Windows 8 laptop, less than an hour old - failing to update

zagmund

Sigh.

New Windows 8 laptop. Or at least laptop with Windows 8 installed by reseller. I checked and it says it's verified/legit/whatever.

I powered it on this evening and got to my desktop thing no problem. I knew there was going to be a shed load of updates so I ran Windows Update. 1 update - it installed and ran. I think it was an Updater Updaterer. Reboot, wait, run Windows Update again - several hundred updates as expected. I clicked on "Update now" and nothing happened. It just sat there saying "downloading 0kb, 0%" but I can see from resource monitor that nothing is coming over the network. I know the network is working because I have been browsing the web.

Is this "normal". Is there a way to unbreak it and get it to update, like it's supposed to? I only want to update it so I can move to Windows 10.

z

Mr.Carter

Stop trying to run/install all the updates together...install them one by one...its a pain but it worked

Lu Tze

Yeah recently had this issue, was able to install them around 10 at a time, ended up selecting all the similar ones (grouping them by what they were updating) and installing them together seemed to work also

Bayberry

zagmund wrote: »

I know the network is working because I have been browsing the web.

Windows update relies on the BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service) service to download updates. If you're running other processes that are taking up a significant amount of bandwidth, BITS will back off, and wait until there is spare capacity.

Note that the Windows Store also uses BITS - it may be that there are application updates in the queue before Windows Updates.

zagmund

Thanks for the info. I selected two updates, told it to proceed and went off for a walk. It's now at the "preparing to install" stage 2 hours later and the network part of task manager tells me that 800mb has been downloaded, so something has been happening.

Hopefully it will install those this evening and I can select a bunch more to churn away over night.

They could really do with a little bit more info the the user. Looked at objectively, the main perception so far has been "it doesn't work/has crashed/isn't doing anything".

z

zagmund

This morning after over 8 hours claiming it was installing two updates it tells me "McAfee needs you to reboot". When I rebooted, there was no sign that the two updates had even been attempted.

It looks like McAfee got in there first, grabbed a lock on whatever gets locked during updates and prevented everything else happening. What a crock. You would think that the OS would prioritise updates to itself as part of a new install.

Anyhoo . . . after that reboot it looks like the actual updates are installing correctly. There have been a few reboots, but the count is going down.

z

ED E

I like to automate the process with new machines.

1. Setup auto login on boot (temporarily)
2. Enable automatic updates
3. Add script to \Startup\

shutdown -r -t 3600

The machine will then reboot itself hourly. Come back a few hours later and everything will have sorted itself out (unless MSRT gets in the way).

Irish Steve

Windows 8 update is from the same school as some other "update" systems, it goes internal, and tells the user very little about what it's doing, and very rarely gives anything that's even close to an accurate time-scale for what it's doing.

What I suspect happened is that when you started up, it almost immediately went off in background to check for updates for the operating system, and McAfee, and possibly other third party applications like Adobe, and found them, then started downloading them all behind the scenes, and running desktop update while that's happening tends to overload things, and it goes into a sulk about it for some considerable time, and by considerable. I mean hours rather than minutes.

On a new machine, I have to admit, I usually run update in "manual" mode, and only allow it to update a few at a time, but even that can be problematic on occasions, due to the requirement to reboot after some updates, which makes the process tedious, as it can't be run unattended as a result.


Then there are possibly hardware drivers that will be needed as well, which may not come automatically with any update routine, you will have to go searching for them on the manufacturers web site. It gets even more complex if you have any legacy hardware, like printers or scanners that have to be installed.

It never ceases to amaze and annoy me that a brand new out of the box machine can take anything up to 6 hours before it's usable by the owner, and that's assuming that the user has a fast broadband service, if you have the misfortune to not have some form of fibre link to the internet, then that time can be massively increased, and that's assuming all goes well. a recent new Dell XPS, less than 3 weeks off the production line took over a day's work to get all the updates into it, and that was with Fibre to download the patches, and driver updates, a very fast machine with SSD, between Microsoft and Dell, there was close on 2 Gb of patches and updates to download.


Now the real caveats based on your comments.

On a number of machines that I've been involved with, I have seen BIOS updates that are needed for Windows 10, and to be sure that there will not be issues when you do get round to upgrading to 10, download and install any BIOS updates, and also check on the manufacturers web site for any hardware drivers that are required for W10, and download them to a new folder (but don't install them yet) so that when 10 does get installed, you have them there ready to install without going on line to check after 10 has installed, the catch 22 is that there are a few systems that won't go on line without updated network drivers, and if 10 has been installed, but the drivers are not on the machine, getting on line to get them presents a catch 22 challenge, unless you have a spare machine that can be used to get them.

So far, and I've not installed 10 on my machines yet, I've not seen any major show stoppers with 10, but it's very early days yet, so all I can suggest is that you take it step at a time, it will (eventually) get there, and stabilise, but it won't be quick.

zagmund

Thanks all for the info. I particularly like that bit about downloading the W10 drivers and the hourly reboots - I came back to the machine this afternoon to find it sitting there (probably for hours) wanting to be rebooted again. I rebooted it and it spent 20+ minutes saying 33% done, 100% done, don't power me off, wait for it, 64% done, 100% done, don't touch me, hang on a sec, 25% done, 100% done, just finishing . . .

After about 20 minutes of this i had to go and do something else. It would be nice if it was happily rebooting itself all morning and installing everything it needs.

z

Dardania

ED E wrote: »

I like to automate the process with new machines.

1. Setup auto login on boot (temporarily)
2. Enable automatic updates
3. Add script to \Startup\

shutdown -r -t 3600

The machine will then reboot itself hourly. Come back a few hours later and everything will have sorted itself out (unless MSRT gets in the way).

Where does this get entered? not msconfig?

homer911

Dardania wrote: »

Where does this get entered? not msconfig?

Put it in a bat file and put the file in the startup folder

zagmund

Finally made it to Windows 10. It took the best part of 4 days.

z