There are a lot of many instances where this process eats up a lot of your resources such as CPU, Memory or Network. There may be many causes for this behavior. Your update client might have a conflict or Windows might just be checking for any possible update. We have listed down various solutions to help with this process. Take a look.
Solution 1: Waiting for Windows Update to Check
Before resorting to any technical solutions, you can wait a little while. It is possible that the computer is checking for possible updates with Windows servers. After a while, the process should itself slow down and keep running in the background. However, if the behavior continues for several hours, you can start executing the solutions below.
Solution 2: Restarting Update Service after deleting downloaded content
We will disable the Windows update service momentarily so we can delete the content already downloaded by the Update Manager. Then we will delete the contents of Software Redistribution folder. After we restart the service, Windows will check which files are already downloaded. If it finds none, it will start the download from scratch. Most of the time, this solves the problem and the service doesn’t consume that many resources.
Disabling Update Service
There are two methods to disable the Windows Update Service. You can follow any one of them for your ease of access.
Method 1: Using services
Method 2: Using command prompt
Deleting downloaded files
Now we will navigate to Windows Update directory and delete all the updated files already present. Open your file explorer or My Computer and follow the steps. C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution
Note: You can also instead rename the software distribution folder. Name it something like “SoftwareDistributionold”.
Turning Update Service back on
Now we have to turn the Windows Update service back on and launch it again. Initially, the Update Manager might take a few minutes to compute details and prepare a manifest for the download. Now if you used method one to turn off Windows Update, also follow method one here. If you followed method two, follow method two.
Method 1: Using Services
Method 2: Using command prompt
Note: Always run the command prompt and the services tab as an administrator. You might experience an error if you forget to use full authority.
Solution 3: Installing the Updates Manually
Before we resort to uninstalling the required updates, we can check if solving the updates manually fixes the problem at hand.
Solution 4: Uninstalling the Installed Updates
If you are experiencing this problem after installing a recent update, we can try uninstalling this before we resort to disabling the process completely. Make sure to make a restore image of your windows before resorting to this solution. That way you can always roll back if anything goes wrong.
Solution 5: Disabling Windows Update Service
If all the above solutions don’t work, we can try disabling the Windows Update Service. Do note that after this method, your update client will not run automatically nor will your Windows update itself.
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