We've heard a number of people report that Win7, when freshly installed, take a long time and a lot of memory to apply the first round of updates. The 'check for updates' part of the sequence taking more than 30 minutes ... in some cases several days! This is due to a bug* in Windows Update (WU), which causes the processing ("checking" or "searching") stage to take far too long, when there are a great many updates to process. The bug is resolved with the new WU client delivered in the KB3172605 update. However, the bug still applies while you are installing KB3172605, making it take a long time ... unless you use this procedure. The procedure below is the result of a lot of experimentation. It is the speediest way we have yet found, for getting Windows fully updated. A trick we have learned:
For other WU issues, start with this omnibus troubleshooting article. Some folks advocate using wsusoffline, which requires some preparation work. Of you may be interested in this PowerShell Windows Update Module. Or this other one called PSWU. We hope to add more to this article. Please send suggestions to mota. *Microsoft have not formally said much about this bug. I was tipped off when I heard Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Clint Huffman talk about it in this podcast. A possible alternative Microsoft released a convenience rollup (certainly not a service pack) See post for details. Read all of it, the details, the pre-req's etc before starting. We haven't tested this approach. |