For the past several months Windows 7 updater has been extremely slow for my two home computers, a self-built PC and a random Dell laptop, both running Windows 7 x64. The task to search for updates can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an ENTIRE ****** DAY (most of the time it takes about 4-5 hours)!!! Then, once it finds updates, the updating can take several hours, and seems to be dong nothing. The progress bar doesn’t indicate any progress and out of nowhere it’ll just be done. The laptop is on autoupdate while the PC is set to look for updates but only install them with my confirmation.
This starting occurring somewhere around 6 months ago and hasn’t cleared up since. I’ve searched the interwebz high and low and many suggest specific KB patches that can fix the problem. I’ve tried most of these, and even these can take 1/2 a day to install, and it hasn’t helped.
I don’t have any virus, I rarely install anything (including games), and neither computer has downloaded the Windows 10 freebie. This update slow-down is a known problem but no one seems to have a good cure. I’m currently updating both of these machines and the laptop is going on 12 hours and has been on the “Preparing to install” stage since late last night.
This happened to Win 7 on my old laptop, and then just didn’t update at all for most of 2016, I eventually gave up and installed Win 10 before the free period ended.
I was never able to find a reason the updater wouldn’t work. If you google the issue there are tons of hits, it seems to be a common and there is no one exact answer as to why.
Yup, what moss_icon said. It’s a widespread bug/problem and Microsoft didn’t even care to have it fixed in a less obscure way. I had the same problem and the package moss_icon recommended is what solved the problem in my case.
Thanks folks. Trying moss_icon’s suggestion on the laptop. I ran it on my PC and it said it wasn’t applicable for my whatever. I may have it already. The laptop I’m trying it on took almost 48 hours to complete it’s Windows Update, and eventually it did succeed. WTF can MS be doing that an update takes almost 48 hours? I can’t even imagine what it may be trying to do.
Yeah, I experienced the same problem two years ago when I was cleaning and setting up some office PCs again. Simply wouldn’t update. And the update that was supposed to fix it? Wouldn’t install quickly either. Downloading it and applying it directly didn’t work because it was stuck in validation hell or whatever for the same reason Windows Update didn’t properly work. And just like you, I ended up leaving them running through the night until it eventually worked. Pain in the ass.
Generally to get it to install quickly we do it immediately after a reboot, or stop the windows update service before running it, so that it can’t go off and do whatever it’s doing that slows everything down. Still doesn’t apply smoothly every time. It’s hugely annoying.
Just to report that this same stupid Windows 7 update bug came back to bite my own machine in the a**. I figured out that I didn’t have KB3172605 installed, from July–even though it was considered “Important” and later security updates were installed as usual. :mad:
So I downloaded the standalone installer, paused the Windows Update service and double clicked on the installer. After startup, LO and behold, there were six further important updates to install, in short order.
Why the F**K can’t MS get its shit together on this stuff lately? It used to be completely seamless and run like clockwork. But I guess morale goes into the toilet when you lay off a bazillion people, huh? :/
I just installed KB3172605 and got my updates working again. Why wasn’t it installed with the July updates as it seems it should have been? Waiting to see what happens next month.
This happened on all our work laptops a few weeks ago and I had to run this update on all of them to fix it. Didn’t happen to any of the desktop systems, however. Not sure why, just knew it needed to be done as CPU was at a constant 25% minimum due to Windows Update running.
One of our Windows 7 machines in the office is suddenly really slow for the last few days. I tried updating it with KB3172605 as suggested above, but it says that update is not for this computer.
I had this problem on my Win7 PC. It had worked fine forever and then all of a sudden it would just get stuck on the updates and never finish. I read everything I could find about it online but nothing I tried worked. I did some thinking and wondered if it was possibly checking all of the old windows update packages in my temp caches and that was slowing it way down. So, I did a Disk Cleanup on my OS drive (C: in my case). That cleaned out all my old temp update package files and sure enough, my updates started working again in very snappy fashion. You should give it a try and see if it helps.
Make sure you have the correct update. I tried running the 32 bit one on my 64 bit desktop and got that message. Were you not able to do updates at all? That was the situation on my computer.
