Windows Update (W7 / Vista)

[Dinkas]

Is it broken? Trying to update a Win 7 box and a fresh installed Vista notebook and they've been sat there for hours "checking for updates", with a CPU core being 100% loaded on both machines.

I'll give it another hour then just disable WU as it's 100% useless in this state.

 

[Dinkas]

Install IE11 on windows 7 and IE9 on vista. That might give it a little kick it needs to get going.

IE11 already installed on Win 7. Installed IE9 on Vista, but no change.

https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18713767

Also on 32bit systems apparently there is a big problem that MS can't be bothered to fix or something (might require manually working around).

Both installs are x64.

I've had a smidge of progress by manually downloading and installing the December 2015 update agent for the Win 7 machine. Now after a few mins I get error messages saying (randomly) "firewall settings wrong" or "windows update servers might be busy".


Update: Win 7 eventually updated fully. Win Vista says updates are ready, but still shows "searching for updates"...
Update 2: Vista started installing updates after 8 hours of "searching" O.o
Update 3: Vista hung while installing update 172 of 199 -.-

 

[Dinkas]

On scabby machines if there are 200 updates to do I would go for 50 at a time.

Indeed. Having frozen at update 172, which was a Windows Mail filter update (super important no doubt), restarting the computer made it go into a recovery mode and seemingly forget the previous 171 updates it had downloaded.

So I had it update in blocks from oldest to newest, anything big or super important looking I selected individually. A bit of a faff but it did the trick.

 

[Dinkas]

How much memory/RAM have you got installed in the machine bud?

At my previous job we use to have havoc anything under 4GB RAM when it came to windows update. There was a fix available for it on the MS website

The Vista notebook has 4GB of RAM. When I say it "froze", that isn't entirely accurate, more it became stuck on update 172 for over 3hrs, any open windows wouldn't minimize and show desktop did nothing. Task manager wouldn't open either. It did strike me that it was acting like all memory was full and parts of the OS were running from the pagefile.

 

[Dinkas]

Necro -.-

So, I left with Win 7 box with "check for updates and let me choose when to install them". Seemed to have worked, until this week, and now it's like January all over again, CPU stuck on 100% from svchost.exe, checking for updates sits there taking the p*** for hours on end and achieving nothing.

I can only assume at this point that MS deliberately sabotage their own stupid junk to annoy people into upgrading to W10.

Lo and behold the wonderful KB3035583 was the last update that successfully installed on the 6th of May. 5 times that same update has appeared this year alone. I wonder what it could be -.-