Sorting a stalled Windows Update service

Published on 30^th January 2015 Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

Following a recent family death, I have ended up with the laptop belonging to the deceased and, since it has been offline most of its life, I set to getting it updated. The McAfee security suite was straightforward enough but trying Windows Update produced errors suggesting that it was not working and that a system restart was needed. Doing that did nothing, so a little further investigation was needed.

The solution turned out to be stopping the Windows Update service and clearing a certain folder before starting it again. To stop the service, I typed in services.msc into the search box on the Start Menu and clicked on the entry that appeared, which was called Services. Then I sought out the Windows Update entry, selected it and clicked on the Stop link on the left-hand side. After that, I used Windows Explorer to navigate C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution and deleted everything in there. The, I went back to the Services window and started Windows Update again. That sorted the problem and the system began to be updated as needed.

All of this was on Windows 7, hence the mention of the Start Menu, and the machine is a Toshiba Satellite C660 from 2011 with an AMD E-300 APU, 4 GB of RAM and a 320 GB hard drive. Those specs may not be the most impressive, but it feels spritely enough and is far better than the lethargic Toshiba Equium A200-1VO that I acquired in 2008, though the HP Pavilion dm4 that I bought in November 2011 probably will travel more often than either of these if truth be told. After all, it now has 8 GB of RAM and a 1 TB Samsung SSHD along with its Core i3 CPU, so it should serve me for a while yet.

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Comment:

anthonymaw says:

30 January 2015 at 14:17

Always disable all anti-virus programs (like McAfee) before performing Windows Updates. Anti-virus programs not only slow down the process as they scan all disk and memory access during the I/O intensive update process, but they can also stall the procedure completely leaving you in limbo. I wish the anti-virus software vendors would be smart enough to recognize when Windows Update is running and automatically suspend on-access scanning but I'm probably asking too much... Good luck!