The other day I installed the add-on to Google Chat that allows you to add voice and video to your chats.

But what I didn’t (knowingly) install was the Google Updater Service. It’s a Windows service that is always running on your PC in the background, taking up resources, and, if the crazies on the world wide web are to be believed, sending info about you to Google as you surf the web.

I don’t particularly care if the last part is true or not, the bottom line is that the Google Talk plugin did not have any options when I installed it, so I was never asked if I wanted to install the update service or not.

Removing the software is not as easy as you might think. You see, it’s not installed as a regular service. So you can’t just go disable it. In fact, once you install it, it is deeply entrenched in your system.

So, here’s a step-by-step on how to get rid of it on Windows XP. Users of other OS’s – you’re on your own, suckas.

(Actually, there are a ton of tutorials on how to remove this. Go ahead and Bing it.)

  1. First, go into Task Manager find GoogleUpdater.exe and kill the process.
  2. Now, the program installed two automated tasks in your task scheduler. If you are like most Windows users you never even knew you had a task scheduler. Open Control Panel and double click on Scheduled Tasks.
  3. Note with anger how you never consented to add scheduled tasks to your system. Then note that they run once an hour every day.
  4. Highlight the tasks, right click, and select Delete.
  5. Now, for another part of your system you never knew existed, we’ll go into msconfig. Click Start, then run (or Window Key + r).
  6. Type msconfig and press Enter.
  7. Click over to the Startup tab.
  8. Find the entry for Google Updater, and uncheck the box. Hit Apply.
  9. Nope, you’re not done yet. Now we have to delete the program. Manually.
  10. Start –> Search –> Files and Folders
  11. Search for googleupd*
  12. Note, you’ll have to include hidden files and folders, since the files are, of course, located within hidden folders.
  13. Delete the files with extreme prejudice. If you notice a file in your WINDOWS\PREFETCH folder, you can safely delete that file. It’s there so the Google Updater can load super fast when you load your PC. Because you want that.
  14. Still not done. Time to go to the registry. Default registry warning: You can really, really screw up your PC by going into the registry. So do so at your own risk.
  15. Start–> Run –> type regedit, press enter.
  16. Navigate to HKey_Current_User\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\
  17. Delete the Google Update Key if it exists.

There you go. Only 17 easy steps to remove software you never wanted in the first place.

Hmmmm… software that installs itself without your knowledge or consent and is very hard to remove… isn’t there a classification for software like that?