X61T Finally Close to Finished

[Pete B]

Finally got a battery for my X61T, flashed the BIOS to Middleton with CTRL
swap, installed an Intel 5300 wifi card and it is running fine with Win 7 64.
Thinking of cloning the drive to an SSD then upgrading to Win 10 and
keeping the image of the old Win 7 drive just in case I want to go back.

Planning to try it out as a music server where the touch screen and Win 10
will be a nice features.

Thinking about a big 480-512 GB SSD.

Have not updated Win 7 since early 2015 and it seems stuck, going to leave
it on for a week or so, since overnight didn't fix it. Then try some more
drastic measures.

[axur-delmeria]

Some have reported up to 18 hours for updates.
Sometimes a fresh installation plus the updates mentioned in this article will result in less waiting for the updates to start downloading.

[whitelabel]

There's a nice update pack available (A). You can use it to update your machine in auto mode.
Also there's utility called Windows Updates Downloader (B). You can use it to manually download and install updates.

(A-1) http://update7.simplix.info (russian)
(A-2) http://forum.oszone.net/thread-257198.html (russian)

(B) http://www.windowsupdatesdownloader.com

Both methods are way too fast than using regular WU to update your machine to the actual version.

HTH

[Billaboard]

Certainly the standard Windows update is becoming virtually unusable. I've just spent 2 days with an Acer Vista laptop, last used in October 2015. When it finally found and installed the updates, 7 installed successfully, 30-something failed.

Previously I'd tried to get it to recognise and install drivers for 2 new printers, which via the MS method should involve the update button in the printer dialog. That just sat there for 6 hours until I gave up and went to the Dell and HP websites and downloaded drivers from there.

I'm still wary of non direct from Microsoft updates, though.

[Pete B]

Thanks everyone, some new ideas to try.

I left it on for something like 36 hours and it finally came out of it with just
over 100 updates. I'm installing them 10 at a time since from past experience
all at once does not seem to work.

Left it on after doing 20 updates, with it set to automatically update, came back
12 hours later and the rest of the 80 were done. The first 10 or 20 after SP1 are
touchy, in fact I think that the first 6 updates had to be done in that small of a
block, then 10, then it went automatically.

[tarvoke]

Thanks everyone, some new ideas to try.

I left it on for something like 36 hours and it finally came out of it with just
over 100 updates. I'm installing them 10 at a time since from past experience
all at once does not seem to work.

Left it on after doing 20 updates, with it set to automatically update, came back
12 hours later and the rest of the 80 were done. The first 10 or 20 after SP1 are
touchy, in fact I think that the first 6 updates had to be done in that small of a
block, then 10, then it went automatically.

glad it eventually survived! - recently I tried pulling a non-thinkpad win7 machine who had not been updated since 2014 and it just was not happening. thanks, MSFT.

I ended up having to use a 3rd party tool -
http://download.wsusoffline.net/

[Shredder11]

I use the same WSUS tool as well and have done for years; a very simple and effective tool which also blocks certain updates that are deemed bad enough to be blacklisted. You can also edit the blacklist but I have not tried that yet, e.g. to manually block those Win 7 and 10 telemetry stuff. Another useful thing is that sometimes I have been unable to use the built-in Win 7 update facility or the online MS webpage version, and so the third party WSUS program has been a life saver.

[tarvoke]

I use the same WSUS tool as well and have done for years; a very simple and effective tool which also blocks certain updates that are deemed bad enough to be blacklisted. You can also edit the blacklist but I have not tried that yet, e.g. to manually block those Win 7 and 10 telemetry stuff. Another useful thing is that sometimes I have been unable to use the built-in Win 7 update facility or the online MS webpage version, and so the third party WSUS program has been a life saver.

yeah, I left windows update running for 12 hours, several different times, e niente. I also tried the windows-update-official-MS-troubleshooting/repair, which apparently used to be the way to fix this, but it also ran for half a day or more, 'nd auch nichts. tried all the alternative MS-approved "fixes", yeah bonne chance.

wsusoffline was a bit jiggly and needed to be run 3 different times with reboots each time (initial main thing was that it wanted IE11 where I have been sticking with v9 for, well, years lol) - Torsten Wittrock FTW, it's MSFT to blame for the jiggliness I think

[Pete B]

The MS update troubleshooter runs forever on my systems when they are stuck,
and I have had a few that needed 24 hrs+ to finally update. I would let it run at
least a full 24 hours. I have at least one system where I stopped using it in March,
which was the last time it had updates applied but it would not update again, just
a few days ago.
Had to do the above 24+ hours and it finally found 34 updates to apply but when I tried
to apply them it would hang in the downloading, with the percentage stuck at 0%
even overnight. It would not go when I had all 34 or even 20 updates selected.
When I selected all the April updates, it went, then all the May and June, it went,
and so on. Now it is fully up to date and I hope with ms update in a better state.

[Pete B]

Some have reported up to 18 hours for updates.
Sometimes a fresh installation plus the updates mentioned in this article will result in less waiting for the updates to start downloading.

This does seem to work best, tried it on one system and the updates just
work every time. If the above systems continues to hang I'll do a fresh install.