I don’t know about you but I’m not a big fan of things that run in the background when they’re not really necessary. Google has a process, GoogleUpdate.exe, that they like to run periodically on your system to see if there are any Google apps that need updates, and depending on your situation that may be something you want to disable. After all, the only Google software I’m running on my machine is Chrome and it will already download updates in the background when I have the browser running, which is good enough for me.
Google runs the GoogleUpdate.exe both when your machine starts up and then once every hour. This process is designed to download updates to the Google programs you don’t have running so that the next time you fire them up they will already be up-to-date. You can disable this process by following these steps:
–Disable the GoogleUpdate.exe Startup Item–
Here is how to disable the GoogleUpdate.exe process from starting when you first boot to Windows:
- Press the WinKey+R to open the Run command, and type “msconfig“:
- Select the Startup tab, and uncheck the box next to Google Update:
- Click OK, and you’ll need to then reboot your computer.
–Disable the GoogleUpdate.exe Scheduled Tasks–
This is how you can disable the scheduled tasks that run at least every hour on your system to see if there are any updates to the Google applications you have installed, such as Chrome.
- Open the Start Menu and go to All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools, and open the Task Scheduler.
- Click the Task Scheduler Library folder, and on each of the tasks that start with “GoogleUpdate” right-click on them and either Disable or Delete them:
Nice write up! Maybe Mac instructions next week? :)
I have a Mac version of the instructions in the pipeline as well… no worries. :)
Why would you do that? The fact that Chrome auto-updates is a major security benefit.
Chrome will still auto-update… this disables it from automatically updating in the background as chasles22 points out.
@ghosttie
glad for this post, you do that because googleupdate sometimes has a memory leak and chews up several gig of RAM. chrome will update when it runs, thats good enough.
Some detailed technical details about the GoogleUpdate process:
[boostbyreason.com]
These posts look a bit old but I want to point out those fixes are only temporary. I have deleted the “GoogleUpdate.exe” file countless times in addition to disabling the tasks and disabling at startup. It automatically downloads itself again without permission and it creates new entries in msconfig and task manager.
@ghosttie: One reason to disable is that there are people on dialup still *points to myself* and the installer is near 30mb and on my connection that is a 3 hour download so everything else shuts itself down to download an update I really don’t want to download at that time. Google needs to allow us to disable automatic updates if we choose. No program should have the ability to update if you don’t want it to.
Thanks!