January 12th 2016 Security Update Release Summary

I've noticed the same long loooong delay in d/l ing updates. Something I have penned down, it seems to only be happening on my 7 64, at least on my end. Win 7 32 has had no problems updating, 8.1 on my Wife's lappy has had no problems. The 7 64 on my PC was hanging at "searching for updates" & I thought this might be a fluke or a problem caused by something I installed until I went & tried to update 7 64 on a lappy & encountered the same problem.

I tried several fixes for the 7 64 on the PC & finally got it to d/l, rather slowly (but at least it started working again), by going to Windows/software distribution/data store & as per MS instructions, cleared the entire folder.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/958046

Updater has been exhibiting some strange behavior for a bit now, such as after running for 45 mins, one moment showing 0% downloaded & the next moment showing 80% downloaded. I'm wondering if this instability in the updater agent is caused on my 7 64 machines because of my refusal to allow any patch related to Win 10 or disallowing anything telemetry related on the machine.

Seffrid said:

That's my experience on both my Windows 7 64 machines, not always but quite often. It sits at 0% for a while so I nip out the room and when I come back a moment later it's starting to install. I agree with your theory in that some of the updates I suspect we both hide are partly related to "enabling MS to improve the upgrade experience" so we don't want them, but they are also related to upgrading the normal update procedure. I'd rather have the intermittently slow updates than install any Windows 10 nagware or send more data to MS.

Well, that last part was just speculation on my part. I've disallowed any telemetry/Win 10 patches on the 7 32 & 8.1, so I would think that those would be effected by that too were that the case. Yet for some odd reason, 7 64 seems to be the OS with all the updater problems for me.

Thanks for the link Brds7t7, I believe I may have tried that, but I'll review my logs & see if I did & if not, give that a shot.

Brds,

What is your d/l'd time now compared to before you installed 3102810? I've had 3102810 installed since the November patch on 11/15/15, and this is my experience.

Excerpt is from the: Internet Explorer 8, 9, 10 support ends on January 12, 2016 thread:

Anak said:

My January patches went okay except for the download/install time that seems to take forever, I start the process then walk away and work at something else around the house, come back in a half an hour and I'm ready for a restart. Any other 101MB download site would only take me about 2 maybe 3 minutes, not 15 to 20 through WU.
Yes, I do understand the millions of machines banging on the update servers at one time, but there's gotta be a better way.

I guess I shouldn't complain though, a half hour isn't as bad a time as some I've heard.

Seffrid said:

One other theory I had about the recent change in download times was that MS have reduced the download server support for Windows 7 patches by switching some of the server hardware to Windows 10 downloads. For me the actual downloading is fine, as is the prompting that there are updates when I switch the computers on, it's simply beginning the downloading that seems to take longer these days. It sits on 0% for a while, after that it's pretty quick.

That's actually a very good theory because I know that this debacle with the updater being slow started right around the time of Win 10 release & went on from there. About 2 weeks into it, some of the 10 users were stating that updating was taking forever. Haven't seen any complaints about 10 updates being slow, but I have seen plenty from 7 users. So that might just be the case.

Thanks Brds!

Borg, I've also heard of the server shifting as described by Seffrid.