Fed up with slow Windows update...

riskyfrisky

riskyfrisky

riskyfrisky

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23 Mar 2012
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Am I the only one who is suffering with this?!

It's soooooo slow.

The machine is a Toshiba Satellite with a fresh installation of Windows 7 64bit. Completely legit, activated, with a mechanical hard drive that's less than two years old.

The laptop has been on since 10.30am and I've managed to get about 50 updates installed! Pathetic.

It took 2 hours to search for updates, and a further two to install them. Now it's taking ages to install another 40. CPU usage is around 50% and svchost is the culprit. I had this issue with my Thinkpad a while back but it never used to be this way.

The worst thing is I've still got to put Windows 10 on afterwards!

Is it something Microsoft's end?
 
Very CPU intensive thats for sure with a mechanical drive I feel your pain.

You many find this handy to save some time in future if you have a removable drive: http://www.wsusoffline.net/

After Windows 10 Upgrade remember to grab your key so you wont have to install 7 again.

You can also slipstream the updates or download an iso more up to date but if your upgrading after probably not worth it.
 
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Was trying to update an old Windows 7 laptop after another thread here (single core atom, 3GB RAM, mechanical HDD) and it was ridiculous - several cryptic number errors later (mostly due to the time being wrong) I managed to get is started at which point it took over 2 hours of checking for updates before it started downloading/applying anything - then for about 40 minutes or so it was applying/restarting updates at which point I got bored and shut it down - couple of days later ran it again and it then did a cumulative service pack upgrade after which it sat there looking for updates again for another 2+ hours and then spent another 2 hours doing various updates and then sat there for hours looking for updates again at which point I've left it for now.

I'm guessing the load from people doing Windows 10 stuff is taking a bit of a toll mind.
 
Downloading from WU to patch W7 seems very slow of late (the past week) - did wonder if the W10 load is eating bandwidth. A new W7 VM on a decent spec server (with SAS HDs) took hours to check and download the first lot of post SP1 updates. Installing was very quick.
 
I think the updates are endless since 8.1 all my machines including the W7 ones seem to just have updates everytime I turn them on. It's becoming a real pain.
 
Glad it's not a PEBKAC issue then!

I knew it wasn't the laptop causing the issue because the exact same machines never used to suffer like this and, once the patches have downloaded, they install pretty quickly.

I was thinking about whether Windows 10 had something to do with it, but if the update servers are being hammered, why would that affect CPU usage on our end?
 
TWiNKLeT0Es said:
Very CPU intensive thats for sure with a mechanical drive I feel your pain.

You many find this handy to save some time in future if you have a removable drive: http://www.wsusoffline.net/

After Windows 10 Upgrade remember to grab your key so you wont have to install 7 again.

You can also slipstream the updates or download an iso more up to date but if your upgrading after probably not worth it.
Click to expand...

How do I grab the key when I upgrade mate?
 
It's a dual core Pentium @ 2Ghz and 3 gigs of RAM. More than enough to service Windows Updates I'm sure.

Most of the updates are now on but it's offering me service pack 1 too, even though it's already on here.
 
riskyfrisky said:
It's a dual core Pentium @ 2Ghz and 3 gigs of RAM. More than enough to service Windows Updates I'm sure.

Most of the updates are now on but it's offering me service pack 1 too, even though it's already on here.
Click to expand...

What kind of Pentium processor?

I could crunch maths quicker than some of the older Celeron processors :)
 
The laptop is a Toshiba Satellite L300 series, the CPU is a T3200 (sounds like a Terminator).

Anyway all is sorted now, though I had to force the Windows 10 icon to appear. Took about an hour to upgrade to 10 but so far all is working well.
 
If you have chance to get to grips with working with the install.wim file I created my own custom Windows 7 Pro disk which contains 200+ updates so that when I do a clean install I can skip quite a few updates as they're pre-installed.

I used this tool http://www.windowsupdatesdownloader.com/ to download the updates, then you can use windows dism tool to add the updates to your wim file.
 
Welcome to windows update, I've had the same problems, took me over 40 hours to get through updates recently.

2+ hrs looking for updates, and on an old mechanical hdd the installing also takes ages. ( Quad core Atom, 4gb) SSD helped with installing time, but the 2 hr ''looking for updates'' is ludicrous.

Grabbing a new image that has all updates until a month ago or so is best imho.
 
Anti virus ? What's that ? A piece of pc slowing malware that peasants use :D ?

//There are very few AV's that are ecent enough not to make a noticable impact on performance, all paid for though. And MSE/Defender is an excuse not worthy of the name A/V, how much rubbish it lets through ( Complete desktops hijacked at customers despite having security essentuals running and up to date)!
 
same here.

sometime it would takes over 3 hours to 'checking for updates' with no response.

next day, it takes 2 mins to get the updates. very random
 
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