Hi everyone, Daniel here from TwinBytes with another tech-torial for you. This time on
Windows updates or Patch Management as we call it, and how to confirm that your
updates are working, we'll show you how to check the version you're on
and some basic troubleshooting. All that coming right up!
With Windows 10, checking out your updates how it's working. Let's have a
look at my screen here. If we right click on the start button, you can go into
PowerShell. Once it comes up, it may take a minute before you get the
prompt. Then you can type in winver for Windows version, and press Enter. It then
comes up showing you Windows 10. If you look here it shows version 1909.
Then it's got the OS build. So now you know what version we're at here, is
version 1909 with this particular build during the shooting of this video.
So with Windows 10 especially, all of the... alot of the features have changed a
little bit, a number of times since it first came out.
So it's kind of good to know when you're looking at instructions what
version of Windows it was at that time and it may be different again by the
time you're watching this video. So as of the shooting of this video it's version 1909.
So I'd be curious to find out what version are you on currently? Maybe you
can throw that in the comments below. Alright so knowing we're on that version;
We'll close out of here. Checking the updates, if you just left
click on the start button and go to the cogwheel. It pops out in this version at
least anyway. We click settings. Then we've got update in security. Here it
shows the last time that it checked the updates. I never trust that. I always
click check for updates anyway, and it checks, and depending on the speed of
your computer and the speed of your internet, it may take a fair amount of
time, maybe even a half an hour I've seen some of them take. But in this one here
you can see that it only took a few seconds and it finished and it's not
showing me that there's any more updates. So you can look at your update history.
It tells you here the last things that were done. So there was a feature
update, which is the 1909. That's the one that we just confirm the version that
I'm on. That's a big feature update and it was installed on November 14th of 2019.
So not too long ago, and then we've got some other updates that we can see.
Quality updates, the latest one was on December 12th and if we go down further
we can see that there are driver updates and the last driver update actually is
showing that it was just two days ago. So it's updated some stuff there and I'm
not sure exactly why I'm seeing Samsung, I think that's because at that time I
plugged my phone into the laptop to test something. So I didn't have it in there
before so it had to to get an update for that. Definition updates was November and
other updates shows December 12th. So being that were January 11th here at the
shooting of this video and some of the last quality updates were from December 12th
was the latest one it's a little bit far back and I'm not quite sure if
that's really fully up to date. Usually it's pretty good at that. There's updates
fairly often. So what if we do not have all the latest updates? We can just hit
the back arrow to go back here, but you could always just close out the window
if you want and then hit start go back to settings. So if this is not working
and we need to fix it, then one of the things, if we go in to file explorer,
in the C Drive, and then go to Windows and then scroll down to find Software Distribution.
This is where it downloads the updates and prepares them for
installing. So what you want to do is right-click and rename, and I'll put dot old.
That's what I do. You can put dot bak for backup. Some people will give
different instructions. But ideally you don't want to just delete it, just incase
if you had to go back to it for some reason. Usually it's fine, you can
delete it. It's just a list of the updates it'll download them again anyway.
Now this is not going to accept it because the update service is running.
But we're gonna just do this anyway to see what happens. So I hit enter and I
got to say yes to allow, and it says that it can't be renamed because it's opened
in another program. Well that doesn't make sense open in another program but
what it means is that it can't rename it because it's in use by the Windows
Update service. So what we got to do is disable the update service temporarily.
So when I right-click the start button go to PowerShell again. Actually this
won't work either. I have to go into the Windows PowerShell as an Administrator.
So I gotta have administrative rights to do this. So of course I gotta accept that.
Then we type in net stop wuauserve and press Enter, and it says the
Windows Update service is stopping and then it was stopped successfully. Now I
can go back over here and say try again. Now it's successfully renamed the
software distribution list to dot old. Now if I go back to PowerShell. I can say
net start wuauserve and press Enter. It's going to start the service. It says
it started successfully, and if I look here, it's now created a new software
distribution folder. So now all the history of that is gone.
It's able to start fresh. So let's have a look if I go back into
my windows update, I can check the update history and it's completely wiped out.
There is nothing left in there. So I'll go back here and tell it to check for
updates, and we'll see what happens. Maybe there'll be some more updates available
and maybe there won't be. If there isn't any and it says it checks
successfully then we know it's it should be working and it's fine. But eventually
at some point there is going to be more updates. If you're going several months
and there's no updates at all, then there's maybe an issue there. So while
that's checking, because it doesn't have the history anymore this could take a
little bit longer, but one of the things that we look at when we do preventive
maintenance, we have our monthly maintenance that we offer to our
corporate clients, and we can see here it's finished checking now and it's fine;
but if you aren't sure what you're doing with this or you're not confident that
you have all the updates because in this case it's saying going back in December
12 we're not sure is that's a little bit far back, it's almost a month since the
last quality updates, and it's been a few months since the last big feature update.
So with our patch management through our maintenance program, we're able to
provide you a report that shows what updates have been installed, and what
updates may be missing still, based on Microsoft's list of what updates are
available. So then you can actually compare to that and find out that you
you truly are up to date or how far behind are you. There's other
benefits to it as well, we can actually block updates that have been
declined or they're discontinued or they've been replaced, then there's no
need to waste time and bandwidth if you're on a slower connection to
download an update that's been discontinued or replaced; and we can also
approve the updates slower and make sure that you're not getting updates that
haven't been approved or been tested yet. So we can slow down that
process as well. So that's one of the benefits of going through a patch
management program, through some IT company,
whether you're going through TwinBytes or you're going through somebody else;
having someone to manage that for you
is a big key factor in your security, because antivirus isn't enough anymore.
You've got to keep your updates done and this is just about Windows, but it also
applies to all the programs out there. So stay up-to-date, stay safe. I hope you
found this video helpful. If you did please give it a thumbs up, subscribe if
you haven't already and stay tuned for future videos. Alright, thanks guys and
we'll see you in the next one. Bye for now.