Windows update service using lots of memory

MagicBoy

MagicBoy

MagicBoy

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18 Oct 2002
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Mothers PC started acting up earlier in the week. It's an old Athlon X2 Shuttle running Windows 7 SP1 64-bit.

Had a look yesterday and a couple of minutes after startup an instance of svchost.exe running Windows Update amongst other things starts using all the available memory. It gets to around 800MB within a couple of minutes, then Windows starts paging to disk and everything slows to a crawl. Tried leaving it for a couple of a hours and it's not sorting itself out. Stopping the Windows Update service releases the memory, so it's obviously that.

I don't fancy rebuilding it. Any ideas?
 
ED209 said:
how many updates it is trying to do?
Click to expand...

It's not showing any, that's the odd thing. It's used most days and it's been installing the AV defs via Windows update with no problems until the end of last week.

Only AV installed is MSE. Checked the event logs for disk errors, couldn't see any. Can't put any more RAM in, machine is limited to 2GB.

I'll give the script thing a go, I've got nothing to lose.
 
Been back and had another look.
Windows Defender is off.
Removed and reinstalled MSE.
Windows update log indicates it's finding an nVidia Graphics driver update, so I've manually installed the latest version from the website to stop that in it's tracks.
Ran the script...

/Fingers crossed.

At least I got a tasty dinner out of it, if nothing else!
 
Worked alright this morning, then started misbehaving again. :(

I've been offered a Sandy Bridge i3 for nowt as a replacement, so I'll swap the machine out. If I've got to reinstall Windows I might as well do it on newer and faster hardware.

Thanks for the assistance so far.
 
Update - the new system has got to 1.3GB RAM usage for the Windows Update service while clean building it. I can only infer that it is the intended behaviour on 64-bit Windows 7 SP1 at the current time with the sheer number of updates.

New machine has 6GB RAM so it's coping just fine...

Anyone on the minimum 2GB - beware!
 
i used to have a super low end celeron laptop with 2GB/windows 7 64bit and it was fine. i'm sure it will settle down after all updates have been installed.
 
if you do a clean install of windows 7 with SP1 there is about 180 odd updates for the OS and once its gone through them it finds more.

as others have said let it run through and once they are all done it should drop
 
The Shuttle was fine until October - appears to be a recent thing. It's a little concerning that Windows Update will use that much memory and page excessively to disk making the computer unusable for 40+ minutes.

Post SP1 the new machine found 193 updates last night, taking out the Office Service Pack and the driver updates.
 
Sure. The drive tests fine. It's running out of physical RAM and swapping in and out of the page file constantly.
 
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