Windows 7 Updates Very Slow

[Sportster]

. . .

 

[s3_gunzel]

The total size of the files was 20 MG, so it should have taken only a few minutes.

Depends on a number of factors:

1) How is your network traffic?
2) How is their network traffic?
3) Where is their server at? They have multiple update servers, you may not always be served by the closest one.
4) What route is it taking to get to you? My website is hosted in Sydney, so I should get relatively quick access - Home -> Cloudflare, SYD -> Site. The other day, it was routing through Seoul. Traffic doesn't always take the fastest route.

 

[s3_gunzel]

On the bright side; once you go Mac, you don't go back.

 

[zurb]

As July 31 approaches, I'm guessing there will be a rapid increase in people doing their free Win 10 upgrade — which might slow things down at the MS servers.

 

[Butterfly88]

I wonder if it is because Windows 10 is out and they aren't spending as much time supporting Windows 7. Just a random guess. That sounds really annoying.

 

[Judge]

I ran into this two days ago and fixed it. No, Microsoft isn't conspiring to make you upgrade.

Looks like for whatever reasons, the windows upgrade function was reading false positives when it comes to the latest updates. That when I tried to download them, the system would neither download or install any of the requested updates, as if it were showing those files already installed on my operating system. So the process kept showing 0 bytes downloaded or installed.

The fix: Go into the control panel, select "Windows Update" and change settings to "Never Check Updates". Save and then reboot your computer. Then go back into the same menu in "Windows Update" and change the settings to "Install Updates Automatically" and reboot your computer again.

Then again go back into the "Windows Update" and attempt to actually download the latest updates. For me this proces effectively "cleared" whatever the problem was that kept me from downloading any updates only a short time ago.

After you've completed a successful download and installation of updates, you can go back into the change settings menu and go back to however you had the updates set up, whether automatic updating or "download updates but let me choose when, etc." .

 

[Judge]

Thanks, I'll give this "fix" a try, as I spent several hours today manually trying to download one update after another off the MS site. Talk about a pain!!! I found that there are a lot of people using Windows 7 having the same problem. Apparently it has something to do with one of the updates screwing up, which is causing the Windows Updater not to work properly, and on and on . . .

Someone gave a recommendation to manually download four files since that was supposed to help. It didn't. I managed to download quite a few, but I'll give your fix a try.

Nope...I tried even one file download at a time. That didn't work either. I also turned off all the services in msconfig.exe and rebooted, essentially resetting all services including windows update running in resident memory. No go.

But resetting the update function as I outlined and rebooting it worked. Ended up downloading and installing ten different items all at once without incident, and without haste.

Yep, it's quite possible that there might have been a previous update which altered the windows update function itself...and that it subsequently required a reset like this to make it work again. Not all updates are always a good thing! Ugh.

 

[wyverary]

What Judge said. For all I love Microsoft (and I'm speaking as someone who mostly uses Mac), their workarounds can be very strange and convoluted...as anyone using Win 10 Pro can attest who has run into that super-bizarre double-error-message when opening Group Policy. Stick with the workarounds...and if I were to offer my own advice, skip the upgrade, for as long as you can. There's no point in fixing what ain't broke.

 

[Judge]

Well, at least users learned something with this experience. Look at the number of bytes transferred and nothing else. If they sit at zero and don't change, then you know something is wrong. Otherwise it all might appear as if it's working properly when it really isn't.