Chrome won’t update - Updates are
disabled by your administrator
How to check for Chrome updates.
This should be done, daily if possible, and at least once a week otherwise.
Open Chrome. Click on the 3
vertical dots at the top, right of the window.
Select Help, and then About
Google Chrome. It “should” update Chrome right away, and then prompt you to
restart Chrome.
Between 10% and 25% of computers
have a problem where instead of doing the update you get this message: Updates
are disabled by your administrator.
This is a CYA lie by Google. It’s
just not true.
This occurs in Chrome on all
versions of Windows.
To update Chrome when this occurs, close Chrome, and then open MS Edge, and go
to
https://www.google.com/chrome/downloads/
Click on Download Chrome, and then run it when it has downloaded.
You can initiate this download via Chrome instead of Edge if you want, but you
must close all Chrome open Windows ASAP to make sure the installer can run. If
Chrome is running the update is likely to fail.
Download a new copy and run it. This should be done at least once a week for
those computers that exhibit this error state.
I have looked into options for when this occurs, but so far there don’t seem to
be any methods that generally work when the error is, “Updates are disabled by
your administrator.” (I have tried all the available methods to deal with this
condition.)
This error is erroneous, and kind of rude, as it puts the blame elsewhere,
rather than on the Chrome update engine, which breaks this way for no good
reason.
BTW, what “should” happen when you get that erroneous error is that Chrome
should download a new copy and close all open instances of the browser, and then
install the new version just like you have to do manually. Then it should just
reopen any previously opened tabs once the new version has been installed.
Google doesn’t even make a utility to strip out the installation. “Stripping” an
application means uninstalling it, and then manually removing the program and
extension related paths, files, and folders, along with the registry entries
associated with it, so that a clean installation can be performed.
Stripping out Chrome doesn’t fix the issue typically.
Manually wiping the user profile files associated with Chrome usually fails to
fix the error as well.
The only solution that works is wiping the drive and installing a clean, new
operating system. That’s generally an absurd solution to this type of problem.