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Vista Updates will not install

16 years ago

I was helping a friend of mine this afternoon. She has an e-Machine with Vista OS. She called me several days ago saying that she could not get SP1 to install. I knew that SP1 was rather old and wondered if she was correct. I went to her house and helped do some clean-up maintenance on her computer. Ran cCleaner, Windows Security Essentials, Malwarebytes (which found 3 adware items), updated Spywareblaster, and installed Secunia PSI, which showed several programs out of date. Tried updating IE7 to IE8 using Secunia and it failed. Then went to Windows Updates in All Programs and received information that there were 18 important updates, but it did not identify those updates, just started downloading them when I clicked on download. They took a while but all downloaded and then the UI indicated "Preparing to install". That's as far as things ever went, and after over 5 hours it is still stalled there. What can she do to get these updates to install. I would have preferred to download only 2 or 3 at a time and install, and then continue in this fashion, but there seemed not to be the option to do this. At this point, her only choice is to click "stop installation".

Some advice, please. I do not have Vista on my computers, so it's a little different from what I'm used to.

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Comments (6)

grandms
Original Author
16 years ago
My friend just called me after having looked at the history of her updates. It seems that Vista SP1 has failed repeatedly since last June. Also Windows Update Agent 7.4.7600.226 has failed over and over. Could the update agent be at the root of her problems?
zep516
16 years ago
See link for various windows update fixes.

Scroll down to Tallin's post.

Also google fixwin.

Here is a link that might be useful: -windows-update-error
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zep516
16 years ago
Here is fixwin program for Windows up-date..

Here is a link that might be useful: fix-windows-updates
DA_Mccoy
16 years ago
Two things come to mind,

Turn off the firewall if the update is coming directly from MS.

If she is using the on-board Windows update utility fine, but if she is going on-line to the Microsoft update site be sure she is using IE.

DA
maime
16 years ago
I had a problem installing updates when I bought this computer with Vista and one of HP tech's helped me. He had me install 3 or 4 at a time and it worked fine. One update was very large and that particular update can be a problem even if it wasn't so large.
grandms
Original Author
16 years ago
Thanks for the links, Zep. Maime, that is what I wanted to do, only a couple at a time. She called me back last night, and she had gone into her update history and was going to try updating one at a time, going back to the oldest ones first. Haven't talked to her today as it has been a busy day and she is expecting company, so not sure I'll see or talk to her again for several days. In the meantime, I will study the information at the links, and we'll keep working at this. I will post again when there is more information.

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