Windows update not working win 7

Le_Kirk

I have been suffering from this (only on the laptop strangely enough) and today I managed to download and run KB3172605 (July Rollup) after stopping windows update service using service.msc. After a reboot, it managed to find 7 important updates and three optional, two of which were the Win10 precursors and which I had previously hidden.

esuhl

almillar wrote: »

Nothing like a good conspiracy theory...

Nothing like blind faith in large profit-making corporations, and the assumption that they would never do anything underhand to increase their profits...

almillar

Is there nowhere in between those 2 views, like, maybe, the servers are really busy, from people downloading Windows 10? That's not blind faith, but making up stories that they're breaking their own product is a bit far fetched!

Le_Kirk

almillar wrote: »

Is there nowhere in between those 2 views, like, maybe, the servers are really busy, from people downloading Windows 10? That's not blind faith, but making up stories that they're breaking their own product is a bit far fetched!

Weird then that my desktop updates regularly and correctly whilst the lappy gives me grief! Both are in the same room, both with the same version of Win7 installed and both using the same Wi-Fi.

Swipe

I fixed my parents laptops using this. http://download.wsusoffline.net

I spent hours trying all the other fixes. Once I'd downloaded and installed all the missing updates offline it fixed the MS updates problem.

Jivesinger

Although Microsoft have been too heavy handed in pushing Windows 10, and I don't like the fact you can't control updates, there is a good aspect to its update approach. Instead of piling up a long list of updates, it seems the approach is to have a major update which reinstall Windows itself, every year or 6 months.

The PC I'm using now had over 10GB of previous updates taking up space when it was on Windows 7, and installing Windows 10 gave a net saving in disk space, even though Windows 7 is still sitting there in Windows.old in case I wanted to rollback.

Windows 7's heap of updates will just keep getting bigger and bigger until it goes out of support.

GunJack

almillar wrote: »

Is there nowhere in between those 2 views, like, maybe, the servers are really busy, from people downloading Windows 10? That's not blind faith, but making up stories that they're breaking their own product is a bit far fetched!

no, it's really not, WU has been randomly borked on at least vista and 7 (probably 8 too) for longer than W10 has been out, almost like ms' answer to all the problems is get W10 :mad: It's like they were prepping for this for some years, as a quick web search will show - and there's no definite fix that's guaranteed to work on all machines running the same OS....

Lady_K

I don't know if anyone else is experiencing the same but from the 1st of August win7 updates are back to normal for me including the alerts on the taskbar and they haven't worked for well over a year

mac.d

I managed to download the KB3172605 update as suggested by Le_Kirk, and then was able to download the updates from June & July. So that one update seemed to do the trick for me.

Mine had only stopped working in June mind you, but I seem to remember something similar happening last year too. Anyway, as you say, it seems to be working as normal again as mine has just found a couple of updates that popped up as normal.

zzzt

I've actually been having the same problem (since January!). Exactly like you, one day it just stopped telling me that there were updates in the notification bar, even though I had it set to.

I only realised after a few months that it hadn't installed updates for ages, so I opened Windows Update in Control Panel and manually checked for updates, and there were loads. But when I told it to download them, the progress bar never moved and stayed at 0% downloaded (for days).

Eventually, it just randomly gave me the notification in the task bar again and downloaded them, but by that point I'd been unprotected for months.

Then the same thing happened again. Despite there being updates, it wouldn't tell me, and wouldn't download them when instructed to. Nothing I did could get it to download the updates. Then randomly one time it popped up in the task bar (on 1st Aug) and downloaded them all quickly.

I don't think there was anything wrong, since eventually it managed to both times, it just seemed like my old OEM copy of Windows 7 was massively deprioritised. No doubt if I was on Windows 10 it would update immediately and against my will.