So Old It Refused To Update
I mentioned yesterday that I spent a lot of time out of my work day on just two issues. The first one was a printer issue. Printer-ish, at least. Let’s just say it was printer-adjacent.
What was the other one, you ask? I am happy to answer that for you. It was the most stubborn Chrome installation I have ever had the misfortune to experience. It was the Chrome installation that would not die.
I got the call as an escalation, actually. The user reported that they were getting a message that Chrome was not compatible with several sites they needed to use, and it required an update. The computer was a Surface tablet, which in my experience is an indication of trouble right off the bat. Surface tablets are popular with a lot of users, but not that popular with technicians. I’m not saying this problem was caused by the janky hardware, but it might have been a contributing factor.
One of my coworkers spent more than an hour over the course of several calls trying, and failing, to get that really old version of Chrome to either update to a more recent version, or completely uninstall so they could just install the newest version. My co-worker tried everything they knew, and asked me if I could take a look.
How hard could that be? If nothing else, I thought, I can just delete all the folders, delete the relevant Registry entries, and start over. A slash-and-burn strategy. But that’s not where I started. I started by trying to cover the basics. Always start out with the simplest fixes, test that it did or did not solve the issue, and move on to more and more complicated fixes. One step at a time, check your options. Troubleshoot methodically.
I started with just trying to uninstall. I tried running the uninstaller with admin rights. I made sure that there wasn’t malware that might be preventing the updater from running. None of that worked.
I double-checked that the issue wasn’t just on the user’s profile. Nope, same problem in another account on the same computer. That told me that it was a Windows-wide issue. Something was deeply broken in this computer.
I spent a lot of time backing up the user’s bookmarks by trying to copy out the folders in %appdata% which was slow going. I did that because the user was not able to log in to their Google account to sync. That is a result of the version of Chrome being so old; it was incompatible with current Google accounts. I think that’s why this was so broken; it had been frozen in time, while Windows and Google advanced, to the point where it was stuck, not functioning. It was too old to update properly, if you can imagine such a thing.
I should have just had the user bring their tablet in, wipe the thing, and reinstall Windows. That would have about the same amount time spent than what I tried next. I began my burning bridges strategy.
To my utter surprise, it even refused to let me delete the Registry keys. I hadn’t seen that before.
I was able to delete the folder in C:\Program Files(x86)\ though. And in its place I installed a portable version of Chrome, which was newer than what the user had been working with. It did let them log in, sync their bookmarks, and use the sites they needed. It still gave an error about not being able to update, though. All I’d done is kick the can down the road a bit.
For sure, the next step is to wipe it and reinstall everything. At least they’re working for now.