I have a 3 year old notebook running Win 7 Pro/sp1 x32. For various reasons, I have not used it since early in 2015 and kept it shut off. It's a nice little travel companion, but had been replaced by a more powerful Dell laptop more suitable to my current needs. It occurred to me the notebook could still serve as a nice platform for testing programs, rather than risk my workhorse desktop - also running Win 7. Then I realized that absolutely no updatesto Windows or to programs had been made in almost 2 years. (Don't try this at home!) So I fired it up, and rolled up my sleeves.
First stop was Windows Update, to see what I had missed. The search for updates took all night. Turns out there were only about 90 Important and 40 optional updates listed, totaling almost half a GB, waiting for download. Included were 15-20 of those pesky .Net Framework updates. Yikes! Where to begin?
So I selected the one at the top - a Cumulative Update for IE 11, published in Aug/2016 - as a reasonable one to test first. It got hung up at 5% into the download, and timed out. Back to the desktop, where things had slowed down to a crawl. Task Manager showed that svchost.exe was hogging between 50-100% of the CPU. Great, there are only about a dozen processes that use svchost. But one of those services is for Windows Updater, which was running under manual mode. But stopping that service didn't seem to speed things up in general.
Since system slowdowns can be caused by malware spoofing svchost, I had to run scans. But of course my half-dozen or so security programs needed updating first (and wasn't that fun, on a seriously slowed down system). But eventually I ran all my scans, which detected nothing. For good measure, I ran System File Checker to rule out corrupted/missing files, but there were none.
So I ran the Windows Update Troubleshooter (WindowsUpdateDiagnostic.diagcab) from the "Easy Fix" MS site. It gave me an 0x0***** error. I tried running it from another MS site, and it just kept searching for online updates. I finally found one that worked from:
go.microsoft.com/
It skipped the update search, and just just checked registry keys, collected files, etc. It took more than 30 minutes to complete, and found:
- Service registration missing or corrupt, Not fixed
- Windows Update error 0x80070057(2016-0903 T-04_36_23P), Not fixed
- Problems installing recent updates, Fixed (3 instances)
To make a long story short, after many abortive attempts to get back to the WU site, I finally got there once again. Only took 4 hours this time, perhaps because I disabled all my resident security. But at WU, there was now a new wrinkle - I could either select all the updates, or none. So I took a deep breath, and selected all 90 Important updates. The download/installation took another 4-5 hours, but was (amazingly) successful. A restart was of course necessary to complete the installations - that took another hour to get back to a usable desktop. The return to WU to inspect and select the few optional updates from the 40 offered, and to install them was much quicker. The whole process only took 1-2 hours.
It now takes only a few minutes to get a list of updates from WU. And when I run that WU-Diagnostic.diagcab it now says my service is no longer missing or corrupt. And my high CPU usage only lasts for a minute or so after a cold start. In short, this system is back to the status quo ante. But what a bun-fight!
Updating all my other programs and browsers, by comparison, was a breeze.
There are morals to this sad saga:
1) Win 7 needs regular exercise, lest it gets rusty.
2) Win 7 needs to be fed with a regular diet of updates, lest it starve.
3) Don't delay for too long in getting updates for any system/program you plan on keeping. (I've never had problems with a delay up to 3 weeks).
4) Sometimes Windows Update can give you more grief than malware.
Next stop: try out Sophos Home (free AV). Stay tuned ...
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Windows Updates after a 1.5 Year Hiatus
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