Microsoft → 6 hours to update Windows 7

My wife has been using Windows XP on a 7+ year old box, the only Windows computer we have, for Quickbooks. She also watches her TV shows online but it's frequently jerky and she'll occasionally run into some issue that I have to fix.

Over six months ago, my son upgraded his gaming computer and left us the old one which is far faster, as you can imagine, than anything she's ever had before. At the same time, her system started acting in a way that I could tell it wasn't long for this world. So I did a clean install of Win7 on it along with Quickbooks, Chrome and that's about it. But getting her to switch to the newer, faster, better system is like pulling teeth and it sat there till ... yesterday.

Over the last few days, the built-in graphics card started acting up, her display settings were all over the place and, finally, she could only get the red channel unless she rebooted. She was finally convinced to switch to the new one.

However ....

After sitting in the corner for 6+ months, Windows 7 needed updating. The updates were many and took forever. When they started failing, I found out about a KB requiring an 800MB executable to fix security issues from just a couple weeks ago. The ongoing onslaught of update upon update had me tearing my hair out. "Two updates left!", I told her.

Reboot. Run Windows Update. "Nine updates more!".

Six hours, folks. Six hours.

While all this was going on, I updated one of my FreeBSD development boxes from 9.2 to 10.0. It took 10 minutes(?). I then installed FreeBSD10 on a new server, remotely, including DNS, server software, mail server, transferred a web site over from another host, installed a new SSL certificate and a few other things. Took me, half an hour(?). Might have been an hour. Wasn't timing it.

But my point is, it took me six hours to update Windows 7.

Will not FreeBSD run Wine and Quickbooks on that?

I don't know. It's what she's used to so I try not to confuse her. I should try it though.

I am not surprised. If you are not diligent in updating Win7 monthly, the accumulation of updates will be quite a bit.

How long would the updates have taken if they'd be done regularly during those 6 months? 6 hours over 6 months is 1 hour per month, or 15 minutes per week based on MS's monthly patch Tuesday.

You don't have an OS problem, you have an inactive PC problem.

How fast is your internet connection?

+1

Over the past month and a half I've been reformatting a slew of laptops for work. I use a Dell provided WIN7 CD that includes SP1, so we're talking three years worth of updates that need to be downloaded and installed. On average it takes me about an hour and 45 minutes to download and install all of the updates. First round includes 186 updates or at least did when I was doing this, second round is about 15 or 20 and goes down from there. I usually take the laptops home and the updates fly by on my 55Mb cable connection. Afterwards I install Office and do all of the updates that are associated with that which is maybe another 15-20 minutes. All the laptops are running Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge i5s with a few i7s mixed in.

Microsoft really does need to do some kind of an update roll up (in another life these were known as Service Packs) for Windows 7, the out-of-box update experience has grown to be quite a pain.

Haven't they pretty much stated (or otherwise indicated) that there won't be one? I know it sucks, I'm about to reinstall a Windows 7 box from scratch this weekend

And did you upgraded IE to 11?

I agree and would even be willing to pay for the update rollup disk. At this point, if I had to reinstall the OS on this computer, I would replace it with a Linux distro rather than have to endure downloading 3 years of updates on a 1.5 Mb connection.

About the best you can do with 7 now is to get the SP1 ISO's from Digital River and install that and update. When I do that, it still takes over 4 hours.. It's painful. I am using linux now because I'm too lazy to go thru all that again with 7.

Ha, I dealt with a lady the other day that bought a new desktop, however it came with windows 8 (not 8.1). Hours later and a gig and a half of updates/patches/fixes it was updated to 8.1, lots of stuff to download and time to waste just to get a stupid start button that doesn't do anything.

Ouch are you on dialup? If not... that is one slow harddrive

Ha Ha I know how you feel. I sold my old laptop Monday and had to restore to new with a 3 or 4 year old Win7 CD and a 6 year old Office 2007 CD.

It took 30 minutes to install Win7 and 15 minutes for Office and 12 hours to install about 300 updates.

I was watching the ethernet connection in Task Manager and there was a lot of time where there was just a small amount of activity. I deliberately used a wired ethernet and I have FIOS 25 / 5 internet, so there should not have been a connection bottle neck.

There is the unofficial SP2: »www.tweakscene.com/viewt ··· 5&t=7167

quote:

---

Windows 7 Unofficial Service Pack 2 (SP2) is a high-quality rollup of updates released by Microsoft after Service Pack 1, which was released in 2011. As Microsoft has no plans for a second Service Pack, it will save you valuable time when you install Windows.

It is available in two “versions”: Ultra and Slim

---

My download speed is 100Mb. The drive is new. I updated IE during one of the updates to 11 but who uses that?

I checked out that link to see what this "unofficial SP2" download would look like. However, it appears that you need a Microsoft One Drive account in order to download either version.

I actually like IE 11. I find it very fast. Works great on my Surface Pro.

IE11 is an inept browser. Don't use it. It's like a car that looks nice and just like any other car but your mechanic hates working on it.

I'm your mechanic. I hate working on it. But let's not get off topic.

I have a really stupid question: How many of those updates were .NET related? I find those are the worst and tend to be largely CPU bound during the update process. I have an Inspiron E1505 of about the same vintage with a 2Ghz Core 2 Duo and despite having an SSD in the thing, .NET updates always peg the CPU and take eons to complete.

It really is frustrating if that is the case especially considering .NET can be considered an 'optional' update until you need to run an application that requires it.

I do miss the days of nLite with XP and being able to easily roll in updates and have a ready to go install. Sadly with Vista forward it has become exponentially more difficult to do such a thing. :|

Next time download the offline service pack first, and then do the windows updates after that.

The last time I installed xp from a gold disk I installed sp3(no need to install the previous service packs) first, and then just did the windows updates. It didn't take too long, but there was still like 100 updates after sp3 with a couple extra reboots.

Microsoft also seems too lazy to update the base installers for some things so you have to download the updates afterwards since they are too damn lazy to update the complete package. That is why you still have some updates after previous updates. If you download firefox, or chrome from the website you get the most recent version with updates, not some outdated installer which you then have to patch immediately. Lazy, lazy Microsoft.....

A lot of them were .NET related. I read somewhere that .NET framework stuff isn't even needed cause it's only for developers but I think I once updated her old computer without them and got a warning popup. In any case, anyone could correct me.

I didn't know there would be so many updates or that it would take so long. She was gone for the day so I just started the updates. The first one listed 98 of them so I thought that would be most of them. Obviously not.

After the first 98, the updates kept failing which is how I found out about the KB reporting the problem with Windows Update.

Why not use autopatcher? it's what I use when I want to install a mass amount of updates. Downloads them all right from microsoft and installs them.

it's the best utility I have ever seen that does such a thing.

That would be incorrect. Plenty of applications use the .NET framework and will not run without it installed (and I don't mean development apps, I mean end-user apps).

I've seen just a few of them (not many). And usually those could be replaced with ones, that don't need .NET at all. So, I consider .NET as an optional component, used by some developers to experiment with their products... I think m$ could mitigate the problem with slow wide acceptance of .NET framework if they offered version compatibility (new version of .NET should simply replace the old one and be completely compatible), but they don't care...

They did that up through .NET 3.5. That's part of why just having the framework installed can cause a windows XP machine to take up to 50% longer to boot (tested on the same OP hardware, once with a SSD and once with a standard disk, in both cases just having .NET 3.5 installed caused it to take roughly 50% longer to boot).

3.5 is also absolutely huge by comparison. MS started over with .net 4, which is radically smaller and split into development and end user packages (the development/full package is a lot larger than the end user package).

If I remember correctly, the reason for that has to do with the ".NET Runtime Optimization Service". It runs on every boot, and really eats up CPU when it does its "optimization". Even on "fast" hardware, it still takes some time to run. When I was running Windows XP, and I think even Windows 7, I would make sure that service was disabled if I had .NET installed.

--Brian

Check the time stamps in C:\windows\windowsupdate.log it should show which ones took how long.

In reference to my harddrive comment I have seen windows update clobber some harddrives, even a brand new harddrive can be slow and not be able to handle a lot of simultaneous reads and writes.

To be clear I have also seen windows update crawl at a snails pace on a machine with a SSD as well (especially older/low power cpus).