What is Sonic Update Manager and how to remove it

Posted on February 18, 2008 at 6:50 am

Here’s another technical walk-through on how to fix a pesky little problem that is caused by computer manufacturers such as Dell! Basically, they load too much crap onto your PC when you buy it and you get lots of junk software installed, one being Sonic Update Manager.

What is Sonic Update Manager?

Sonic Update Manager is not even a full software application, it’s a secondary application or service that run with the Sonic RecordNow software. Sonic RecordNow lets you create cds and dvds, so you don’t want to remove that from your machine.

But you may notice that every time you start up your computer, you get a wonderful message from Sonic Update Manager to enter the Sonic cd, which you don’t have since Dell didn’t give it to you and then pressing Cancel only seems to infuriate the software more because it keeps popping up over and over again! How annoying!

How to remove or uninstall Sonic Update Manager?

There are a couple of ways you can fix the problems associated with Sonic Update Manager and I’ll go through them here one by one.

The first and the simplest, if it’s possible, is to simply go into the Control Panel and then Add/Remove Programs. There look for Sonic Update Manager and if you’re lucky, it might be there. Click Remove to get rid of it. Remember, don’t get rid of Sonic RecordNow as that is the software you use to record cds and dvds.

The second way is to disable the Sonic Update service that starts up when you computer starts. You can do this by going to Start, click on Run, and then typing in MSCONFIG and pressing Enter.

Next click on the Startup tab and you’ll see a list of all of the processes that start up when your computer starts up. You can uncheck any service to prevent it from loading during bootup. For the Sonic software, you want to search for any startup item named sgtray, or that has the words Sonic Update Manager or Update Manager in the path for the command or location.

Also, if you see isuspm or issch, go ahead and uncheck those also as they are culprits for this issue as well. You may also see something called “UpdateService” or “InstallShield” in the command column, make sure to un-check those. Don’t worry about disabling something important, Windows will give you an error if you try, so if you don’t get an error, it probably won’t hurt to disable it.

In some cases, you might have to uninstall it from Add/Remove programs and disable the startup items!

Sonic Update Manager Hotfix

You can also download a Sonic Update Manager hotfix from Roxio itself that could possibly fix your problem.

http://tools.roxio.com/support/dell/isum_hotfix.exe

Once installed, go ahead and restart your computer.

Windows Installer Cleanup Utility

Another step you can take is to clean up the Windows Installer files in Windows as that may have gotten corrupted and therefore cause all kinds of random popups asking for cds, etc.

Description of the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility

The download is from Microsoft and will help if you are still having issues even after trying all of the above steps trying to get rid of Sonic Update Manage.r

You should hopefully be able to resolve your issue with a combination of any of the above steps! Post a comment if you have a question!

Technorati Tags: sonic update manager, remove sonic update manager, sonic update manager msi, fix sonic update manager

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9 Responses to “What is Sonic Update Manager and how to remove it”

Nirmal said on : February 18th, 2008 at 7:21 am

Sometimes these kind of softwares can cause problems when you dont know how to remove it. Config file is the best way to change startups.

akishore said on : February 18th, 2008 at 9:39 am

Hey Nirmal,

Thanks for the info, can you explain a little more what you mean by config file?

Thanks!

Syahid A. said on : February 18th, 2008 at 9:57 pm

I think what Nirmal means is the tool that you use exactly above.

zeqo said on : February 18th, 2008 at 10:44 pm

I tried everything above and some more from Google search….didn’t work.I couldn’t find anything related to this so i could try to fix it.This happened when I tried to update my Sonic software.

Nirmal said on : February 21st, 2008 at 12:02 am

Yea, I was telling about the msconfig file itself.

Kathy said on : April 29th, 2008 at 11:08 am

Thanks soooooooooooooooo much for your help. Problem Solved. “God Bless You” ! ! !

Linda said on : May 3rd, 2008 at 6:26 pm

Excellent advice!! Dell technicians had been totally mystified. I didn’t find Sonic on the start up menu, but did find “isuspm” and “issch” and this has solved the problem. Thanks!

Hector Fabian said on : June 17th, 2008 at 10:39 am

Excellent. Thanks

Patricia said on : June 19th, 2008 at 2:16 pm

Hi everyone .. well, it seems my version was more aggressive. When I removed the items from startup - all seemed well. But lo and behold .. there it was yet again.
In order for me to remove the program, I first disabled all my startup services and applied (but did not restart computer). This stopped the pop ups. Then I was able to remove the program from the system. So far .. so good!