Razer's Terrible Game Scanner Service

I'm no gamer but I love Razer Inc's peripherals. At both home and work I use their BlackWidow keyboards, DeathAdder mice, and Goliathus mousepads. They're reliable and they look and feel great. Sadly, today I discovered something about them that is not so great: The Razer Game Scanner Service.

I launched Sysinternals DebugView today to do some debugging and was surprised to see the following:

Some service installed on my computer was pumping tons of messages to my computer's debug console, writing the same message several times a second: "GameScannerService(RzProcessManager) (0xb20) (0xcb4)." It didn't take long to figure out that this service is part of the Razer Comms package, which must have installed along with the default Razer Synapse applications that you're prompted to install when you plug a new Razer device into your computer. I don't even have any games installed on this computer, so I obviously don't need this service- but I've got a much bigger problem: This is a Windows logo-certified commercial product that's installed on literally millions of machines around the world that's pumping thousands and thousands of lines of useless information to the debug consoles of those computers all the time. That's a huge waste of collective CPU resources, and it's just plain terrible design. Release-build software shouldn't ever dump anything to the debug console, ever. How in the world did this get past Razer QA and Microsoft's certification labs?

Since I don't need the service, I just disabled it in the Services control panel:

1. Launch Services.msc.
2. Locate Razer Game Scanner in the list of services.
   
3. Double-click the service's entry, then click Stop and set the Startup type field to Disabled and then click OK.

Depending on the features you need, you might be able to simply uninstall Razer Synapse from the Programs and Features control panel.