Windows 7 Update Taking Too Long
I installed Windows 7 on an old laptop yesterday evening, so that I could experiment with Win32 API programming. I started it updating about 5 hours ago. It downloaded the updates in 30 minutes or so, but as of right now it is still installing them, and only 58% complete.Why is this taking so long, and what can I do to hasten it?The laptop is an HP Pavilion dv6701us, with 2 GB of RAM, a 120 GB SATA hard disk, and a dual core Pentium D CPU, for what it's worth.Update (July 18 2015):I've now observed this behavior on every Windows 7 machine in my household, 32 and 64 bit alike. It seems almost invariant with respect to RAM, CPU speed and number of cores, even SSD vs.
Windows 7 Update Taking Too Long
All Windows 7 systems I've seen updating, take over 8 hours to install 200 updates.Is there anyone for whom Windows Update is not spectacularly slow?Update (July 19 2015): here is the link to the compressed xprof file:Update (September 14 2015):I wasn't entirely satisfied with the answer below - can Microsoft really be shipping something that broken? - so I decided to have a go at it with Sysinternals procmon. This is what I see, over and over again, while Windows Update hangs and doesn't even start downloading stuff: High Resolution Date & Time: 9/14/2015 8:097 PMEvent Class: RegistryOperation: RegOpenKeyResult: NAME NOT FOUNDPath: HKCUSOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionPoliciesWindowsUpdateTID: 3376Duration: 0.0000183Desired Access: Query ValueThat WindowsUpdate key does not exist. Could be it's supposed to be nonexistent; but I strongly suspect otherwise, seeing as it is accessed over and over and over again by the updater's service host process, in a seemingly endless loop. The question in that case, though, would be: what entries/values should it contain?Google/Bing so far hasn't turned up anything, but I'm going to keep looking on this.Update 2 (September 14 2015):I tried the hotfix from here:It claimed to fix some things, including something about the update service registration being missing or corrupt(!). This is a fresh Windows 7 SP1 install.
However, Windows Update is still just as slooooooooow as before, chugging away at 50% of available CPU power while appearing for all the world to be stuck in an endless loop.I just don't understand this. Windows has 90% of the desktop user base, it cannot possibly be this awful by default. I will keep investigating. Starting with Windows Vista the Updates come as difference files.
So during setup, Windows need to creates the real files based on the diffs. This is CPU intensive and takes some time especially on really old CPUs like your Pentium D.In your provided xperf file you have a high CPU usage from TrustedInstaller because it needs to create a pending.xml. To find out why your computer is taking so long install the Windows Updates, open your Start Menu and type Resource Monitor. You will be presented with a screen showing a summary of the resource use on your computer.On the right side of the window you will notice four graphs indicating activity in the four major subsystems of your computer (CPU, Disk, Memory, and Network). What you're looking for is your computer's bottleneck, i.e. The subsystem that's holding everything else back (there's usually only one at a time).
Interpreting the graphsObserving each graph you'll see a green shaded area and a blue line, both representing values in the Y-axis of the chart. CPUThe blue line indicates how much of your processor's maximum frequency is in use.
If the blue line is at the top of the graph, your CPU is running at 100% of its rated speed; if it's halfway up the chart, then the CPU has been throttled down 50%.The green area shows how much (on a scale of 0-100%) of your processor's available speed your PC is using.Your CPU is the bottleneck if the green shading fills the graph, in which case the blue line should also be at the top. DiskThe blue line indicates how busy your disk is from 0% (idle) to 100% (working as hard as it's capable of under the circumstances). The green line indicates the total Mbps/Gbps of data is being read+written, on a scale of 0-100% of the figure shown at the top of the chart. So if the chart shows 10 Mbps and the green line is 75% of the way up, your disk is moving a painfully slow 7.5 Mbps of data.Your disk is the bottleneck when the blue line is pegged at the top of the chart. This, by the way, is my guess as to where your bottleneck is but that's beside the point since I'm teaching you how to figure it out yourself. NetworkThe network chart is like the Disk chart.
The blue line shows what percent of the total bandwidth of which your network adapter is capable is in use, while the green line shows how much data is being used, again according to the scale shown.Your network is the bottleneck if the blue and green lines are at the top of the chart. MemoryThe blue line shows what percent of your physical memory is in use while the green line shows how many hard page faults per second are occurring.It's unlikely you'll find the blue line all of the way to the top of the graph since Windows will proactively move data from memory to the hard drive to keep some free RAM available (this is called paging). However, if a lot of RAM is in use and the hard drive is quite active then memory is probably a bottleneck. The number of pages/sec can also indicate when you're too low on RAM. If you have a consistent occurrence of hard page faults, that means Windows is hoping to find data in (fast) memory but is having to look in the pagefile on the (much slower) disk for the needed bits.By observing Resource Monitor while your computer is working you can quickly determine what subsystem is showing things down, and therefore what upgrade would most effectively improve performance. FWIW I've a brand new Win 8.1 quad-core laptop with no issues: Windows Update used about 20-40% of both disk and CPU capacity in a brief sample period and took about 2 hours excluding download time to update 60 different parts of MS Windows at 250MB total. Meanwhile Kubuntu does the same volume of updates on a 8yo dual-core desktop in about 20-30mins.
Windows 7 Setup Taking Too Long
It seems far slower than it should be; perhaps it needs an option to use all available CPU as I'm guessing they throttle it back to allow other apps to run, that's the only viable reason I can see.–May 24 '15 at 19:55. Monitoring resources is far from sufficient, while the question is very interesting. Using windows 7 in parallel with Linux on the same computer I can say that on Linux no update takes more than 30 minutes, while on Windows after four hours only two thirds of updates installation is done, and that without the installations that take place after restart. The question is: why Windows is taking SO LONG on the same resources?, just by considering the experience in itself, even without comparing it to Linux.– user162573 Jun 18 '15 at 19:41. You can create a Windows 7 install USB thumbdrive (or DVD but thumbdrive is faster) which includes all the patches till that date.
This makes installations on older machines not take such an extraordinary amount of time. Here is one page that outlines the process.If you are going be doing a lot of these then it is worth learning to create your own installers.
If not, then just live through the lengthy update this time.You probably have a pre-Service Pack 1 media. A newer Windows 7 DVD will already be patched.
Why Do Windows Updates Take So Long
I manage a WSUS server for a large number of servers in a shared environment. Recently I noticed that despite the scheduled install time configured via the local gpo of many servers, they were not rebooting for sometimes 1.5-2 hours after their scheduled install time.