Mon 09 May 2016 10:54
Slow Windows Update on Windows 7? Install two Windows Update patches first.
Recently, I noticed Windows Update taking many hours or even days on
Windows 7, especially for new installs/reinstalls. Task manager shows
svchost.exe exhibiting large memory usage (suggestive of a memory leak)
and/or sustained 100% CPU.
Happily, there's a workaround: grab a couple of patches to Windows Update itself, and manually install them. Get KB3050265 and KB3102810 from the Microsoft Download Center, and install them manually in that order, before running Windows update. These two patches seem to address the issues: after they were installed on some of our systems here, Windows Update ran in a reasonable amount of time (an hour or two perhaps on slow systems when many updates are needed, but not days).