I have three machines all saturating a CPU core forever with Windows Update

[postmortemIA]

edit: postmortemIA beat me to it.

Thanks I only forgot to add that this issue is more prevalent if you have slower CPU with a weak single core performance, and not a lot of RAM. Everything with C2D is out of luck.

 

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[Kaido]

You guys are almost certainly doing something weird, because the issue has been fixed. As I said above, with a clean install, all that's required is: SP1 ISO -> KB3020369 -> KB3172605 . After that WU will work as well as it ever did (of course the initial update will involve a large volume of updates, but they will be detected fast).

And yesterday I tried restored an old image from when WU was running slow just to see if KB3172605 would fix it (my prior experience with KB3172605 had only involved clean installs). KB3172605 did fix the issue on that image.

I'm very familiar with the issue, but it's simply a non-issue now. I've tested KB3172605 across a wide range of systems now (as old as an E6750 machine with mechanical HDDs). None of them exhibit the WU issue.

Haven't had much luck with that one. I do about a dozen fresh installs of Win7 (mostly Home & Pro, some Ultimate) from either retail or OEM discs or from Dell discs (all SP1) per week in the course of my IT work & the update stuff has been getting worse & worse. I also service multiple sites with various brands of routers & ISP's (everything from DSL to Fiber), so I know it's not the local network config blocking things. Really has gotten a lot worse since Win10 dropped.

 

[corkyg]

Last evening, my active Win7 system notified me that an update was available. I looked at it, and it had several MS Office updates, plus a Win 7 rollup, net framework rollup, and the Malicious Software scan. I let it go ahead. The download of all took less than 10 minutes, and then I had to go to dinner. Came back an hour later and it was all done and requested a Restart. Did that, and there were zero problems. I think that suggests Kaido is right.

 

[Kaido]

Last evening, my active Win7 system notified me that an update was available. I looked at it, and it had several MS Office updates, plus a Win 7 rollup, net framework rollup, and the Malicious Software scan. I let it go ahead. The download of all took less than 10 minutes, and then I had to go to dinner. Came back an hour later and it was all done and requested a Restart. Did that, and there were zero problems. I think that suggests Kaido is right.

Yeah, on the machines I've "gotten going" with updates, they are typically good to go for updates after that. Windows 10 has no problem updating on the newer machines I do.

Right now, I've been telling people to clone their drive, do the free Win10 update (you can still do it through MS's accessibility backdoor), restore their clone, and then install Never10 if they want to stick on Win7. Technically Win10 shouldn't be pushing out anymore...but just in case. Had a lot of unhappy people during the automatic Win10 update fiasco, including quite a bit of data loss. Although Win10 (with tweaks) is pretty nice, especially with the anniversary update...you can basically turn it into Win7 with some GUI customization.

 

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[corkyg]

You are correct. There is no longer any compulsive upgrade to go from 7 to 10.

 

[Ketchup]

I also haven't had any furthet issues with WU on 7 installs that aren't fresh. I have't done a fresh install of 7 in a while. I might do one of those just to see how things go.

 

[VirtualLarry]

A friend of mine is hasn't been able to get his Windows Updates for at least a month or two now. It just fails to download.

He's got an AM3 quad-core and 16GB of RAM and an SSD, and Win7 64-bit SP1.

I told him that I'd look at it, next time I have the time and I'm out his way.

Also, he's never been prompted to download or install the Win10 update, nor did he able get the GWX thingy.

His version of Win7 is a retail upgrade, that I gave him the entire retail package for it, and it was activated, years ago.

 

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[BonzaiDuck]

edit: postmortemIA beat me to it.

There is a five-step procedure we were following since maybe July. Three phases, more or less: Update the Update Agent [or related]; a Rollup followed by another rollup -- naming escapes my memory.

Beginning October IIRC, they implemented a new update paradigm. For me, it caused troubles with my Kaspersky, and pending further notices of program updates (which will come) from KIS, I have to turn off App Control and Firewall -- relying on Windows Firewall.

Using MSE for windows 7 is considered "OK for geeks." I've used it in a pinch while troubleshooting the other things.

I haven't had trouble with win Updates since I went through that 5-step fix. I haven't had trouble with Updates and KIS since I turned off App control and KIS firewall.

Someone mentioned the downloadable "off-line" upgrade tool. I didn't investigate scheduled features in the tool, but you have many choices to control the type of updates you download and install. You can turn off regular Windows Updates and do your own periodically -- manually if not scheduled, but according to a profile of the other factors and in/ex-clusions.

The only problem with that, or as I imagined discovering last spring: When you get Win Updates working again, it starts from scratch and doesn't recognize the updates you've installed with the Off-Line tool.

 

[mikeymikec]

Huh. Despite my PC having problems on the previous two patch Tuesdays, it's fine for this one.

 

[PliotronX]

Finally a magic combo that does the trick for me, 100% so far. I can have a vanilla SP1 installation fully updated within an hour (gigabit internet).

 

[sdifox]

Once in a while windows update goes gaga. You have to stop the windows update service, bits, empty the windows update folder and start the services again.

https://itsfoss.com/fix-windows-updates-stuck-0/

 

[VirtualLarry]

My friend's PC, I set WU to "Never Update", rebooted, installed the April 2016 Servicing Stack update for x64 Windows 7, then installed the July 2016 rollup, and rebooted, and then WU worked again, pulling down the newest update and security roll-ups. I also did some optional updates, the user and kernel-mode driver framework 1.1, and Net frameworks updates, which then got updated by a Net frameworks roll-up update after another pass of WU.

As a precaution, I also did a Disk Cleanup with System Files included. That took like 10-15 minutes to scan and then complete.