A hard to tame application like googleupdate.exe could cause a notification every other second or so which could be really annoying as there is no obvious way to disable the notifications in the review copy.

SPKiller is a similar application that can block processes and services in the Windows operating system. The installation itself requires more work than the usual double-click on a setup file. The installation will simply place the files of the program in a directory on the computer’s hard drive. The user has to click on InstallService.bat to install the Windows Service. After that the Service needs to be started in the Windows Services Overview.

The Windows Process and Services blocker is configured with a simply XML file that is located in the program’s installation directory. The configuration is not more complicated than editing a text document. It is made up of three sections that are of importance to the user. The first is called CycleTime and defines the interval in milliseconds that the running services and processes are checked. ServiceNames contains a list of Windows Services that should be blocked if running while ProcessNames does the same for Windows processes.

The configuration file contains a few example services and processes mainly from McAfee but also Radia in the ServiceNames configuration and annoying processes like GoogleToolbarNotifier or AppleMobileDeviceService in the ProcessNames listing.

SPKiller works well as a process blocker in Windows especially since it blocks both processes and services on the computer system.

Update: SPKiller is no longer available. The developer website and product have been discontinued.