Windows Update - long time to check for updates

Discussion in 'other software & services' started by roger_m, Sep 2, 2015.

  1. Mr.X

    Mr.X Registered Member

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  2. Mrkvonic

    Mrkvonic Linux Systems Expert

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    I like it when Microsoft confirm my own tutorial, hi hi :)
    Mrk
     
  3. Jarmo P

    Jarmo P Registered Member

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    Thank you for the link. A good find.

    So MS had broken Windows Update for Windows 7 and just this late, at least half year have gone from when this trouble surfaced, they publish a solution. A user action needed solution has now been finally given as a solution from MS too. Has there yet been any apologies by MS? Something like "we did not know" etc lol. "We are sorry for dangering your computer security ..".

    I'm especially mad because of them lowlife hacker criminals being around and stalking.

    I have been struggling a lot to get WU updates. Usually getting them maybe 2 weeks later than announced. With having to stop wuauserv update service because of high CPU load to make my computer usable.

    I am guessing this was to make W7 users to accept the w10 "upgrade". When will MS fix the W7 computers of those who don't read this link?

    From the published link. I had the first update installed, but second not. After installing it I was soon also able to get the this month updates. And I hope this is a permanent fix.
     
  4. Cache

    Cache Registered Member

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    This has been a nightmare for those of us who have not been following this issue from the start. Like you Jarmo, I had the first update installed (as long ago as May 2015) but not the second. That one had been marked as optional by MS and I haven't been installing those. It's hardly "optional" if you need it for Windows Update to work and MS obviously knew that!

    It looks as if MS are saying "We recommend automatic updates and if all you clever clogs out there think you know what you are doing, then you decide which of these "optional" updates are really necessary!".

    Without the help of the board members on here, I would never have fathomed this out by myself or, at the very least, not as quickly.

    I also note that at the end of their Support article, MS tell users to make sure that they change Settings to "Install updates automatically (recommended)". It seems to me that with the cumulative updates in WU, we will all eventually end up with these optional updates anyway.
     
  5. guest

    guest Guest

    After Windows 10 is not free anymore, they found a solution. That's maybe only a coincidence...
    Ok, i'll try it (KB3200747) the next time i install Windows 7 in a VM. Then i'll see what happens :cautious:
     
  6. Jarmo P

    Jarmo P Registered Member

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    I am a bit lost here in how I should proceed with the updates regarding this "rollup" thing from now on?
    Did not change my WU update settings any and only allowed them download and only install what I want and when. Not like updates start when ever I am not ready.
    So should I have also installed the optional patches instead only the security ones?
     
  7. Mr.X

    Mr.X Registered Member

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    Anyway there's a script proved to work in the past Win10 upgrade crusade lol
    And now here's an updated version of it: Prevent Windows 10 Upgrade
     
  8. Cache

    Cache Registered Member

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    I have been doing the same until now and currently have 51 optional updates listed in WU. I am not as knowledgeable as many on here but my take on the future rollup program is that the majority of these optional updates will eventually be included in future rollups, starting in a few months time. I am not planning on installing these optional updates yet but will wait and see if the list reduces in size as MS get into their Rollup stride!

    Incidentally when I uncheck the "Give me recommended updates the same way I receive important updates" box, 44 of these so-called optional updates immediately become Important updates! I guess these are the ones that MS will eventually include in future rollups and it has occurred to me to install them now and have done with it - but I have so far resisted the temptation and am sticking with Plan A - at least for now! :)
     
  9. guest

    guest Guest

    Cool, thanks.
    I see that i have to whitelist some command-lines for ERP, but that should be no problem.
     
  10. roger_m

    roger_m Registered Member

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    I can confirm it works. I just installed the two updates on a clean install of Windows 7 SP1. After rebooting and re-enabling Windows Update, I ran a check for updates which failed with an error, and I got the same error when I checked for updates again. However, rebooting again fixed the issue, and Windows Update took just 10 minutes to find updates.
     
  11. roger_m

    roger_m Registered Member

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    Okay, so it's easy to fix the problem with the long time to check for updates, but there are some other issues. I'm just installing the the 219 recommended updates that were selected when doing the first scan for updates on a clean install of Windows 7 SP1. After installing the two updates to fix the time to check for updates, it took around 10 minutes to check for updates - as expected. However, Windows Update is using ridiculous amounts of RAM - around 2.3 to 2.7 gigs. I've seen WU use well over a gig of RAM before, but never anywhere near 2+ gigs. The laptops has 4GB of RAM installed, which should be plenty, but with WU usiing so much RAM, the RAM usage went as high as 88%.
     
  12. Gullible Jones

    Gullible Jones Registered Member

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    @roger_m

    I'm thinking RAM usage was actually the original problem.

    On Linux I've seen cases where resource-hungry programs bog the system down when swap space is available, but behave normally given sufficient RAM and no swap. I wanted to see if that was the case with Windows Update; so yesterday I set up a Win7 SP1 VM, and used a Visual Basic script to force an update (using the Windows Update COM interface).

    With the default swap file, the script ran, but bogged down searching for updates.

    With 1.5 GB of RAM, and the swap file disabled, it immediately imploded with an OOM error. Not the update service, mind, but the actual VBScript interpreter. It couldn't keep all the Update COM stuff in memory.

    I suspect that Windows Update is keeping all its big data structures in RAM all at once, instead of using a database backend (like RPM) or a text file (like dpkg). In any case, the CPU spikes would be explained by excessive swapping.
     
  13. roger_m

    roger_m Registered Member

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    That appears to be the case, I've just never seen WU use so much memory before. The highest memory usage I've seen in the past, if I remember correctly, would be about 1.5GB.
     
  14. SonyaAnn

    SonyaAnn Registered Member

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    Has there been a fix for this issued yet? Reverted back to factory settings (windows 7) upgraded to 8 was having issues with every update failing and in limbo with that dreaded configuring updates taking hours only to fail and reboot twice before booting - so I reverted back to 7 again. Installed 8 again, found the updates to install 8.1 upgraded and ever since I have been staring at a checking for updates.

    Ran for 12 hours yesterday and never made it past checking for updates, ran 5 hours earlier and nothing changed, ran chkdsk, defrag, reset everything, ran dism then attempted to install standalone installers, but I have the exact same thing standalone installer has been "searching for updates on this computer" for 5 hours now.
     
  15. Stupendous Man

    Stupendous Man Registered Member

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    For Windows 7,
    see Microsoft's article "Windows Update is taking an unusually long time to scan and install updates".

    For Windows 8.1,
    the method is the same as in mentioned article for Windows 7, but for Windows 8.1 prerequisites are KB2919355 and KB3021910 (instead of KB976932 and KB3020369 for Windows 7), and for Windows 8.1 the update to fix Windows Update "long scan time for updates" issue is KB3172614 (instead of KB3172605 for Windows 7).
     
  16. Osaban

    Osaban Registered Member

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    I still have a beautiful old desktop replacement (9 years old) with Windows Vista Ultimate, lately I couldn't get it to update anymore and its start time went from 45 seconds to 2 minutes, long enough to make me wonder whether something is amiss. I've decided I won't rely anymore on MS updates, and restored an image from 2014... All of a sudden start time is as fast as it used to be, system speed is noticeably fast, it is like having the machine I knew when I first bought it. I can assure you there was no malware on the system, therefore I'm wondering what could have made it so sluggish? And I'm not suggesting that MS is directly responsible for this degraded performance, but the very fact that for the last 6 months or more, trying to update has been so erratic, it kind of shows MS has been to say the least negligent towards an OS that is still supported.
     
  17. bo elam

    bo elam Registered Member

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    I disable automatic updates. Saturday and Sunday I ran Windows updates manually a few times, and never got nothing. Last night in one try I left it running for almost 2 hours and still got no response. Never before I had spend as much time checking for updates.

    Today I read the latest posts in this thread and found the solution to the problem in the link you and others before have posted. I already had installed KB3020369 so I only had to download and install KB3172605. After doing so, running Windows update manually worked perfectly (W7 32 bits).:)

    Bo
     
  18. SonyaAnn

    SonyaAnn Registered Member

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    I went back to 7 again, upgraded to 8 again and have been trying to get the updates installed since my post. It's been rather long and painful few days updating 8 installing updates one by one since windows update constantly giving different errors or stuck in the undoing changes loop after update.

    I found a blog apparently Microsoft programmer explaining what needs to be done to correct one of the many error codes, it was an extremely simple solution at least it has fixed the update issues on 8 no more error codes at all now. Hopefully it'll transition smoothly into 8.1 now

    Oh the simple solution that's working for me so far remove the registry key HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WinEvt

    Oh and just to update the situation 8.1 finished installing finally first thing I did was to delete that same registry key and reboot ran windows update found 25 updates in 2 minutes.
     
    Last edited: Dec 21, 2016
  19. Amanda

    Amanda Registered Member

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    Thanks. I bought Windows 7 Pro (because I couldn't stand W10 anymore, 7 is just so much better :-*) and these two updates saved my life. It took less than 10 minutes to search for +200 updates, and I used an original DVD image of W7 SP1 which is probably +6 years old (SHA1: 0bcfc54019ea175b1ee51f6d2b207a3d14dd2b5:cool:.

    It's surprisingly fast to install updates now. I'm playing Euro Truck Simulator 2 on Ultra graphics quality while I install the updates, and Windows already installed 70 updates in 33 minutes.

    This is looking really good, I'm glad Microsoft solved the update issue that they introduced themselves :p
     
  20. roger_m

    roger_m Registered Member

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    I'm having issues with 32 bit edition of Vista on a customer's computer at the moment. This computer had not been updated for years, and when I received it, for some reason the Windows Update service was missing. I was able to restore the WU service with tweaking.com's Windows Repair. The computer still had some issues, so I did an in Inplace Upgrade of Vista SP2, which should have fixed any issues with Windows.

    However, despite installing every single recommended update I could find to speed up the check for updates, it is still staying stuck at checking for updates. I even installed some updates that were recommended to install as well if you have Office 2007 installed, but it made no difference. I know that if I leave Windows Update running, it will eventually find updates - no doubt after many hours of searching, but it is an annoyance. I've done a few clean installs of Vista lately, and was able to get Windows Update working properly on the computers I did the clean install on.
     
  21. stapp

    stapp Global Moderator

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    roger in a desperate attempt once to get a Vista machine to update I changed the time at which it should update (usually set for 3am) clicked apply, and it must have triggered something as an hour or so later it pulled in the updates.

    It was a similar situation to yours.. nothing seemed to work despite everything I tried.

    Of course it could have just been a coincidence who knows ??
     
  22. guest

    guest Guest

    this is a common issue with older version of windows. basically u need a specific patch to be installed.
    check here : https://malwaretips.com/threads/windows-updates-hanging-and-not-downloading.62319/#post-533001
     
  23. roger_m

    roger_m Registered Member

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    I had already installed every 32bit update for Vista listed there.

    Windows Update did finish searching for updates after a few hours, and is downloading updates now. I had left it running the previous night with no luck, but I installed the Office 2007 updates today as well as some other updates, which must have helped.
     
  24. Krusty

    Krusty Registered Member

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    My Win10 x64 machines have been taking ages to check for updates the last few weeks. Anyone else seeing this?
     
  25. Kerodo

    Kerodo Registered Member

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    Nope... I just did a clean install of 1607 today and the update check took about 1 minute....
     
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