Windows 7 - An Update on Updates

Acting in my role as my family's IT Crowd representative, I ran an errand of mercy yesterday to help recover a Windows 7 PC that was failing to properly run up.

It was booting OK, but was tremendously slow, and it's owner was unable to access the internet ( aka Internet Explorer ).

The PC hadn't been booted up for a month or so, and there were a series of overlapping issues, one of which was that the Norton Anti-Virus tool was (a) out-of-date and (b) expired.

In parallel, Windows Update hadn't run in a while, and the PC believed that it had not been updated since July :-( even though updates were last checked for in September :-(

Long story short, I had to manually update Windows via four specific fixes ( Knowledge Base articles ) : -

Installing and searching for updates is slow and high CPU usage occurs in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2

Windows6.1-KB3102810-x86.msu

July 2016 update rollup for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1

Windows6.1-KB3172605-x86.msu

November 2016 Security Monthly Quality Rollup for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1

windows6.1-kb3197868-x86_654e073e00c76a3a7dd01dee8fc2e4fb9a75c931.msu

November 2016 Preview of Monthly Quality Rollup for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1

windows6.1-kb3197869-x86_179db4ad840757eeaba21c1838938e5d61217c73.msu

In each case, I found that the trick was to: -

(a) Disable the network interface ( having downloaded the fix, obviously )

(b) Stop the Windows Update Service (WUS) via the Services Control Panel ( services.msc )

(c) Install the fix

(d) Reboot

Once I finally managed to get Windows to update ( and the first of the above four helped with that, as it actually patches WUS ), it's all up-and-running, and Windows seems fairly happy ( as does Norton AV, once I renewed the subscription ).

Now to run SpinRite ...