News or AutoUpdate Utility - BACKWEB

Backweb started out as push technology aimed at delivering user selected content. You could select types of news you wanted to get and it would be delivered to your desktop as long as you had any sort of active internet connection. The whole thing was eclipsed by Microsoft's "channels" and their ability to provide offline web content viewing. So Backweb disappeared for a while.

Backweb was reborn as advertising content delivery software. It was initially used by ISPs such as NetZero and Juno who got kickbacks for delivering ads to their customers. That practice was discontinued after these companies merged. These days it comes installed on systems by various manufacturers. It automatically detects an internet connection and downloads any available product updates. By far the most common of companies using this feature is the HP/Compaq merged entity. So far as we can determine, other companies used to use this software but stopped due to the bad press that it was getting them. HP/Compaq may be the only one still using it.

Generally Backweb will show up in your startup or task list followed by a series of numbers. Some references on the web suggest that backweb is a dialer. But if you look at these numbers closely, you'll see that many aren't valid phone number formats. It's believed that these are actually original account numbers. It's very difficult to track numbers back to who was originally using them. But here are a few we have been able to track down:

BACKWEB-137903.EXE probably came installed on HP systems and may show up as "My HP Center".

BACKWEB-8263142.EXE probably came installed on HP systems and may show up as "HP AudoUpdate".

BACKWEB-8876480.EXE was installed with Logitech's Desktop Manager. It automatically checks for software upgrades and special offerings from Logitech. This instance of Backweb may also appear as LDCONF.EXE.

Backweb is known for using system resources and in some cases for allocating all available memory to itself causing your system to grind to a crawl. If your experiencing these problems, we'd recommend removing this program even if you can't determine the program that installed it on your system. We've been unable to locate a useful task that these backweb programs currently preform.

Safe

Backweb Technologies
Hewlett Packard
Compaq