Are you having problems getting update to run? Well in this video, I'm going to show you how to solve most common problems with Windows Update. Stay tuned. So, nothing can ruin your day faster than trying to get a new computer set up, only to have Windows Update not work.
The errors that Windows Update gives you are usually extremely vague and most of the time unhelpful. At least without Google, of course. That's why sometimes it's better to just start over from scratch and completely reset Windows Update. So, that's what we're going to be doing today. But first, we got to pay some bills.
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Enter the product key you just purchased and hit Activate. Now you don't have to deal with that stupid watermark that come with running an unactivated copy of Windows 10. Now, on with the video. Now, the first method I'm going to show you today is super easy, and it comes built into Windows.
So, let's jump on the computer, and I'll show you what I'm talking about. Okay, so I'm going to show you the easy way to do this, which, for the most part, doesn't work most of the time. But that's okay, I'm going to show you how to do it anyway.
Go ahead and click on your Start button, click on Settings. And this should work in Windows 10 and 11, but I'm going to be showing you how to do it in Windows 11 because that's what I have running on my system right now. So we have to go into Settings, then we want to go into System, then scroll down into Troubleshoot, and then from Troubleshoot, we want to go to Other Troubleshooters. And then from there, we want to pick Windows Update from the list right here and just push the Run button.
And this will run the Troubleshooter for Windows Update in Windows 11. So it's going to take a minute to go through this, so I'm going to go ahead and skip to the end. Okay, so here's the end and it may find something for you or it may not. But at this point, you can go ahead and close the troubleshooter, go into Windows Update and check for updates to see if it worked. Now, what you're going to find in most cases is the troubleshooter is absolutely worthless. It's a great idea in concept, but I've never had a situation where the troubleshooter has actually solved a problem for me.
If you have, then make sure to mention it in the comments below. And I'm not just talking about Windows Update. I'm...
talking about literally every time I've used the troubleshooter. It's been worthless. But for the most part, when Windows Update fails to function, you're going to have to restart it manually. That process is unfortunately a little more complicated than the troubleshooter is, but it's really not that hard.
So let's jump back on the computer and I'll show you how to do it manually. Okay, so from this point, we're going to go ahead and close Windows Update and we're going to go ahead and click on the start button and type in cmd for our command prompt. and you want to make sure to run this as administrator. You can do that either by clicking on run as administrator here or right clicking and hitting run as administrator there and then go ahead and hit yes to your user account control and we should have an administrator command prompt open.
Now, the first thing that we want to do is go ahead and kill the services that are related to Windows Update and to do that you use the net command, type net, stop and then the first one is going to be bits and bits is the background intelligent transfer service. This is what allows Windows Update to transfer data between your computer and the Windows Update service. Then the next one we want to stop is the Windows Update service itself which is w u a u s e r v. Go ahead and hit enter and then this will stop the Windows Update service.
And then after that we want to go ahead and stop the application identity service. So this one, same thing, net stop. And then the name of the service is going to be appidsvc. And hit enter, and it'll go ahead and stop that service there. And it looks like in this case, that service hadn't been started anyway.
So that's okay. As long as it's not running, that's all we care about. So we're going to hit net stop one more time. And this time, we're going to shut down the cryptographic service.
And that's going to be cryptsvc. And go ahead and hit enter. and it'll shut down the cryptographic service.
Okay, so the next thing we need to do is actually delete some files here. So what we're gonna wanna do is use the CD for change directory and go to the root directory of the drive and you should be on your C drive here because most Windows installations are gonna be on their C drive. And then what you're gonna wanna do is go into the program data's directory. So type in CD, PRO and you can use the tab key to actually complete program files if you don't wanna type it all out and then hit enter.
And then next you want to go into your CD application data. And for some reason they get, oh, it's because I'm in the program files directory. Look right here.
Be careful that when you go into your program data, you're actually in the program data directory. So we're going to do this again. We're going to CD root. Program data. There we go.
Okay. Now we're in the program data directory and then we want to go into the Application data directory and then from this point we want to go into the Microsoft directory now if you run a directory here You'll notice there's nothing in this directory. That's because the files that are in here are hidden So what you're gonna want to do is type CD Microsoft and there you go. You're in a Microsoft directory, even though there was no files found in that folder So you have to type Microsoft out in that case then the next time The next folder we need to go into is CD Network. Hit enter and then go into CD Downloader and then hit enter.
And then from here you have a bunch of files in here and what you want to do is delete all of them. So you type del star dot star and then hit enter. Hit yes you are sure and then it'll delete everything in this directory. And as you can see now this directory is empty.
Now, We've got some other files that we need to delete as well. So we're going to go cd root. And then from here, we want to go into cd windows.
And then from windows, there's two folders we want to get rid of. The first one is the software distribution folder. And then the second one is the cat root 2 folder inside of system32.
And let me show you how to do that. There's two different ways we can do this. We can either rename the directories or we can just delete the directory.
So I'll delete one and rename the other so I can show you both options. So the first one we're going to do is we're going to... go ahead and rename the software distribution folder. So for that, simply type rename and then you want to type in software distribution and then space and then name it whatever you want. So in this case, I'm going to call it software underscore old and hit enter and it'll rename the software distribution folder.
Now at this point, we want to go into CD system 32. And then we want to either delete or rename the catroot2 folder. So on this one, I'm going to delete it just to show you the different options. So what you want to do is hit RM, DIR, this means remove directory.
And then we want to spell out catroot2. And then we want to use a couple switches here. What I'm going to use is I'm going to use the switch S.
And what this does is it removes the folder and... any sub files or folders that are inside that folder. And then also we can use another switch for Q to be quiet.
It's not going to ask me if I'm sure. I hit enter. It's just going to remove the directory.
So now that we've deleted a lot of the files, at least the cache files related to Windows Update, we got to go ahead and reset some security descriptors as well as re-register some DLL files and other things associated with Windows Update. Let me show you how to do that now. Okay, so this next section is a little bit complicated to do unless you have notes.
So I'm going to go ahead and leave my notes in the comments below so you can just copy and paste. However, it's a really good idea to make yourself a text document that you can transfer to the system with a thumb drive so you can copy these things in the future. Anyway, what you're going to do is this is the first command that you need right here.
It's this sc.exe, and it's essentially resetting the security descriptor with bits. This is the background intelligent transfer service. And the next one we're going to do is we're going to reset the security for Windows Update itself.
And for that, there you go. All I did was paste in something from my notes. And if you look right here, here's my notes. Here's where I have those two lines right here that I could copy and paste into the command prompt. Now, fortunately, there's nothing wrong with using your notes while you're doing a job like this because you know what?
Those commands would be impossible to remember if you need them on a regular basis. So go ahead and just keep them in a text document. to make it kind of easier for you to do this job later on in the future. So now that we've got the security descriptors reset, now we've got to go ahead and re-register a lot of the files that are associated with Windows Update.
Let's do that now. This next section right here is going to be a little bit more complicated. So since we're already in the system32 directory, we need to go ahead and open up a File Explorer window into system32. And to do that, all you got to do is from the command prompt type explorer period.
And what this will do is error out because I clearly spelled it wrong. You want to make sure to spell explorer correctly. So with explorer spelled correctly, just type explorer period.
And what this is going to do is open the current directory in file explorer. And there we are, system 32 folder. And then the next thing that we want to do is I'm going to jump back to my notes here.
And as you can see, we're going to be re-registering a lot of files here. So what we're going to do is we're going to make a batch file just to make this a little bit easier. So what you want to do is go ahead and select from your notes all the different commands that you got right here.
Go ahead and copy those. And then you want to create a new text document. And since I already have this in a text document, I'm just going to go File, Save As. And then right here, I'm going to go to my desktop.
And then from there, I want to make sure to save the file type as All Files. Make sure you don't leave it on Text Documents. Select All Files.
And then from here, I'm just going to type in wupdate. BAT for the file extension and then push the save button. And then once I've done that, I can go ahead and minimize Notepad. And then what I'm going to want to do is take this batch file that we just created and move it into the System32 directory.
So we're just going to grab it, drag it over, and drop it into System32. And then it's obviously going to want some security permissions in order to do this. So just go ahead and hit Continue and hit Yes to the User Account Control, and it should copy it in there. And at this point, we can go ahead and minimize this and go back to our command prompt.
Now, what we're going to be doing here, and as you can see from the notes, we're going to be running the command. that we use to register a different file. However, we're going to be using the forward slash s command to essentially make this do this silent because we don't want it jumping up and giving us pop-ups every single time we register one of these things.
Because essentially, if you do this without the s command, let me show you real quick. If we're going to go ahead and copy and then paste it in here, what it's going to do is we're going to get rid of the s right here. And then by doing that, it essentially gives us a pop-up every time we register another DLL file. And that's not what we want.
What we want it to do is we want it with the S to just do what we want it to do. So to run that batch file that we just created, what we're going to want to do is type whatever you called it. So in my case, it's wupdate.bat and hit enter, and it'll go through and re-register all of those components. Okay.
So now that we've re-registered all the components associated with Windows Update, It's a really good idea to reset your networking as well because your networking may be what's wrong with Windows Update. So let's jump back on and I'll show you a really easy way to do that. Okay, so to reset your networking, there's just a couple commands that I typically use to do this.
And the first one's going to be net sh winsock reset. Go ahead and hit enter. I'm going to go ahead and hit the up arrow to get my original command back.
And then after that, I'm just going to hit a space. and type in proxy. And then from this point, we're going to go ahead and reset our IP address. So for that, we're going to go net sh int ip reset. And then once that command finishes, we're going to go ahead and flush our DNS as well.
So we're going to go ipconfig forward slash flush DNS, hit enter. and it should flush our DNS cache. Now, at this point, it's a good idea to go ahead and restart your computer.
However, there's one more thing that we have to do, so you could do this as well and then restart afterwards. So we need to turn back on all the services we turned off at the beginning. So let's do that now. Okay, so what we did before is we used net stop at the beginning to disable the services for Windows Update. Now, in this case, we're going to do the reverse.
We're going to do net start. So go ahead and type in net. Start. Then bits for the background intelligent transfer service. I'm going to go ahead and give that a second for it to start.
And then once it starts, we're going to go ahead and hit net. Start. W-U-A-U-S-E-R-V for the Windows update service itself.
And once that starts, we're going to go ahead and type in net. Start. App ID SVC.
for the application identity service and once that starts we're going to go ahead and hit net start and then start the cryptographic service which is c-r-y-p-t-s-v-c and then hit enter and it looks like that service has already started so we can disregard that at this point and then we can essentially type exit close that we can minimize everything in our way click on the start button go into settings Go to Windows Update, and at this point, Update should work fine. Now, at this point, Windows Update should work fine. Well, that is, after you restart your computer. However, there are still some things that could cause Windows Update to still not work.
For instance, one problem that I've seen that is actually quite common is Windows Update will fail if the clock isn't set correctly. Believe it or not, Windows uses the clock to verify security certificates. So, If your date and time is incorrect, you can run into errors within Windows Update.
So make sure to set your clock. This problem tends to be more common when you initially install Windows, and it hasn't had a chance to automatically set the clock yet. And you know, there are other instances where you can have problems with specific updates.
And with these, you'll get codes associated with that update specifically. These error codes will typically be formatted with a zero, an X, and then a string of numbers. Normally, you can search Google for that specific error code and find a forum post or a help article or something else that can at least point you in the right direction to solve that issue. However, these ones tend to be the most annoying ones to fix because there's not a single method that can be used to solve these issues.
But each error code could be caused by multiple different issues or even several issues combined. In some cases... corrupted system files from within Windows can cause problems with Windows Update as well.
For that, I would recommend running the System File Checker. But don't just run SFC Scan now because it almost never works. Instead, check out this video where I show you the proper way to run the System File Checker.
The problem with SFC is that it only works as good as the source files it has available to it. If you have a corrupted image, that might be causing your SFC problems. Anyway, as always, You guys have a great day.