Fix Windows 7 Update issues

You may have read my Sept. 23 post describing how to install Windows 7 and update it, but what if you're working with a computer on which Windows 7 Update is simply broken? The procedure in that post -- which require installing specific updates manually -- may not work.

That happened to me this last weekend. The April 2015 Servicing Stack simply would not install, nor any other manual update. Then I found this article which describes how to clean up Windows Update on a Windows 7 system. It shows a script (a Windows batch file) which will clean out all the gunk. They even give you a link to download a .zip file containing the script.

I chose to follow Step 1, which involves opening Notepad, pasting in the code in the gray box, and saving it as a .bat file. It worked! Windows Updates could once again be manually installed. Note that I had already disabled automatic updates so they wouldn't block manual updates, as described in the Sept. 23 post, and as described by Microsoft here.

Then after a reboot, the "Check now" button in Windows Update works great! A few rounds of installing updates and rebooting, and the system is nearly up to date.

I hope these tips work for you ... and for me the next time I try them 😄
As usual, results are not guaranteed -- Anything you do to your computer is at your own risk, even if recommended by a well-meaning tech.

If these procedures seem daunting to you, call your favorite computer tech for assistance.

Windows 7 - fresh install - faster

Anyone who has loaded Windows 7 from scratch has probably found that it can take days for Windows Update to get the system up to date. Most of this time is Windows Update trying to figure out which updates you need, which is probably all 170+ of them.

Even Microsoft has acknowledged this problem. They have started packaging bunches of updates as "rollups" to try to tame the Windows Update problem. But, if you're installing Windows 7 from scratch, the rollups may not work for you. Attempting to install one might result in "this update is not applicable to your computer." #frustration!

This is what worked for me, starting with a refurbished Dell with bare Windows 7 - no service pack installed:

1. Boot the computer. Check the System control panel to see whether it's 32-bit or 64-bit. Check to see if Service Pack 1 is already installed.
2. Turn off Windows Update. Go into Windows Update and set it to never check. Turn off optional updates too, just to simplify the problem.
3. Restart computer to make sure Windows Update is not running.
4. If the computer doesn't say it's Service Pack 1, install Windows 7 Service Pack 1. It's KB976932, either x86 (500+ MB) or x64 version (900+ MB). It should install pretty quick (15 minutes, more or less) if you run it from the computer's hard drive or SSD. It will restart the computer and announce it's done.
5. Check Internet Explorer. the base Windows 7 comes with IE8, which Microsoft disavows. Install IE11 using the "live" installer or the offline installer.
6. Reboot the computer again, just to be sure.
7. Download KB3020369, the April 2015 servicing stack fix. Install it. This is needed to avoid the "not applicable" problem in the rollup.
8. Install the latest rollup, for example KB3172605, the July 2016 rollup.
9. Turn on Windows Update. This will initiate a check for updates.
10. For me today, it took somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half for Windows Update to find it had to 164 important updates to do. These downloaded and installed at reasonable speed.

All of the above took about 3 hours today. This is much less than the 1.5-3 days it has been taking recently to reload Windows 7.

I hope you have similar or better results.

Thanks to the members of the Oregon Computer Consultants Association and to HowToGeek.com for help with this sequence.

Securely erase hard drives

There are a variety of methods for erasing hard drives and SSDs prior to redeployment or disposal.

Among these are: 

• Manufacturer's utilities, e.g. SeaTools or WD Data Lifeguard or here
• CCleaner, a free utility for Windows, offers several disk wiping options (see picture below)
• DBAN, available on UBCD
• Acronis, either full product or WD version or Seagate version
• Parted Magic, a spiffy and easy to use Linux distro available onUBCD or Hiren's Boot CD

Most new hard drives and SSDs come with built-in erasure methods. These are often faster than external (e.g. DBAN) methods. If you want to use the built-in method, Parted Magic is the easiest way I know of to do it. There's a Disk Eraser icon right on the desktop. You just have to choose the bottom-most of the menu of methods.

If you want to learn about the manufacturer's secure erase, here's a really good commentary on it:

http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/62253/what-is-the-difference-between-ata-secure-erase-and-security-erase-how-can-i-en

When the article mentions hdparm, that's what Parted Magic uses to initiate the manufacturer's built-in erase.

As I write this, I'm using Parted Magic to do an enhanced secure erase on a 2TB Western Digital drive. It estimates that it will take 4 hours and 14 minutes to complete.

The article points out another method of "wiping" the drive -- use a good encryption method, and then lose the key. If the encryption method really is well implemented, anyone trying to read the disk will get pretty much random data.

- Jesse, Yellow Crayon LLC

It pays to do regular backups!

Heather, an office assistant at a local business, called to say that their customer list had become mis-sorted. Could I help them recover it from backups?

Yes, I talked her through the recovery process over the phone. This saved her hours of work vs. manually untangling the customer list. Of course, this wouldn't have worked if we hadn't set up automated backups less than a month before. We used SyncBackSE from 2BrightSparks, and set it to back up critical files every night. Heather recovered yesterday's version of the file, and is another happy client!