Solved Windows Update Not Working After Reinstall and Initial Updates

[AlanQ]

Hello there.

I have a Samsung Notebook here that shipped with Win 7 64 HP SP1. It was working fine but it was somewhat slow, so I've upgraded the storage to SSD and reinstalled Windows with the DVD that came with it (Which is basically a Windows install disk, it's not a recovery media). The installation went smoothly, however, I have experienced problems with Update in the past that were solved by applying the KB3102810 and also installing the newest WUA, in this case KB3138612 from March.

After installing them, and installing all the drivers, I happily proceeded to do a full system update. However, I didn't install all of them at once since in the past that caused problems. I've selected some updates, installed, rebooted, then installed the others except for the Internet Explorer and the optional and recommended ones.

I then Installed MS Office 2010, and applied the updates to it (using Windows Update), followed by the installation of IE11 but it was installed from the website (which I believe basically just installs the updates).

Everything went fine and on the next reboot the system was 'up to date' according to the Windows Update (green shield with a checkmark).

At that point I've disabled automatic updating ("Check but let me choose" option). However, I think some of the last updates caused some problem because now a few minutes after booting wuauserv will start to hog a CPU core. I guess it's because it starts to search for updates and somehow the WUA got broken. I let it sit for hours to no avail (Please note this is a modern i5 on a 250Mbps fiber connection). I've killed the service hosting process (svchost) and stopped the wuauserv and tried to reset the settings. First I've tried to apply the FixIt, but it didn't work because it triggers the same problem. Then I've reset it manually and removed the update cache files and settings, but no matter what I do the problem always happens. When I manually try to check for updates there's no network activity and the wuauserv keeps hogging a core.

I've tried downgrading WUA to the version from Sept 2015 because people reported it was working properly, but that didn't do the trick.

I have disabled the Windows Update service in the mean time, but I'd like to solve that problem somehow. Perhaps someone here knows what update caused the problems (if any). The system is pretty much vanilla, I've only installed that and made some harmless tweaks for SSD (disabled prefetch/superfetch and indexing).

Thank you in advance.

 

[torchwood]

Hi Alan,
from an elevated command,
run sfc /scannow (3 times).
then the SURT tool
Download System Update Readiness Tool for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB947821) [October 2014] from Official Microsoft Download Center
and finally this, copy/paste the results please
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=52012

well go on from there

Roy

 

[AlanQ]

Hi Roy,

Thank you for the directions... I'm pretty sure something is wrong because I've never seen wuauserv hogging a core like that and the numbers stay 'static', in other words, the trusted installer never runs, there's no internet activity, and no variation on the wuauserv cpu usage. In normal usage sometimes I see the wuauserv hogging a core but generally it doesn't stay on 100% for much, either varying a bit, what indicates that it's not in some kind of infinite loop, or you can see other windows components doing their work like the trusted installer. So the behavior is very different from what I normally see. That should be taken with a grain of salt though because I'm not an expert, so my experience could be very different from the average I presume.

That being said, I've removed the battery of the Notebook and left it running the update check, I'm going to check it back tomorrow to see if there was some progress. I don't think it's gonna finish the check, and then I'm going to run those commands and tools and report back here. What really drives me crazy is that the internet connection is very good, and yet the update checking runs for hours with no internet activity at all. Isn't that just a matter of downloading a package list and comparing the installed packages to the server list, or does it have to retrieve some complex data from the system like checksums and stuff? Because I don't see how a simple version diff check could take that lot of processing power. Perhaps the repositories were not online, but then I'd see at least some basic internet activity I guess... it's a bit of a shame you can't choose the repository manually imho.

What's a reasonable time for the first updates and update checks? I'm just asking for a number so that I can stop the updates and assume it's not working after some time, instead of waiting for hours to no avail. Those endless progress bars also are too bad in terms of UX, and unfortunately Windows' been using them a lot these days. The lack of information is really terrible, especially after some seemingly unreasonable minutes.

 

[AlanQ]

Hi, when I checked today the update checking was finished... apparently for some reason it took 8 hours only to check them... there was a lot of updates (800MB download) what's very strange because last successful check it reported it was up to date, but anyway, I've installed them all, and some very strange things happened the next boot like some updates that were installed previously were somehow rolled back (IE updates)... but I can't confirm with 100% of confidence what happened, so let's just say I missed something. After the reboot it was very quick to check the updates and I installed those strange ones and everything seems to be working fine now.

I wonder if I'll have to go through that for every Windows 7 install from now on. I think the problems could be caused by the huge volume of updates that have to be applied... it would be nice if they could distribute a newer installation media, but I know the chances of that happening are nil.

Perhaps there's an easy way to setup a local update server, perhaps using a RPi or something I could just plug the ethernet cable and get the updates locally. Anyway, I don't install Win 7 that often since I've moved all my infrastructure to the competitor system, and it's clear to me now that was the best thing I could've done.

Thank you for the help guys.