Battle.net Launcher CPU Usage Fix

Blizzard's battle.net launcher is a nice way to launch your Blizzard games and keep them up to date. Unfortunately, it has a bad habit of using a lot of CPU, even when no games are running and it's in the background. This is because the launcher is showing a lot of web content - the content tiles you see in each game menu are small web pages, complete with javascript and videos / animated GIFs, all of which use CPU.

Battle.net CPU Usage

I made a small script that will disable the web content, which reduces the CPU impact of having the launcher open. This works by blocking the embedded Chrome browser sub-processes, so no web content can be rendered by the launcher. As a side effect, you will see a constant "loading" spinner in the launcher, but this is cosmetic only. Game launching and patching will continue to work as expected, however other features such as switching accounts and battle.net chat will also not function with web content blocked.

Technical information: It uses the Windows NT "Image File Execution Options" registry entry to register a fake debugger for "Battle.net Helper.exe". As the debugger cannot start, the program is blocked from running.

Download: bnetcpufix.zip (1KB)

How To Use

After downloading the scripts, extract them to a folder such as your desktop. Right click the INSTALL.cmd file and run it as administrator and the fix will be installed. You can reverse the process by running the REMOVE.cmd file. After use, the scripts can be deleted without affecting anything.