windows update

[pk72]

windows 7 update will not download updates the shield stays red the setting are showing never and I can.t change them

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

pk72

I continue to support a bunch of Win7 PCs, some of which were rolled back from Win10 because the owners disliked Win10 so much.

But, I have noticed that recently, Windows Update has been performing really slowly on ALL these machines.

The symptoms are that it searches for HOURS -- and does not appear to make any progress!

OR .. it finds stuff, but then goes into downloading for HOURS ... and does not appear to make any progress!

Anyway,  check for a Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Downloads\ folder.  This is where Windows Updates stores the updates it downloads and its working files.  IF it exists, Windows Update is working -- even though you see no progress.  Over time, the folder will grow until all the Updates have been downloaded.  Then, it will shrink as the Updates get applied.  When done, Windows should remove it. If it does not, you can remove the contents of that folder, but do not remove the folder itself.

And yes ... updates are taking hours (or days!) when they used to take only a few minutes.

So basically, there is nothing wrong with your PC. 

And -- if you RESET it, you are only going to make matters worse as that will start the Update process from scratch, and the last time I did that, it took three full days (!) to find, download, and apply all the updates.

NOTE: If waiting doesn't work, then try running this repair utility:  http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/windowsupdatefixer.html

Good Luck

[AFW]

The long waiting during updating, error messages and even booting issues with VistaSP2 as well as overloading the memory (100%, 3 GB) all involve WUSA, missing patches and the Apri+July 2016 Windows updates, see the many postings on the MS support forums on this topic and http://wu.krelay.de/en/2016-07.htm that provides the fix.

Frank