Windows 7 updates slow to install, when a fresh install is done

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amiga500

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#195240 12-Apr-2016 00:05

I'm now using Ubuntu and Windows 10, but more as an experiment, I used a spare hard drive to do a fresh install of Windows 7 Home Premium. The install and activation went smoothly. But the update process was incredible. I had set it to install updates automatically and after checking for updates failed (as I expected) I rebooted the PC and went to bed. In the morning around 9 am it said installing update 131 of 208. The updates took until 1 pm until they had all installed and then I found over a 100 failures. Some of those fails had probably been fixed by the 100 or more updates that had installed. By my estimate the updates had taken around 8 hours just to install. A bit of googling around told me that 8 hours was quite common for a fresh install of Windows 7.

The forums say that Microsoft are probably giving priority to Windows 10 on their servers, with some people saying it is deliberately slowing down Win 7 updates to force people to Windows 10.

As a comparison the updates for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS are only a few hundred megabytes, and install in around 20 minutes!

nathan

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#1530375 12-Apr-2016 05:45

Its slow because there are so many patches for Windows 7, a 7 year old OS at this point

One of the reasons why Windows 10 is so much better as we use Cumulative Updates

Microsoft is not deliberately slowing down Windows 7 updates to force people onto Windows 10

You can make it go faster by installing this first

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3112343

and we'll have more to say about updating Windows 7 later this month...

Jase2985

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#1530387 12-Apr-2016 07:08

yep install SP1 as it comes with alot of those updates and you may only have 50 or so afterwards. I did this recently on an old laptop.

amiga500

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#1530538 12-Apr-2016 10:21

Jase2985:

yep install SP1 as it comes with alot of those updates and you may only have 50 or so afterwards. I did this recently on an old laptop.

Thanks for the tip! I thought that the dvd iso I was using had SP1 but maybe I was not paying attention. If I was serious about running

Win 7 I would install SP1, and then try installing the updates a few at a time as suggested by several people on the forums.

No complaints about the speed of the Windows 10 updates, they came through and installed in about the same time as Ubuntu 14.04.

Dairyxox

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#1530540 12-Apr-2016 10:28

nathan:

...

You can make it go faster by installing this first

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3112343

and we'll have more to say about updating Windows 7 later this month...

Rolling all this into a SP2 or similar would be great...I hope that's what you're implying.

Batman

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#1530726 12-Apr-2016 13:04

I remembered the excitement on the night i upgraded from xp to Vista.

After about 3 hours of installation the screen went blank. Guess what, it went to sleep. Did it wake up from it? No, fatal error upon wakening. That was the beginning of the end of Vista.

amiga500

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#1530975 12-Apr-2016 17:55

I keep right away from the rolling release linux disros, and only use the LTS versions (long term support) to minimize the regressions and similar stuff that plague Linux.

So is Windows 10 more like a rolling release OS now?

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stevenz

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#1531034 12-Apr-2016 20:01

Why there hasn't been an SP2 already is rather ridiculous.

There is a known issue as well with a fix; https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3102810 (Presumably the one Nathan links to supersedes this though?)

Given the aggressiveness of the Win10 upgrade situation, I'd be surprised if they did much to help existing Win7 users, but would like to be proven wrong as it's a lot less hand-holdy than Win10 is.

@KnightNZ

amiga500

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#1532447 13-Apr-2016 11:21

Give MS another few months or a year and most of the problems with Windows 10 might be a whole lot better. They have no reason to be complacent, as their biggest fear must be some big players like Google,HP, Intel, working together to bring out a Chrome/Android/Linux OS for laptops that is really good, and the big PC makers decide to switch over to the new OS.

tanivula

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#1532473 13-Apr-2016 11:50

I've been frustrated by how slow this is, often doesn't look like it'll work and then try to install a *billion* updates causing the system to fail and then revert...

Have since resorted to using WSUS Offline which is a handy tool to download and install updated without using Windows Update... Plus has the benefit (big one for me at work) being able to have your updates on a USB stick and not having to download everything over and over again when it comes to work PC rebuilds.