To find out if it is running in Windows press [Ctrl Alt Del] on your keyboard to open the Windows Task Manager. According to Google GoogleCrashHandler.exe has the following characteristics:

GoogleCrashHandler.exe runs continuously on your computer if you’ve selected to send anonymous usage statistics and crash reports to Google for certain Google software, like Google Chrome. It helps send crash details to Google when your Google software unexpectedly shuts down. We use this data to help determine how to prevent these errors from happening in the future.

The process can be turned off in the installed Google programs. That could be a bit of a problem if several Google applications are installed on the computer system. In Google Chrome – Google’s web browser – you have to go to into the Options, switch to the Under The Hood tab and remove the checkmark in front of “Help make Google Chrome better by automatically sending usage statistics and crash reports to Google”.

Other Google applications have similar options. If more than one Google app is installed you need to go through all of them to turn off the crash reporting in all of them. Once that is done GoogleCrashHandler.exe will not be running on the computer system anymore starting with the next start of the computer system (restart or kill the process for immediate effect).

It also did feel strange that Google needed a process to update their programs while other companies like Mozilla did not. Especially if the only software by Google was their web browser Google Chrome.

Google has announced changes yesterday that will please many computer users. They basically changed Google Update from running in the background permanently to a process that would check for updates periodically which basically eliminates the googleupdate.exe process in the background as it will terminate after the check for updates.

Users can check the Task Scheduler in the Windows Control Panel to change the frequency of the update checks. The Google team points out that the process might be running continuously on some computer systems if problems are encountered with the task scheduler and Windows Services.

The answer is simply: Dud has been designed by the software developer to replace annoying executables and programs that are started by the Windows operating system or applications. Mentioned are files like helpctr.exe or stobject.dll which are not useful to most users or necessary at all.

The developer has created a second program called Replacer which can be used to replace protected files in operating systems such as Windows XP or Windows 2000. It can for example also be used to replace the annoying googleupdate.exe, ctfmon.exe and basically any other annoying process that gets automatically started by the operating system or software programs.

It might make more sense in certain situations to find a way to disable the process or service so that it does not get started at all but this is sometimes not possible. That’s where a program like Dud comes in very handy.

Googleupdate.exe uses about 1.6 Megabytes of computer memory while running. This might not be much on computer systems that have Gigabytes of computer memory but can make a difference on low end systems. There is however another aspect that requires some attention. Googleupdate.exe will send data to the Google server whenever it checks for updates.

This data includes a unique ID number, languages, operating systems, version numbers and other install or update related details. Disabling the googleupdate.exe process is thankfully not complicated. The process can easily be killed at any time and will not appear again in the process list during that session.

The Google Update process is added as a service during the first installation of a Google software that makes use of it. To change its behavior one would simply open the services configuration with [Windows R], [services.msc] and hitting [enter]. The service is called Google Update Service (gupdatexxx) with xxx being a random ID)

A double-click on GoogleUpdate.exe will open the properties of the services with the option to change the startup type from automatic to disabled.

A click on the apply button will change the setting and ensure that Googleupdate.exe will not be started during Windows startup anymore. Another click on Stop will stop the process for the current session.