After over a month of windows 10 updates being stuck at 15% complete, using a combination of wireless and physical ethernet cable (I thought maybe it would not do updates over wireless, but that was not what was stopping it) I thought I had better have a look at the issue.
Why leave it so long you ask ?. I have windoze10 as a dual boot image on a laptop that boots by default into fedora, that is my only non-linux system and I hardly ever boot it into windoze… only occasionally to test portability of some of my apps; so it was only an annoyance.
Anyway, looking into it it is not a new problem. I found a web post that discusses this issue and how to fix it for Win7, 8, 8.1 and 10… it is just another issue MS leave in the wild for decades. Another reason nobody should use windows.
Anyway the detailed procedure is in this post on stuck windows 10 updates.
I’m briefly highlighting the steps here as I have had issues with websites I have relied on with bookmarks for years sudeenly going offline just when I need them; but for the detailed howto use the link above if it still works.
- as an administrator at the command prompt
- net stop wuauserv
- net stop bits
- net stop wuauserv (I added the second stop, the first fails)
- Delete all files under C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution
You will probably have to reboot at least once to finish deleting the SoftwareDistribution files.
The post expects you to have to restart the services, in win10 that just gets an error saying the service is already running so in Win10 at least they restart on reboot.
But anyway, the procedure works. After over a month at 15% complete, after following this procedure update status went back to 0% complete, then within an hour was at 100% complete and prompting for the install/reboot.
Windoze showed no errors in the update procedure, it was just hung and apparently would have hung forever.
I’m not saying I have never had issues like this in Linux, but as I have been using linux for over a decade fixing issues like this are so second nature to me I would probably never know I had an issue.
Windoze is supposed to be for people who do not need to know how to play with it’s internals; but seriously would your grandmother search the web for how to fix this ?… seems to me windoze users are not getting security updates as many will have “stuck” like mine did; making windoze an insecure platform.
