Recently, my laptop has been making some noise and fan just keeps running and running. I checked and culprit were bunch of services and one of them being DropBox. Obviously, I removed DropBox and bunch of other services and now noise is back to normal.

However, while I was exploring all this, I also noticed two other services GROOVE.EXE and GROOVEMN.EXE services. In the past, I had worked with Microsoft Groove and I know I do not have Groove installed on my machine. But my guess is, it has something to do with SharePoint, Office and Visual Studio (SharePoint support). The service description and documentation says, GROOVE.EXE is Microsoft SharePoint Workspace Audit service.

On this laptop I also do not do any SharePoint work. My SharePoint development machine is different. If you notice from the above screen, GROOVE and GROOVEMN services are consuming over 22MB of memory and I do not like this. I do not like any process is taking that much resources on my machine that I don't need.

Then I went ahead and did some more research and noticed it was taking close to 50MB of space in Microsoft Office folder. As a matter of fact, the history of Groove.exe shows it was installed on June 11, 2011 and last accessed on May 23, 2012. That is pretty much telling me that I don't need it.

But here is something interesting. I went to my computer services (Type Services in Search Start Command TextBox, click on Computer Services, and click on Services) and noticed the service is not even running and set to Manual Startup Type mode.

So, I went to my Startup services and noticed bunch of Office 2010 services running and one of them is even called OneNote. I disabled these 4 services.

I restarted my machine and went to Task Manager and I don't see it anymore.

If you want to remove it from your computer, search for Groove.exe and you should find it in your Office folder. Just delete it.