It’s been nice knowing you, Google Desktop
I uninstalled Google Desktop today.
Someone on our network has been using 400kb/s 24/7 for the past two months. It’s not exactly my job to hunt around for that kind of thing, so I didn’t really investigate what it was. Turns out, Google Desktop was downloading something from 64.233.179.*, port 443 (HTTPS) the whole time it was running (I installed the new version about two months ago). I switched it off, and the downloading stopped. Switch it back on, it starts up again.
Naturally, I was curious as to what exactly Google Desktop was doing that consistently used up that much bandwidth, so I started disabling features. One by one, I disabled every single feature, from “Index secure pages (HTTPS) in web history” to all of the RSS gadgets in the Sidebar, and still nothing. I disabled everything I could find in the Google Desktop Preferences to the point of making it absolutely useless, and still it sat happily downloading 400kb/s from https://google.com/.
So, finally I gave up. I guess I wasn’t willing to believe that something I downloaded from Google Himself was broken, but I can’t find any other explanation. When I uninstalled it, there was a place to explain what the problem was, so I gave them an abbreviated version of this story.
Hopefully someone reads it. I’ll update this post if I hear back from them.
By the way, the tool I used to monitor my network activity was the excellent PRTG. There’s a freeware edition which is more than adequate for a single user trying to figure out what in the world is eating up their bandwidth.
