Windows Update - long time to check for updates

Checked Vista and KB3153199 was one I installed yesterday, so I rechecked for updates and it returned results in 6 minutes. 7 should have KB3153199 now too so hopefully that'll clear it up, for now. Thanks Mister X.

 

I agree, if at MS they think I'm going to switch to Windows 10 on a 9 years old machine they can wait forever. Yesterday it took me more than 5 hours with the CPU running at 52% to finally detect the updates on my Vista machine. Next time I will try for 15 minutes, if it doesn't update I will just pass. I don't think Vista at this stage needs any updates considering my security.

 

I've had several cases of excessive CPU use and power consumption due to Windows Update hanging in Windows 7 and I've ended up leaving it disabled until I'm ready to update. I'm using both Autopatcher and Windows update to do updates. Once you have Autopatcher download all the updates you can put the Autopatcher folder on a thumb drive and have all the necessary updates ready to go for multiple computers. Autopatcher is good but not perfect by any means. It hangs on some updates and I've found the quickest way to get it going again is to stop and restart the windows update service. I sometimes have to run it more than once as well because some updates won't install until others are installed. Once it is done, Windows update starts working normally again and there are always some Windows updates Autopatcher misses. Autopatcher doesn't do Office or other Microsoft product updates at all either so it is a good idea to run Windows Update after autopatcher. After both are done, I disable Windows update until I'm ready to update again which could easily be a month or two. I usually do Windows updates in conjunction with browser and other updates.

 

I can confirm KB3153199 was one of the updates on my Vista and after checking for updates I got results after 11 minutes! Thank you all for the info...

 

I have noticed that there have been several, apparently unrelated, patches each month for the past several months that have been the key to resolving the slow update searches. I have observed that at least a couple of them have been related to windows kernel driver updates ... once installed, the update delays disappear ... hmmm ...

Edit: I ran a manual update check, and the results came back in about 2-3 minutes. I have not installed any May patches yet.

But I still have a few April patches to install. Maybe one of them is the cause of this month's slowdown.

What an annoying game of "whack-a-mole"!

 

Yesterday, I did an upgrade install from XP to Vista SP2 (I moved a hard drive from a non working computer with an XP COA to a working one with a Vista COA). I ran Windows Update last night, and left it running overnight, but this morning it was still stuck on checking for updates. I tried to install KB3153199, but it was also stuck trying to download the required update.

It has been probably been around 18 hours that Windows Update has been stuck on checking for updates when I tried an alternative. I installed 360 Total Security and ran the Patch Up module. It took just a few seconds to find 178 updates. I was not able to install any updates, probably because I still had the installer for KB3153199 runnning. So, I rebooted, and now Patch Up is downloading and installing all the updates.

Based on past experience, I knew that if I had left Windows Update running, it would have eventually found updates. But using 360 TS makes things so much faster.

I'm not going to keep 360 TS installed as I already had Tencent PC Manager installed. So I will uninstall it as soon as it's done installing every update.

 

I wonder what Woody's pick will be next month?

 

Well it turns out that using Patch Up isn't really helping. The first update installed fine. But, subsequent updates are failing to install. I cancelled the second update after Patch Up had spend 3 and a half hours trying to install it. I then skipping the seoncd update and tried to install the third update, but also it was not installing. The Windows Update service was runnning, and using about 25% CPU use when Patch Up was trying to install the updates, so something was going on. But, updates should not be taking hours to install.

 

Don't know, but the KB he references has fixed the issue for me on every single machine I have tried it on.

 

I did a small test on Vista. With all updates installed, the check for updates went fairly quickly. I then uninstalled three fixes and rebooted. I did another check for updates and the three updates showed up again in about 3 minutes. So maybe KB3153199 does alleviate the problem, but I would not bet on it.. We'll see what next month brings.

 

Good morning everyone,

FWIW...I had some of the same update issues being discussed here. I posted a topic over at the SevenForums, and with the help of a couple of long-tenured members there, was finally able to get all the updates installed. Shown below is the link to my topic if anyone would like to see what we did:

http://www.sevenforums.com/windows-...d-install-reason-post3247259.html#post3247259

Hope this might be of some help & regards to all.

 

It was really fast receiving W7/32 windows updates today: just 10 minutes to download all 15 and 20 minutes to install and configure. I chose not to pre-install KB315399 just to see if it made a difference. Obviously it did not, so it may not be the panacea that everyone was hoping it would be. A pleasant surprise and I have no explanation for it.

I may have lucked out (re: an available server) - right time, right place.

 

Sage advice? Install updates in small batches at a time. If you install everything at once, your computer will choke. That takes a lot longer but all the updates do get installed.

 

@NormanF It was only installing one update a time. After installing the first update, no more updates would install, even after a reboot. Actually when Windows does eventually find updates, I let it install all the selected updates, then reboot as neeed and keep doing the same. I've never had any issues even if there are tens of updates selected to install. The problems is that is can take a very long time to finish checking for updates.

I installed KB3153199 last night. After a reooot it instal straight away. However, the check for updates is still taking a very long time. Windows Update has now been stuck on checking for updates for 10 hours. The Windows Update icon in the systray says there are updates available when I move the mouse pointer over it, but the Windows Update window still just shows it's checking for updates. Closing the WU window and then clicking on the systray icon to reopen it makes no difference.

Update: After nearly 11 hours, Windows Update finished checking for updates and found 200+ updates to be installed, which I'm installing now.

 

Did you download the KB3153199 through Windows Update, or was it just slow because of the high CPU usage? I downloaded the update on another machine (Windows 10 from Microsoft's site, no issues there) and copied it to the ones with issues (Windows 7). If you must you can kill the instance of svchost.exe with the high CPU usage. It will come back but if you work fast enough to install the update and reboot then it all goes pretty quickly. I got tired of it taking literal hours to update these machines.

 

I would be interested to know if you guys that are finding Windows Update slow also find Windows Update MiniTool slow.

 

Of course WUMT is slow. This program is just, but a nice and good, front-end to the existing native Windows Update. If something's is wrong in the underlying mechanism of WU or Windows itself it will be reflected on WUMT as well.

 

Compared to default Windows Update, I find it way faster, it always installs updates within 5 minutes, download included for like 700MB updates.
Then again, I run my Windows cleanup after every successful update, plus some third party cleaning software as well, I never see any slow downs.

 

Your sig says you are running Windows 10. There are no issues there. This mostly affects Windows 7 and older. On the at least 5 machines I have fixed it on, I downloaded and installed KB3153199 and rebooted. No issues after that for the many updates that were behind, plus still working for the May updates. This will probably fix it for most people. If you have additional underlying issues, you will need to continue to troubleshoot it. Disk and registry cleanup utilities usually do not get the job done for Windows update issues.

 

Checking for updates, ...since February on dust collector Vista box.
Download n' install KB3153199 okay.
Checking for updates, ...no joy.

 

Thanks for the info.

 

Did you reboot? I have a 32 bit Windows 7 machine that had not updated since July of last year that worked after I installed that KB. You could also have other issues... it wouldn't hurt to try this if you haven't:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/971058

 

More WU information here.