Windows won't update? Fix it fast!

hi and welcome back to scotty's tech got info i'm scotty with my co-host cletus so windows 10 is okay um they're releasing more updates more frequent updates um but very often what happens is you try to install updates it gives you a little notification you click the button and it it looks like it's doing something your computer may even restart and then later it just gives you an error message and it says like something obscure like oh could not install windows update i mean blah blah blah um something went wrong obscure error code 8007 0 or whatever and then it gives you a retry button so you click retry and it looks like it's doing something it even looks like it's re-downloading the updates and again it just gives you the same error message so the question is what do you do to fix windows update so that you can actually get the updates the security updates the improvements uh when it appears to be broken well it turns out it's actually pretty simple okay so what we're going to do is we're going to clear out the windows update cache effectively so if you have windows update or your settings window open go ahead and close that first then we're going to do is we're going to click the start button and type services and we open the services app and okay the first thing we want to do is scroll down to the bottom and somewhere along here we're going to find windows update so you double click windows update and most likely will be running so you just click the stop button you wait a second and it goes no we want to stop it and then you click ok then you want to scroll up and find the background intelligent transfer service so probably scroll up like this background intelligent transfer service double click that and if it's running click stop here of course you can see it's not so okay we're fine then just click ok and then we can close the services window and then you come down and open file explorer we're going to go to your c drive the windows folder and then scroll down and find software distribution go into that folder and all we're going to do is select all of these files and folders right click and say delete working on it okay that's it now what you could do is actually restart the services blah blah blah don't do that just go ahead and come down and click start power and restart your computer and after you've restarted your computer you can click start settings go to update and security you'll have some kind of weird message you just click retry and poof your windows update will work again note that this little trick works in pretty much 99.9 percent of cases in a few cases uh yeah there may be something else wrong but the vast majority of the time this is a trick that works and the reason it works is because windows update downloads certain files it puts them in that software distribution folder and somehow they become corrupt maybe it was in the middle of downloading and you rebooted or some other thing was installing and something went wrong and the files became corrupted so all you're doing is you're stopping the two services that are actually downloading and trying to install the windows updates in the background and then you're just nuking all the files the temporary files that it's downloaded before installing them and then the reboot is kind of important because you'll notice that if you actually go and manually restart those services and try windows update again most of the time it's not going to work so turn off the services delete those files and then just immediately reboot and i found that that is the most effective way because the background intelligent transfer service will start automatically when it's needed and windows update is actually uh also going to start whenever it's needed so by rebooting you're pretty much done and you've saved yourself a few steps once you actually get windows update working again you may find that the windows updates actually kind of bork your computer and if that's the case you should see my earlier video where i explain what to do in the case that you've installed windows updates and suddenly you can't log into your computer the keyboard and mouse don't work whatever you can use system restore and i explain how to do that in that video so that you can again get yourself back up and running so yeah that's pretty much it it's not so difficult also if anyone wants to use the command prompt to do this i'll include a link in the description below to an article on my blog scotty's tech dot info where i explain how to do the command line commando version anyway that's it for more techy tips see scotty's tech dot info thanks for watching see you next time you

Channel: ScottiesTech.Info

Views: 128,011

Keywords: windows, windows 10, windows update, windows update error, BITS

Id: BPHnOM3Tnp0

Length: 5min 37sec (337 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 30 2021