Turned on my laptop earlier, and tried checking for updates. Saw around 250MB worth of updates, clicked install, and Windows Update locked up shortly afterwards. Restarted Explorer, and Windows Update still wasn't working, so I rebooted. Tried checking for updates again, and now I'm stuck on that screen (the progress bar moves, but it's seemingly not finding updates). No idea what caused WU to freeze. My desktop (set up in basically the same exact way) handled it fine. Any ideas how to fix it? I tried a Disk Cleanup (to cleanup WU files) and a reboot to no avail.
Doing that right now. make sure you're getting internet access before you start. I used to have a firewall I had to turn off before it would work WU has two parts downloading, which shows percent and installation which lists like 29 of 60 (my status at the moment) Has this update process worked correctly on this computer before? ...T
Win 8.0 and 8.1 have a nasty issue with... sfc /scannow untill the errors are gone. delete Software Distribution folder... reboot. then try again... works for me when customers have issues...
All my windows 8.1 installs are "preparing updates" and keeps rebooting in a loop. what the f is going on? happening now since a week ago. It's on its 15th reboot now. preparing updates: 30 %... 100 %... rebooting system... prepearing updates: 30 %...100 %.. rebooting system... cant get into my pc Did M$ found a way to screw with systems? it looks like they did.
Run admin prompt command: net stop wuauserv Then delete the c:\windows\softwaredistrubution folder. After that you can re-try running wuapp.exe check, but I actually recommend rebooting first since it likes to cache the softwaredistribution file links into memory and will error out or crash your system. If you are still having problems I would suspect that some of your services are not functioning correctly. I know Windows Updates uses wuauserv and background intelligent transfer services, as well as some registry settings at the very least. If you have used some program that modifies your services, you might try to undo those things so that the services are running as they are supposed to. System tuning programs are notorious for fiddling with services.
A year and a half after your answer, I got the same issue with WU. And I couldn't stop the service. Thanks to your advice, I disabled the start of the service, reboot, deleted the c:\windows\softwaredistrubution folder, returned start to Manual, rebooted, and Voilá! FIXED!! Thanks a lot!!
ive had similar.. i found .net 4.5 was partially broken and update would not finish. but not always the case
Saving and making a note of this.. In case this ever comes up again Thanks for posting back I face this sometime last year.