The Cranky Chrome Install Case

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I was recently helping someone with a problem with their laptop – an HP Envy, several years old but still running fairly well on Windows. It would install updates, receive feature releases, and get Office 365 updates with one click. But there was a fundamental problem: Google’s Chrome browser was not installing.

We needed Chrome to access some projects that required the Google platform. Easy, right? Not so much on this laptop. Let me walk you through the sleuths and tactics I needed to install Chrome, a process that offers lessons to other users when seemingly good installations go wrong.

I downloaded both the stub installer and the company installer and the installers would flash a window and then close and not install. (The Event Viewer reported that the installation was unsuccessful, but gave no idea why.)

While examining the files installed on the machine, I found something called “Fast Browser” residing in the registry instead of the Chrome browser. I tried to uninstall it. No dice. Then I tried the Revo Uninstaller in a failed attempt to uninstall both Fast Browser and leftover Chrome. It was at this point that I found evidence of an old program whose purpose was to disable Microsoft Defender. I was hoping to avoid doing a full reinstall, so I kept trying to clean up this clearly damaged OS. Since the Revo uninstaller could not find an old installation of Chrome, even though the registry keys indicated that the operating system once thought Chrome was there – I scanned the registry. It turns out that the Chrome registry keys have been forgotten.

None of the usual troubleshooting techniques recommended for installing Chrome worked. One recommendation was to uninstall the antivirus software. But since installing Defender, there was no third-party antivirus to remove. (I saw that the background smart transfer service was set to manual, so I set the service to automatic and tried again.

To fail.

I checked to see if the HP Envy’s network driver was up to date. It was. Reminder: only go to a vendor’s site or to Microsoft to update the drivers. Using third-party driver installation tools is often risky.

Then I used the Registry Editor to find all Chrome locations in the registry. I then tried to delete Computer HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE SOFTWARE Google and Computer HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE SOFTWARE WOW6432Node Google in Registry Editor. Here’s where things got interesting: I couldn’t delete the registry keys. I received an error message stating that I did not have permission to modify these registry keys. I kept trying other suggestions and used the Microsoft troubleshooter to see if that would find the installation of Google Chrome and remove it. (It was not possible to uninstall.) UAC or User Account Control was already enabled, so I didn’t have to do anything.

Then I checked the system startup to find anything that installs on startup that might be causing this problem. Here things got interesting: msconfig showed that the system was configured to perform selective boot, and nothing I tried would allow it to go to normal boot.

I could have used such tools to try and take control of the registry keys, but now I have decided that I can no longer trust this hard drive. Even if I found a way to reset permissions or redo the OS, I no longer considered it a safe OS. So I took the opportunity to not only fix the laptop but also upgrade it.

The Envy came with a traditional IDE hard drive; I chose to upgrade the system with an SSD drive. Once done, I put a USB drive with a Windows 10 ISO image from Microsoft’s download site. The HP laptop immediately found the flash drive and started installing the operating system. Due to the Windows 10 digital license attached to the motherboard of the laptop, the system automatically reactivated Windows 10 without me having to provide a product key.

Then I reinstalled documents, pictures, and various items from the original drive (after first scanning it for security issues). I placed the old drive in an external USB enclosure. Then, I took possession of the old user folder in order to be able to copy the data to the SSD. (I’m a fan of adding a ‘take ownership’ option to the right mouse click properties menu, as it allows me to easily copy files to a new drive.)

Finally, I started looking for other files to make the transition easier. If you couldn’t find anything without your browser favorites, depending on your browser preferences, you will need to find them and copy them to the new drive. In the case of Firefox, you can find a backup bookmarks folder in the original user profile and restore it.

I prefer to use a password manager rather than saving the passwords in your browser, but if you do the latter you can export and import them (after adjusting the browser to expose this capability.) Once that you have recovered your rebuilt machine, remember to take a full image backup of your system.

Since I didn’t have a reliable backup to restore from, I had to rebuild this laptop from scratch. And while the Envy was better than before thanks to the SSD upgrade, switching to a new computer has always been confusing for me. It takes time to recover a “just like this” system. There are often little programs, applications, or bits of data that I forget I need. I recommend that you keep an old hard drive in a USB enclosure in case you accidentally forget a file.

The bottom line is this: When your Windows computer won’t let you “fix” it, it’s time to rebuild from scratch. So it’s important to plan ahead and always have on hand (or know where you can get quickly) an external hard drive enclosure, spare SSD, and flash drive (with at least 8 GB of space) to create a bootable Windows 10 ISO.

So how would you have approached this misbehaving computer? What other tools or tips would you have used? Join the discussion on Askwoody.com

Copyright © 2021 IDG Communications, Inc.

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