Windows 7 been updating for over 12 hours.

[PsyCrow421]

Hi,

the updates on my wife's Windows 7 laptop are taking a very long time and I am considering forcing it to shut down. It started to update at about 11pm last night and when I went to bed an hour later it was on 19 out of 23. This morning at about 9am it was at 22 of 23 and it hasn't changed since then. That is now about 13 hours since the update started.

Is it time to give up and restart the computer?

 

[PsyCrow421]

Gave up waiting and rebooted the computer. It started fine but I decided to reboot again and it is now back doing update 19 of 23 again.

 

[UsernameIssues]

At least one of the recent updates did seem to freeze during install. I was doing other things at work, so I did not take note of the KB that took a long time to install. It might have been the malware scan. I just left it alone and it eventually finished. However, it did not take as long as what you are seeing.

There are a few tools that I use to see what (if anything) is going on when apps hang like this:

Windows 7's native Task Manager > Processes tab
(add the columns for IO Read/Write/Other Bytes)
...then look to see if there are any installers actually writing data.

Windows 7's native Resource Monitor is also nice for watching IO activity. Look to see if you csn find a log file being written to. Open that log file and see if the install app is stuck or is writing the same thing over and over. About all this info does for you is to let you know that it is time to risk something like a restart.

Process Monitor's data can be overwhelming, but it can tell you a lot too.


The simplest thing is to just wait. But you are correct: at some point, you have to wonder if any progress is going to be made.


If you end up restarting that computer again, I would do option three in this tutorial before installing updates again.

 

[akjudge]

This may be of no real help, but just an idea that I have from personal experience...

I use WinPrivacy (from WinPatrol). Works great, but occasionally it can be "over cautious". For example, during the recent batch of Window updates, it flagged a particular update and blocked it until I "allowed" it to proceed. Unfortunately it caused the update process to continually loop, resulting in the type of "hang" you are seeing.

My solution was to exit WinPrivacy, reboot, exit WinPrivacy (starts with windows), then check & install updates. No hang.
It is possible with some of today's specialized malware/security programs, that they may see an update as "malware" or "randsomeware" attacks.

So now my procedure is to disable/exit my more sophisiticated security programs before trying to install Window Updates.

Jim