Same here, I've never installed Silverlight on any machine ever. I've ran into maybe 3 websites that used it. One was Microsoft's own site and the stuff I had clicked on wasn't that important enough to me to go install that crap just to see it so I just closed the window. Another was a stock charting website which wasn't necessary as I had other software to use. I forget the third one but it was some random commercial site that I equally didn't need to care about. The last time I encountered it at all was probably 3 or more years ago.

This solution worked on both my desktop and laptop

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-update/windows-7-update-solution/f39a65fa-9d10-42e7-9bc0-7f5096b36d0c?auth=1

Not if you chrome.


As to the main topic, I had difficulties with windows update not working in Win 7 when I wanted to upgrade to win 10 this past summer. I had to remove all cached updates, then download a patch for windows update manually to get the update working again. As far as if you want to do that or not, or distrust MS, I don't really care about that.

Timely semi-necro of the topic. Got Win7 installed on the new NUC but it won't install updates. Set to manual, I start the search, and nada. Left it running for over 24 hours - still nada. Meanwhile, 2 other PCs on the same connection are finding updates.

Gonna take a look at all of the suggestions this weekend and see if I can get that working. Thanks for the tips.

Most solutions I have ever tested have already been mentioned but here are som more: Twice I just gave up and reinstalled Windows after which it worked. Sometimes Windows wants a cold boot insteasd of a normal restart to get those updates working.

I am not impressed with Windows updater that can take several days to update a fresh install of Windows needing lots and lots of reboots and new searches for updates and whipping and screaming and... you get it. Then when I change or upgrade distro on my Linux computer, the updating takes less than 15mins and needs a single restart OR EVEN NONE depending a bit on what is new. Microsoft sure is way behind in this.

Dear game developers, please do not use DirectX nor .net or other MS only stuff.

Interestingly, checking today took only seconds. Used to take 20 min to 1h when the month's security patches popped up.
Had disabled auto checking as well yesterday, considering that things were set to change today with the single update bundle and didn't trust it not force auto updating Windows Update too or who knows what else when it'd check, but saw a few posts that didn't report something like that, so dared a manual check and it was almost instant. Didn't install the bundle yet though, though it claims to only include this month's security updates (also available separately in the security-only bundle, which you have to download and install manually if you want just that) and the September non-security bundle, no new non-security stuff. But trusting MS again after all this mess since the Win 10 push started isn't going to happen, so wait and see...

How do I know which patch I need to get?

Both my computer and my dad's computer had this problem. You can see because an entire core/thread of CPU is constantly being used in task manager.

I was able to fix this by downloading and installing the KB3172605 update mentioned above by groundhog42. But I had restart the computer and then run it right after restart, otherwise it still wouldn't update properly. Then after WIndows can find and download other updates normally, and CPU usage is now back to normal too.

I had similar problems a few months ago, basically, since I wasn't completely patched up prior to them switching to monthly updates, the updater was having serious issues finding the necessary patches.

For me, switching to WSUS offline up date and updating that seemed to fix the problem, but if there's anything wrong with the database that MS uses to store that information or the disk itself, you might have issues.

This works for me.