WaasMedic Agent Exe stopping me from working

Mark Schroeder:

Thanks for your post about WaasMedicAgent reading files from prior Windows 10 updates. Some earlier posts in this thread also mentioned issues about it reading old Windows Update files.

Some months ago, after each Windows 10 update (usually on 2nd week of the month), I started using the Windows Disc Clean utility to delete files listed as "Windows Update Cleanup". The steps are: Run disc clean utility....select Cleanup system files.... checkmark "Windows Update Cleanup" as one category of files for Disc cleanup to purge.

Since starting to do this every month, I have noticed that the WaasMedicAgent delays have been reduced from half hours and hours, to just a couple of minutes on my system, which has hard disk drive. Not sure purging the Windows Update Cleanup is the cause of the improvement, but I have not had the extremely long periods of system non-response that I used to have when Waas Medic Agent ran.

On a couple of occasions, Disc Cleanup showed that cleaning up Windows Update Cleanup files would save over 2 GB of disc space. After it ran, the category showed only a couple hundred MB of space left. If WaasMedic is reading those files, that could be one reason it takes so long.

Note that removing Windows Update Cleanup with Disc Cleanup is not fast. On my HDD system, it may take the utility 10 to 20 minutes to purge those files. But I get to choose the time to run Disc Cleanup, as opposed to WaasMedic popping up when I don't want it to.

I recommend everyone with this problem use the Disc Clean utility to process "Windows Update Cleanup" files after monthly Windows 10 updates.

When this thread started it may have seemed like WaasMedicAgent et. al. were "buggy", needed to be reported to Microsloth (because all their own people running Windows were too stupid to notice it or too lazy to report it to the 'development team'). But if you've followed the thread you realize there are several mistaken assumptions regarding this issue.

MISTAKEN ASSUMPTIONS:

1. WaasMedicAgent etc. are legitimate routines that just have resource hogging bugs that Micosloth wants to know about and fix.
2. That WaasMedicAgent is as described in its properties, a routine to find and fix Windows Update errors. (An MS official has stated this "user assumption" is incorrect.)
3. Microsloth is the least bit worried about losing a few individual and small business owners to Linux / iOS.

The calculus and focus are as follows:

1. The majority of money is made from enterprise users. They form a captive market because moving to a new OS / platform would be prohibitive in terms of both cost, down-time, retraining expenses etc. So they can be abused to no end and the monthly service fees and upgrade fees etc. will keep pouring in. No need to really "innovate" the OS anymore, just add features that increase their dependence on MS "Enterprise / Cloud / Colaboratiive" services that allow MS to peruse all kinds of data, including hijackable proprietary corporate information that can be used to tighten a monopolistic grip on IT services.
2. Individual / SMB users are really more of a pain than the profit from their upgrades or license fees from individual device purchases is worth. But most are invested in MS and / or Windows compatible applications with proprietary data formats and are unwilling / unable to bear the cost and inconvenience to take on a new OS and try to convert / reconstruct all their personal / SMB data and operations on a non-Windows platform. So if MS "flushes" even 40% of such users from the "Windows Family" - not only "no big deal", actaully "good riddance".

MS doesn't give a **** about anything said in this thread or anyone posting to this thread. Any "feedback" that has been submitted regarding this issue, I'm sure, has been piped directly to the land of NULL. So while it may provide a little relief to your BP to post here, beyond that it is a total waste of time. Our only real options are 1) move to a non-Windows platform or 2) surrender to the abuse and just admit to ourselves that we are just MS drones / suckers for life.

@MarcHoppe absolutely shocking resource drain you show there. They pushed this W10 cr*p onto very limited spec computers as I keep saying.

Another huge issue, millions of computers all running this power hungry rubbish are belting out extra heat, what's the carbon footprint? MS need to urgently review what their OS is doing in relation to power consumption.

I just checked and there is not one failed update on my laptop going all the way back to September of last year. Today Waas Medic was running and chewing away at my hard drive for half an hour. I finally just chose to "end task". A manual check for updates shows the system is fully up to date or at least no updates are offered. I'm running 20H2 Build 19042.844 and I have not done an update file clean up.

Does anyone know how to report this BUG to Microsoft ? They obviously don't read this forum.

I'm about ready to install a Linux distro and dual boot it with Winblows 10 and just let Windows die. There are a couple of things I still need on the windows side otherwise I'd overwrite it and just install Linux.