Last week, I wanted to fire up Google Earth on a secondary workstation that lacked the software. And Lo! when I kicked off the install I was treated to my first encounter with Google Updater. Since Google has always done right by me, I let it do its thing and I was soon happily browsing various points of interest on my local blue marble.
Later that day, my firewall software spoke up to let me know that Google Updater was trying to access the Internet on its own. Without setting a specific policy, I clicked disallow a bunch of times before I finally fired up the application itself and gave myself full control over update checks. Unfortunately, this did not appear to do anything and Google continued attempting to call home, even after I put it through a couple of update cycles just for the heck of it. This really annoyed me.
Then one of the updates grabbed software I didn’t want or opt for. Suddenly, I have Adobe Reader 8 installing. I already run Adobe 7 Pro out of necessity and really didn’t need another PDF reader on this machine, but there was nothing I could do short of aborting the install, so I let it. Naturally, the next time I attempted to access a PDF document, Adobe choked and complained. So I let Adobe off its leash and let it update itself, which of course has required a reboot and now I can’t access a critical document from this machine at a juncture where I can’t reboot quite yet.
I’ll live of course, but this is becoming a time-waster and, for all I know, might end up becoming a huge pain in the ass. Who knows, maybe in hindsight I was clicking through too quickly, but I don’t think so.
Anyway, in case anyone else missed the Google Earth install link that doesn’t require Google Updater (like I did initially) here it is. I’m sure there are equivalent links for their other apps. And here’s how to get rid of it, if you wind up choosing to do that.