Windows 7 – Problem with Windows Update

I have a rather ancient HP desktop which I upgraded two years ago from Vista to Windows 7. I check every month to see if the patch Tuesday updates have been processed and noticed mid-Decemeber that there seemed to be a severe problem with Windows Update. It took ages to start and when it finally appeared, there was just a big red “X” It would not manually allow me to check for updates, and the usual fix (making sure the necessary services were running) did not help. I was forced to rename the c:\windows\softwaredistribution directory, after which Windows Update ran correctly and found and installed three updates.

My question is this. I realized that Windows Update had not processed the December patches as I regularly check to be sure everything is OK, but a non-technical user would from this point have a system without any new security updates. Is it not damgerous for Microsoft to have a critical service such as Windows Update that can so easily stop running?

Conversation 3 comments

  • mk123

    31 December, 2017 - 6:44 am

    <p><em>yeah sometimes its error now window 10 has many </em><a href="http://www.trickworld.co.uk/free-netflix-account-january-2018/&quot; target="_blank"><em>bugs</em></a><em> </em></p><p><br></p><p><a href="http://www.trickworld.co.uk/free-netflix-account-january-2018/&quot; target="_blank"><em>Free Netflix Accounts 2018</em></a></p><p><br></p><p><br></p>

  • seapea

    31 December, 2017 - 4:11 pm

    <p>Users at work have figured out that they can try to secondary link on the update notification page if they get the red X error message saying updates could not be run.</p><p><br></p>

  • epguy40

    09 January, 2018 - 1:11 pm

    <p>sometimes it's a windows update server error or some stuff corrupted in that <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">windowssoftwaredistribution folder and that folders contents needs to be cleared to get things going again. so I've had that problem a few times on my Win7 machines.</span></p>

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC