I have an old spare laptop with 1903 version. Thought I'd charge it up and see about updating it. It found 4 updates that have been downloading now for several hours with all 4 Status: Downloading - 0%. Is this typical? Is there any way I can speed this up?
It may be typical for an older laptop. On my laptop, I usually clear the Windows Upgrade Log Files and Windows Update Cleanup in Disk Cleanup before trying to download a new batch of updates. Found in a sub-tab it is called "Clean up system files". Just right click on the "C" drive and select properties and you will get to where I am mentioning.
In my case of being on satellite internet, it is typical for four downloads to take several hours before a progress status is reflected. Meaning, it will sit at 0% for five hours and then jump to something like 35% and slowly trickle along the rest of the updates in about an hour or two.
Again, this is with a satellite connection, so it may not be relevant to your situation but thought I would throw it out there.
Last edited by EyeInTheSky; 24 Oct 2020 at 14:32. Reason: Updated.
In that case, now that it is established an excellent connection is present, I would check those resolver caches I mentioned as they may contain GB's of data taking up valuable space and possibly slowing down the downloads.
As a side note, I had to stop the windows update service in "Services" before I cleaned those resolver caches out because the downloads were in progress and Disk Cleanup got confused when I tried to run it during Windows Updating. After I cleared the caches, the updates went a little faster.
Ah, no worries..........it worked, so it probably had quite a few gigabytes it freed up in the caches.
On my laptop before I figured out the problem, one of those caches contained data nearly the size of my entire hard drive.
I was like that can't be possible can it?
I swept over 300GB out of the caches and the downloads went a lot quicker, that's for sure. It actually took longer to clear the caches than it did to download 3 updates once they were flushed.
I think disk cleanup ran for over two hours when the caches were almost maxed out and the 3 downloads only took like an hour after I fixed the issue because I actually had clear skies in the mountain basin that day! Most days, we don't see the sun because of smog and fog, so I know the dish for the satellite is having a hard time finding the signal!
What caught my attention, was that you mentioned it was an old laptop and I was thinking mine was over five years old and I never purged those caches since owning it and never had to reinstall Windows on it, so it had quite a few years of logged cached data to say the least.
Last edited by EyeInTheSky; 24 Oct 2020 at 17:17. Reason: Updated
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