August 2015 Windows Update for Vista Requires One Hour to Run to Completion

I posted earlier in the thread, and while deeply annoyed at Microsoft over this, I made the switch to W10 by playing the system (legally) by reinstating an old W7 pro license to gain a W10 pro license, and putting W8.1 on the old Vista PC which then also qualified for W10.

If I were using Vista now I think I would accept that its support time is nearly up and as such I would look at disabling the update service. I'm not sure if simply turning off updates from control panel works for this issue... you would have to try it.

IE9 was already becoming flaky on some sites long ago due to lack of support. Alternatives didn't appeal although I did use 'Palemoon' for some time and quite liked it although these 3rd party browsers always seem like 'works in progress' to me.

So MS got their wish and I'm now using W10 for both my PC's, and all at no cost. Do I like W10. Well I have to admit I do, and the new 'Edge' browser is a gem.

I do think MS should come clean over Vista though, and offer some solution for this issue.

So this Patch Tuesday I got the usual Task Manager going beserk trouble AND I lost the use of IE9 for all but the most basic of websites.  I did start a new thread for that one:

IE9 Won't Work, But Firefox Will -- Since Patch Tuesday

Oh yes, and I never did receive the OS updates to my computer.

I just don't understand all this that this company seems to be putting people through so they can get everyone to get rid of their present operating systems and go for that new Windows 10.  I mean, that has to be what's going on, right?

I know, you really could give a rat's **** about one old man like me that may actually find it best to move to the Linux OS and just remember better days with Mr. Gates and his products and get you folks out of my life.

That IE9 business was really a bummer***!***  I honestly thought my ISP was at fault and it was while I was on the phone with support and they asked me to try another browser when I found out it was the Internet Explorer that was causing the trouble.  How stupid I felt.  And then the letdown -- you know, thinking that this company had driven one more nail into me.  I'm just getting really fed up with this whole business***!!***  Sad.  Really sad***!!!***

I just wish to stick a note in here that I had the same problem with the March updates as I have had since August of last year and as was so clearly outlined in Mooly01's August 20th post, Update problem 1 link.

I assume that we can conclude after all these many months that the only way we will get any official response from a Microsoft executive is to take the company to court, and I don't presently have the cash for that.  This ain't no glitch thing, for sure.  This is something done because somebody in marketing at the company wrote something into some code and it screwed up our systems.  You folks that are so in love with this company that your love allows you to forgive all manner of corporate mischief will be forgiven by some of us, but the company executives will eventually pay the piper, you can bet your sweet bippy on that.  How that request for payment will be submitted we cannot imagine yet, but it will be submitted in some manner at some point in the future.

And please don't misunderstand, I am not looking forward to that day.  I think this whole business is disgusting and I wish it were not happening, BUT I am also getting sick and tired of the lawless Internet that is allowing all manner of mischief by these companies because our lawmakers are too bloody busy working on matters that belong in the past century and are not looking to the future.  This same exact kind of **** took place when Standard Oil was ruling the roost at the end of the 19th Century and the lawmakers at that time paid no heed to what was being done.

Humans can be pretty disgusting social animals when they are going after that nasty thingy called money.

By the way, I did screen grab after screen grab to document my battle with the March updates.  In fact, I did some of the same documentation in one or two previous battles.

Anyway, somebody is going to get some answers eventually.  That's for sure!

Is Microsoft throttling bandwidth for users running Windows Update on Vista machines to give a higher priority to Win 10 users?

I've run multiple Windows Updates since Patch Tuesday on 11-Aug-2015 and couldn't get them to run to completion on my 32-bit Vista machine until 16-Aug-2015.  There were no errors - it just reported that it was checking for updates and never finished, even if I let it run for over an hour.  Process Explorer showed svchost.exe constantly consuming ~50% of my CPU (i.e., complete saturation of one of my Intel Duo cores) and that a thread for the Windows Update service (wuauserv) was responsible for all that CPU activity.

Is anyone from Microsoft looking into this issue where the initial Checking for updates... phase hangs for long periods of time during monthly Patch Tuesday updates for some Vista users?

Mooly01 provided a link to a post <here> by Windows Sysinternals forum administrator MagicAndre1981 stating that that Microsoft released a patch (KB3050265) for the Win 7 Update Client to fix a similar problem on some Win 7 machines. This Windows Update Client for Windows 7: June 2015 at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3050265 reads in part:

"This update addresses an issue in which system performance can be decreased during scans. This issue has the greatest effect on computers that havea small amount of physical memory."

I've posted additional screenshots in ScousaJay's thread *windows update just seems to hang while checking* in the VistaForums which show that Checking for updates.... can run for more than an hour on my system during Patch Tuesday updates when Microsoft releases a large batch of updates.  Note that I have no problem running Windows Updates outside of Patch Tuesdays when zero or a small number of updates are found.  That VistaForums thread has over 15,000 views and several Vista users reporting the same issue so this is clearly not an isolated problem.

Here's the CPU consumption for my Feb 2016 Patch Tuesday updates that I ran on Wednesday, Feb 10th.  Checking for updates... was stuck for 80 min before reporting that 13 important updates were available for download.  The entire Windows Update session required 110 min to run from start to finish (the re-boot is displayed as a dark grey band at the far right of the image):

I'd like to know if Microsoft is planning to release a patch for the Windows Update Client for Vista that would address this problem, as they already did for Win 7 computers with limited amounts of RAM.

32-bit Vista Home Premium SP2 * Firefox 44.0.2 * IE9 * NIS 2014 v. 21.7.0.11

HP Pavilion dv6835ca, Intel Core2Duo T5550 @ 1.83 GHz, 3 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS

I have been looking around for some ideas/reasons for why I have also been having some odd problems with my Vista unit's updating tool.  And I keep pretty good records, so I am sure I can track down what month this started, when I have that kind of time, BUT that August of last year timestamp strikes me as really close to what my stupid built-in human memory system is 'telling" me.

So I am wondering if there might be some way to actually get facts from either Microsoft, or an outside expert?  I mean, actual information on code written into the updates, or AN update, that has caused this recent weirdness?  That would be NEW code, right?

Anybody get the idea where I am coming from?

Yes, I agree that most of us have better things to do with our time, but there is something about the direction the IT industry as a whole is heading and I am starting to think that maybe we need to start paying closer attention to what this industry is doing.  I better stop at that in my explanation for asking my questions.

So how about that code?  How can we see it?  I suppose if somebody can hand me the code I can check for any odd changes.  I can make some time for that, if somebody outside of Microsoft hasn't already done it.  I write "outside of Microsoft" because there better be at least one employee that knows where the code is stored and can read it, or we're all in heaps of trouble.