I recently installed MySQL after a long time. I’ve been so used to the flexibility that MongoDB offers me that I haven’t looked at MySQL in ages. However I had to install it recently for something I was working on, and chose the Community Edition available here.
Everything went fine. However I was in the middle of doing something else on a different night when I suddenly saw a suspicious popup window that looked something like this:
The first time I saw this, I figured it was just some post-installation cleanup that MySQL was performing, and since I hadn’t launched it more than once after the first installation, it seemed natural.
However this popup appeared again, and again I was surprised. I dismissed it a second time thinking ‘Oh well, maybe some more updates or something! or maybe it just started up after some long update process.’
The third time it happened, I knew there was something weird. I captured the program and copied the command window text. I searched about it and came across a few places talking about it – apparently it’s a phone-home updater. As I don’t remember agreeing to having MySQL checking every day for changes, I decided to disable this. I followed the instructions here, and thought I’d share it with you for Windows 8.1.
First, search for Schedule Tasks:
Now expand the Task Scheduler Library in the left pane, and expand MySQL > Installer under it. You should see an entry named ManifestUpdate. Right click this entry and select Disable:
You’re all set! You shouldn’t get that task running anymore. At the same time, you might notice a bunch of tasks scheduled to run on your machine which you might choose to disable too. Be careful not to disable something important though!