Sep

18

I’d like to retract a Sunday Share tonight…

Filed Under Babbling, Webmaster Woes 

I’m not going to remove the post, but I am going to edit it to link to this one for folks who might be interested in it… If you recall me recommending Google Chrome almost 2 weeks back, well, I take it back. Let me start at the beginning of this story…

Before I had made that post, not 3 days after using Chrome, I started having hang-ups on websites I’d normally visit. I noticed my computer wasn’t being nice to me. Granted, my desktop is a 1.4ghz Celeron with 2 gigs of RAM running Windows XP Pro, but even with that, this was just stupid small hang-ups. Things that even after such a fresh install of Windows as I had (which I should really get to sometime soon), I shouldn’t be having. Especially on an internet connection that’s seriously going at 100mb/s. I could show you my SpeedTest results. Insane speeds. So before I had even made the post about Chrome, I wasn’t using it anymore. I was seriously back to FireFox.

At any rate, shortly thereafter, I noticed a button on my WordPress site called “Turbo.” When I clicked on it, it was talking about Google Gears, so I installed it. On some of the sites that I was going to, I was starting to get these messages from it about it speeding up my internet experience. So why not, you know? We all want faster internet.

I noticed a few days afterwards when my computer was running slow that I had an Administrator and SYSTEM process on my Task Manager for “Google Updater.” Now, I wasn’t running anything that should have been updating, and the only thing that was open that was Google related at all was the Gears which was a plug-in on FireFox. So when I couldn’t remove it from my Add-Ins, I used Google to find out how to kill its own Gears. That uninstalled, my computer started running a little faster.

Only a little. You see, a few days later, I noticed that “Google Updater” was back on my Task Manager. The only thing that was Google related on my computer happened to be Chrome. I just uninstalled it now and all of a sudden, things started speeding back up. Strange, huh?

But not too much. You see, hours after I initially made this post, I noticed that “Google Updater” was still running. So after searching my computer, I learned something: when you uninstall Gears and Chrome, it doesn’t remove the task function from your computer to run Google Updater whenever your computer goes idle. So after manually removing it and rebooting? Its really finally gone.

To me, its really just not worth it.

I should have known from back when I first tried using Google Desktop way back in the day when it came out that I wouldn’t like using a Google product. When I first tried using Desktop, not only did it take well over a day to archive my computer, but my computer was completely locked up while it was going through the process and my computer would only work afterwards for the day or so that it was installed if I (1) deactivated the toolbar on my browser and (2) closed the application on my desktop. Not really the way somethings supposed to “work,” you know?

I like Google. The website, that is. I think from here on out, the search engine will be the extent of the products I use from them. I don’t need unapproved background processes running on my computer.

Not cool, Google. Not cool.

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    About The Site


    Thanks for stopping by, folks! My name is Adam J. Cohen, and I'm a guitarist/songwriter in Champaign, IL, recently relocated from Orlando, FL where I'm a UCF grad. Here, you'll find vignettes on my life, setlists from open mics and reviews, and whatever else crosses my mind. Enjoy!