Turn Off the Obnoxious HP Driver UAC Popup Update Check in Vista
If you are using Vista and have an HP printer, especially of the All-In-One variety, you’ve probably noticed that once a week or so you get this obnoxious User Account Control popup dialog out of the blue asking for permission to run some Hewlett Packard update process called hprbupdate.exe.
The problem is that by default the HP drivers include a couple of different updates, but those updates also require Administrator privileges to run, so you get prompted to run the updates. To make this even worse… the updates are for the help and support, not even for the drivers.
In case you are wondering what I mean, here’s the ridiculously annoying and unnecessarily obnoxious dialog I’m talking about:
Disabling This Obnoxious Popup
In order to disable this utility, we’ll have to run the configuration tool from within the directory. After doing a little research, I found the directory the app is actually running from, which is this one:
C:\Program Files\HP\Digital Imaging\Product Assistant\bin
Once you get into this directory, launch hprbui.exe, which is the Hewlett-Packard Product Assistant UI.
Once you open this up, click on the Preferences link on the left-hand pane.
Now under the Basic Settings section you’ll want to click on “Disable Solution Updates”, and then click on the Save button.
You should get the dialog saying that your preferences have been saved.
This should disable one of the updates, but we’ll still need to get the second one.
Disable Help Content Update
I’m not really sure that this update has to be disabled, but better safe than annoyed with popups, and there’s really very little reason to update the help content all the time if you don’t use it.
Open up HP Solution Center, and then at the bottom of the window click on the Settings button.
Now in the Other Settings box, hover your mouse over Other and then choose Update Preferences from the menu.
Now you can uncheck the box for “Enable help Contents updates automatically”.
This should hopefully get rid of these completely ridiculous update prompts once and for all. When will these vendors learn to use the built-in Task Scheduler in Windows for this type of thing? That’s what it’s there for!
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Oh, you totally rock my world!
Not only is this thing so annoying by coming up all the time, on the few occasions that I’ve told it to go ahead and update (thinking that would make it go away in the future), it always says “update failed!”
I rocked my HP printer.
I may have set the world record on the upcoming Olympic event “The Printer Chuck” I hate with a passion all HP printers!
Thanks for the advice next time I’ll search your posts before violently reacting to frustrating technology “features”.
Mark
I am running as the “hidden” administrator accout that has vista UAC turned off by default. But these updates had been driving me nuts since they always failed. Thanks.
Thanks so much for the info. I lived it with for a year now. I did a search for “Removing annoying HP Updates from Vista” a few minutes ago and found this useful info. TQ TQ again. No more annoying prompts that go nowhere.
Thanks a lot for this great tip!
Wow! Your solution to this nusance is more accurately and thouroughly explained than the response I got from HP Total Care. Thank goodness for tech geeks!
Thank you very much! I was worried I might have a virus so this made me feel better AND now I won’t get that annoying pop up. Thanks!
You do not have to go to C:\Program Files\HP\Digital Imaging\Product Assistant\bin to open the HP Product Assistant.
Try Start – Programs – HP – HP Product Assistant. Then Set Preferences as described in the article.
I’ve turned off updates and no longer get the UAC every week. Thanks
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HP’s chat support simply asked me to remove “HP Update” from the program list in the control panel. Is there any reason to worry about the settings and steps you suggest? Why not just remove the darn thing? Is it good for anything else than updates?
Thanks for this info. I just did it so wish me luck. I like one of the other people let the thing run once hoping it would stop and it caused errors with my system resulting in a 3 hour call with HP customer support in India, UGH……