Q: First I would like to praise and thank you for your great magazine. It is so much better than anything we have on our side of the “great water”. I look forward to it each month and it has given me invaluable help and information. Now my problem: I run Windows XP with Service Pack 2. I have AVG Internet Security Suite version 8.5.435 installed. I am getting pop-up notices from the AVG firewall saying that “Google Installer is trying to establish TCP connection with remote IP address xx.xxx.xx.xxx:xx (the number changes each time there is a new pop-up). Do you want to allow this connection?” There are 4 boxes for a choice: Allow for all, Allow for safe, Block. Help. I know that sometime in the past I must have downloaded something to do with Google and this Google Installer came along with it. It didn’t bother me at first, because I would click block and the pop-up would go away for a few days. But now, the pop-up occurs several times an hour and I have to click a dozen or so times to make it go away. I have tried to find where on my computer this thing is so I can delete it, but I have had no luck. Can you help me? At this point I just want anything to do with Google off my computer so I can get rid of the darn pop-up (which, incidentally, it has popped up twice while I was writing this e-mail. Very annoying.) Thank you in advance for any help you can give me.
A: The easiest way to tackle this is to track down which Google product you have installed and remove it. Most likely this will be the Google toolbar for whichever browser you’re using, unless you’ve installed Chrome, Google Earth or Google Talk. Any of these applications will also install GoogleUpdate.exe as a background task to check for the latest updates and this is what you’re seeing messages from.
Uninstalling the Google application should take the updater with it. However, if you’ve installed several Google products you may have more than one copy. The only way to be sure you’ve eradicated it completely is to search for all instances of GoogleUpdate.exe and delete them, then remove the associated registry entry. You can find full instructions on how to do this at http://bit.ly/cel0Za
When you download Google applications such as Chrome they always install an updating tool
Originally featured in PCU125
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