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Comment by JeffCyr | Hacker News Reader

I had to update a Windows 7 laptop recently and the process was far from easy, the update process hang at 100% cpu for hours and I had to manually install the monthly update rollout, average people won't do that and just disable the updates.

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That is what hasn't been mentioned in this thread. Around half of the Win7 systems I get asked to look at never actually pull updates because it's stuck checking forever. This is due to a WSUS client bug. Fix used to be to take the system offline and instal 3 hotfixes... not user friendly or obvious so it doesn't ever get done by end user.

This wizard should fix it now: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wiki/windows_7-u...

Same... I have this old Windows 7 laptop I hadn't used in a couple of years... I had to wake it up again to do some testing of my new app on Windows, and the upgrade was just a total nightmare... I had to follow the old procedure on this [Microsoft forum](https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-...), which took me hours to do!

If it wasn't for the WannaCry problem, I wouldn't even have bothered!

Exactly. I've seen this problem on Windows 7 as far back as 2012. Any machine that is not constantly receiving updates will run into this issue sooner or later. On weaker machines, the update process will actually eat all the machine's memory and likely never finish. Also, the manual update which fixes this problem changes every few months. At this point I feel that Microsoft just wants to discourage people from using Windows 7.

Yeah, that dead horse called "New OS-Software every five years" still has some miles to go, before acceptance sets in- that buisness customers prefer stability over shiny any day and Infrastructure now sells as a service.

What about using WSUS Offline? http://www.wsusoffline.net/

Does that include all security updates for the windowses ... it's only 2MB (?!)

It pulls down a list of updates then fetches them.

So you need an already updated Windows computer to actually get the updates

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