Over the past 3 years any Windows 7 computer with “Microsoft Update” enabled always seemed to have svchost.exe wuauserv service taking up 1GB+ of RAM and crunching the hard disk at some silly rate.
In the last ~12 months any Windows 7 computer with just plain “Windows Update” has started being as equally inefficient. I’ve always wondered why Microsoft have never “fixed” this pretty horrible issue. The pessimist in me thinks it is convenient for them and pushes people to upgrade to Windows 10.
Today I got bored and searched around. It seems that Microsoft have actually issued updates (seems that they are not part of the normal update cycle) which fixes this issue:
Update: The following may now be more suitable – 3189511
https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/kb/3102810
Download for 32bit: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=fcd6bf5d-f004-4ca3-aa7e-1de462b91dd0
Download for 64bit: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4fe566bd-31b1-4413-8c4c-412b52533669
Right now I’m applying several hundred updates to a Windows 7 machine that had previously been using 1GB of RAM to scan for updates. After the above manual Windows Update-Update it is now using, at most, 150mb of RAM.
They have even issued a couple of previous similar updates (now obsoleted by the above update)!
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3050265
and
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3065987
thecomputerperson 