Technically Personal!

It is a known fact that Memory hogging and Windows are tightly linked Over the past few weeks, I have written on

1. “How to fix svchost.exe memory hogging issue” and
2. “How to disable Adobe updater“.

Continuing the series, here is a tutorial on how to remove/disable/delete Googleupdate.exe.

What exactly is Googleupdate.exe?

GoogleUpdate.exe is a small program (typical google characteristic!) which gets installed with any Google product you download and install. It comes bundled with Picassa, Google desktop search, and now in Google Chrome. Many a times, it runs in the background (mostly hidden) and very difficult to identify and kill the process. It is basically a meta-installer / auto-updater which keeps all the Google products in your system updated.

So what’s wrong with Googleupdate.exe?

It’s true that it does not hogs your system memory. But that doesn’t give any right to any process to run and connect to the internet without your permission and download some updates as well. The whole concept of having an updater running as a hidden process irritates many. Moreover it does not run at system startup, hence removing it using msconfig is out of question.

Then, how to remove GoogleUpdate.exe?

• Go to Start –> Control panel –> Administrative Tools –> Scheduled Tasks or go to Start –> run and type in “taskschd.msc”
• You must find GoogleupdateTaskUser.exe in the scheduled task list. Right click and delete the task



• In Vista, go to Start–>Control Panel–>Administrative tools–>task scheduler
• Click Task scheduler Library and disable GoogleUpdateTaskUser.exe

That is it! You are done! Let me know if you would like me to write on any other process in Windows which you want to disable/delete but not able to do so.