At work, sometimes I get to see some truly bad bits of design – and my current winner is some awful design from Installshield and their ‘Update Engine’. There is, quite simply, no easy way of turning the damn thing off, disabling it, stopping the service, or uninstalling it. What crap! I did find a solution eventually…

I found the answer here and I’d give Pluck a 10/10 for walking away from an installer program like this. I had installed some software that we were reselling to a customer, to check it worked. Now, I know that the supplier won’t be updating through installshield – it really isn’t that kind of a program. But it still installed this update engine. “Okay”, I thought, “I’ll turn it off”.

So now it’s disabled for all programs, never checks for updates, and it still pops up a window asking to check for updates. F$%king thing! It positively fails Andy’s test for Software – it doesn’t do exactly what it says on the tin.

Anyway, the solution. Run ‘msconfig’ from the ‘start menu > run…’. Find ‘issch’ and uncheck the checkbox next to it. It is still installed, but it doesn’t run, at least.

And I’d recommend to everyone that they use a different installer. I like Innosetup myself, and use it at work. It does what it says on the tin, and is free, although I’d suggest donating.