sometimes.
Even though you’ve successfully disabled Your Phone, it might still sometimes run in the background without your notice.
A lot of users have also complained about Your Phone acting weird for no reason. So, if you want to remove it completely here’s how you can do it.
Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.YourPhone -AllUsers | Remove-AppxPackage
If your question is, “Is it safe to remove Your Phone from your PC ?” the answer is yes. There are no side effects of doing the same.
Fortunately, installing the Your Phone app again is very easy.
All you need to do is –
If the Your Phone app is crashing continuously on your Windows PC, you might want to try to follow the steps described in the “How To temporarily Stop yourphone.exe” section above.
After that, try relaunching the app by going to the start menu, searching for the app, and firing it up.
If that doesn’t solve the problem, try restarting your PC. A lot of potential problems can be solved by just one restart.
You can also try uninstalling and installing it again.
In this article, we glanced at how you can temporarily disable or permanently remove yourphone.exe.
Usually, when a program that people have never heard of or seen running in the background before is bound to raise concerns, Microsoft’s Your Phone is no exception.
And, no, it is not a trojan or a virus as the main DLL files, and executable files it uses are picked directly from the main OS directory, from the C drive.
Did we help solve your issue? Let us know in the comments section below. Liked what you read?
There are probably many other users worried about the same “issue” so, do make sure to share this article and give them a helping hand.
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