Saturday, June 25, 2011

Crapware 101: Quickbooks 2012, Windows 7 and the Google Desktop

I had a call earlier this week from my boss saying that his Windows 7 notebook was saying 'Please Wait...' when he booted it and it wouldn't get past that.  No Ctrl-Alt-Del screen or anything.
I could access the file shares via the network and could even RDP to it, where I was then presented with the same 'Please Wait...' screen.
My boss then said that he had installed Quickbooks 2012 the day before.  So, I had him login via safe-mode and configure msconfig.exe to boot a 'selective start-up' and we disabled all non-microsoft services.  This should have prevented an third party services from trying to start during Windows boot.
However, rebooting didn't resolve the issue.
After a heap of mucking around, I simply couldn't find the problem.  We were fairly sure it had something to do with Quickbooks, but it was a fairly straight forward install.  My boss decided he'd call Quicken the next day to see if they'd heard of the issue.
Turns out, that during the install of Quickbooks, it prompts to install the Google Desktop!  Crapware!  An expensive, well known application is installing Crapware!  My boss had, without even thinking, installed the Google Desktop.  The Quickbooks support team had checked and advised him to uninstall the Google Desktop via safe-mode and all was well!
So, this is another awesome reason for not ever allowing an application to install other software... also known as Crapware!  I'm really surprised that the Quickbooks installer even has this option, being as Quickbooks is such a well known and respected application.  I think they have definitely dropped the ball on this one.

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