Home
German version of this page
TL;DR: There's only one change to previous month due to May Patchday: KB3153199 joins the list.

Validity/Coverage

Valid as of: May 2016 (2016-05-10)
Valid until (presumably): Jun 2016 (2016-06-14)

This HowTo is valid for Win7 SP1 and Vista SP2, which have been newly installed or haven't been updated for some time. It should also help on systems that were up-to-date last month - just install the missing updates from the list below in this case.

These instructions were only tested on Win7 SP1. However, the list of updates should speed up the search for updates on Vista SP2, too.

Solution to the issue

The term "solution" might be a little bit exaggerated, since the following HowTo only tries to make sure that the Update Agent doesn't need to check all updates, so the check for new updates is done faster. Futhermore, it's only a temporary solution; most likely the issue will appear again with the next Patchday.

Install the following updates BEFORE letting Windows search for updates, to avoid this very search taking "forever":
KB Win7 x64 Win7 x86 Vista x64 Vista x86
KB3153199 Download Download Download Download
KB3145739 Download Download Download Download
KB3078601, "loyal" companion since August 2015 Download Download Download Download
KB3087039 Download Download Download Download
KB3109094 Download Download Download Download

On newly installed Win7 SP1 systems it's not really necessary to install the updates from the list above; it's sufficient to install any of the current Windows Update Clients (December 2015 or later) from the table below. But since the updates from the list will be installed automatically anyway, it doesn't matter if they're installed manually beforehand.

To reduce memory and CPU usage while searching for updates, the following updates should be installed as well:

Steps to take after Windows installation

Some automation

To ease the pain of installing multiple systems you can use e.g. this script. Put the script and all updates in the same directory - a USB flash drive or network share may be a good place. The script determines the Windows version (Vista or Win7), its architecture (32 or 64 bit) and so on. It makes use of the command given above. Just double-click the script - after you've disabled automatic updates (see above) - and it installs all required updates automatically, including the latest Windows Update Agent (if present). Reboot the system after the script is finished, and you're done. Re-enable automatic updates as needed.

If you intend to install Windows Updates on a whole network of systems, it's probably better to use some dedicated solution for this, e.g. WSUS Offline Update, which already installs the prerequisites in current releases.

Misc

Thanks to T. Wittrock, author of WSUS Offline Update, Denniss and the community.

Regards
Dalai

Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional