Why do updates sometimes take forever in Windows?
Hi, everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for Askleo.com
Let's dive right into this question.
I had someone asking about a couple of computers. "On one Windows Update was
waiting for install after 20%, waiting for more than 30 minutes.
On the other, it was 100% download of Windows Update.
I have extremely fast Internet,, fiber
optics and no other computer running any downloads."
Windows Update can
take a long time sometimes, and I know that it's frustrating,
especially if you're waiting to use your machine.
If it's one of these scenarios where
you took an update before you were leaving to the airport, which is a scenario I've
heard of and all of a sudden it just chugs and churns and you end up being late
to the airport because your machine was too busy with installing updates
or you're giving a presentation and it needed to reboot beforehand or even
worse, which doesn't happen as much as lately.
The machine goes into this update
without asking you first.
It has happened to me as well.
Let's talk about just what I do.
The scenario, to be clear is that Windows needs to reboot to take an update.
It does so, and in the process,
at some point it says Windows is installing updates,
and this little spinner spins
and spins,
and there's just no sign of any progress being made.
Most of the time
these updates actually don't take very long.
Most of the time
Within a few minutes you're back.
I know that that's what has happened to me
most of the time on my Windows Ten and Windows Eleven
machines, and yet sometimes it can take a really long time.
How long is too long?
How do you know?
Well,
you don't
my solution when that happens, if it's at all possible
as I let it run,
I have let Windows Update run overnight.
I have no idea if it completed five minutes after I walked away
or 5 hours after I walked away or five minutes before I returned.
But the bottom line is that yeah, sometimes it does just take a long time.
That's why my number one piece of advice for this scenario is to let it run.
It's not something that you necessarily want to interrupt.
For all the reasons that you just don't
want to interrupt things, you can basically leave your system
in a fragile state, if not an unbootable state in the worst case scenario.
But that actually leads to the scenario where
say you wake up the next morning and you
come to your machine and it's still updating,
then you have a hard decision to make. For me.
It's actually pretty easy.
I know that for everybody isn't necessarily so.
So I'll force restart the machine.
At that point, I will.
I realize that there's risk involved in that, but I'm also fairly well equipped
to recover from the kinds of things that that risk might entail.
Not everybody is in that situation. I get it.
But you have a choice. You can either let it keep running.
The chances of it succeeding, say, after an overnight of updating is pretty small.
So a force reboot might very well be the only alternative
that you have available to you.
And then when I say force reboot, I typically mean
holding the power button for the ten or
the 30 seconds that forces the machine to literally power down,
and then you turn it back on again and hope for the best
nine times out of ten, it'll actually boot all the way back into Windows,
and the update either will or won't have taken.
If it hasn't been taken, it may try again
10% of the time, just pulling a number out of the air,
it will reboot into a recovery console,
and then you can use some of the recovery tools, perhaps to restore to a restore
point or restore to an image backup, or do something else,
or continue on to Windows, which may at that point still work.
We just don't know.
The problem is we don't know what caused the problem, and that actually limits
the number of options we have available to us in trying to diagnose this.
There is one other scenario,
and I want you to pay very close attention to this next time it happens to you.
And that is very simply, are the spinning dots spinning?
If they are spinning?
Chances are Windows Update is working. Not necessarily,
it's still possible that there's something bad going on,
but it's also more likely that Windows Update is in fact doing something.
If the dots aren't spinning,
if there's no activity whatsoever,
and when I say moving, they haven't moved even a Pixel, they are completely frozen.
Then your machine is very likely to be
hung and letting it run forever isn't going to solve anything.
It is, in fact, time for a hard reboot.
Give it a few minutes, make sure that they're not spinning,
because sometimes they will stop for a minute or two or longer.
But if you never, ever see them spinning anymore after a while,
then chances are the machine is what I call well and truly hung.
And the only thing you can do.
The only thing you can do is
force a reboot by forcing the power down and restarting.
Now the question included a comment about the speed of the Internet.
That's generally not a problem.
The Internet is generally not involved in these scenarios.
Most of the time Windows updates works
by downloading everything first, actually behind the scenes.
You don't even notice that it's
downloading everything that it needs to download, and then when it says, hey,
I need to reboot that's when it actually goes into the installation phase.
But the process that we've been talking
about here applying the updates on a reboot.
Generally, the Internet shouldn't be
required, and actually it should work just fine.
Even if your Internet is completely disconnected.
So
what if everything fails?
What do you do if it's overnight,
it's still updating, it's well and truly hung, or
you force reboot and it either doesn't reboot or it tries to apply the same
updates again and it causes the problem again.
Here's what I would do.
One is I would restore the machine from the most recent image backup.
You have an image backup taken prior to all of this trying to happen,
then I would immediately repair Windows Update.
It's very possible that Windows Update
itself has a problem and there are steps to repair it.
There's a link to an article that will
walk you through doing that in the article associated with this video.
Then you have a choice.
You can try again,
which is probably what I would do after repairing Windows Update.
I would try again.
Honestly, chances are it'll probably work.
Let's say it's a 50 50 chance just to be on the safe side.
So let's say it works. You're done.
You get on with your life if it doesn't work well, we're back here.
In that case, I would repeat the process of restoring to that image backup.
I would repair Windows Update again just
because it probably doesn't hurt to repair it.
But I would then
configure Windows Update to pause updates for at least seven days, maybe longer.
If that's an option for you and get on with your work,
get on with your life and hope that it is something
that Microsoft will end up recognizing and repairing.
So that when that time period expires, when the seven days are up or whenever
that time period is over, the update will happen,
but it will happen and work.
So hopefully I've given you some things to think about, some things to look at,
some things to consider.
The biggest takeaway of all I suspect is simply to have patience
and potentially let Windows Update take a while to do its job.
But if it does fail and fail hard, there are some things to try.
For
related links, for comments for updates and more, visit
askleo.com/137929
I'm Leo Notenboom, and this is
askleo.com