Uninstalling Google Desktop

Instructions for how to Uninstall Google Desktop because it's a worthless piece of ... wonderment

Authors

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This Knol written by Will Johnson, wjhonson@aol.com for Fast Forward Technologies

I'm this close I swear.
 
My computer has been running slowly for a while, and I thought to myself, "Self, let's run a Panda scan".  I mean it's been a while, and even though I use AVG and Comodo, you never know if something snuck in there.  So I started up the scan, and it's chugging along when I happened to glance at the screen and I see this:
 
googledesktopcommon.dll
googledesktopsetuphelper.exe
 
toggling back and forth just like that.. over and over and over and over and over
You get the picture.  And I say to myself, "Self, that looks kinda odd don't it?  What is that thing and why do I have so many copies of it?"
 
So I poke at it.
 


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It seems my C:/Program Files/Google/Google Desktop Search folder is... 3 Gigabytes large.
Now my entire disk drive is only 34 Gig.  So I don't know about you, but an *index* that is 10% of my entire disk is hmmm just a tad excessive shall we say?
 

So I did a little Explore on the directory.  I guess I must have installed this originally back in 2007.  I now have sixteen hundred directories, each holding a copy of these two files at 1.9M in each directory.  So I guess maybe one is created for each calendar day?  Not sure.  Anyway this is pretty bad.
 

Is everyone certain this is a Google product and not something created in Nigeria?  Really?  Google can't figure out how to delete old directories or what?  I mean bleeding Christmas.  Thank you for using up 10% of my disk making sixteen hundred copies of the exact same thing.  Why don't you just cut off my thumbs also?

 
So my next step is to uninstall this piece of... uh.. surprise.
 


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Luckily Google has these instructions for how to remove IT:
  1. Click the Start menu button in your Windows taskbar.
  2. Go to Programs > Google Desktop > Uninstall Google Desktop.
  3. Select the 'Remove completely for all users' option.
  4. Click the Yes button.
  5. If you'd like to delete your personal search index as well, deselect the 'Keep index and gadgets' checkbox.
  6. Click the Uninstall button to complete the process.

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