Windows XP Update Tricks & Tips

Posted on: April 23rd, 2009

In the course of servicing about over 1,000 computers I’ve run into bugs with Windows Update quite a few times. Vista is better in this respect, besides one really odd case I didn’t have much trouble with it so far.

Here’s a collection of some tools and procedures that I found to be useful when dealing with Windows Updates issues in XP.

The first tool I found very useful is called Dial-A-Fix. Can be downloaded from: http://majorgeeks.com/download4899.html

When you start it you’ll get this screen:

Unfortunately the program was really made for geeks so it’s full of abbreviations. But in order to deal with Windows Update issues you’d need to know only two parts.

Conveniently, I marked them on the screen shot.
1. When the update process keeps failing, or can’t be started, etc:
Click the check box marked with red “A”. If you check this it will automatically check a bunch of other ones (things that are related to Windows Update). Then click on “GO” and let the process go through.

2. Second thing to try is cleaning out the cache of Windows Updates, which is called SoftwareDistribution. If you click on “Flush SoftwareDistribution” it will give you an option to clean only the downloaded files & leave the Update History alone (the “Yes” option), or the whole bunch (the “No” option).

Note: You can do that second option without Dial-A-Fix if you stop the Automatic Updates service and then delete the “C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution” folder. But do this only if you’ve taken the usual precautions and you know very well what you are doing, because messing around in the \Windows\ folder can be catastrophic!

The Necessary Services

Now, another issue I’ve seen with Windows updates is that it’s not working because someone (or more rarely something) disabled the services necessary for it to run. One time I worked on a computer where a previous Tech person “speeded the computer up” by disabling a whole bunch of Windows services took me a while to get it running again. To check on the running services type “services.msc” in the Run box (Start->Run).

Here you should have the following services listed with Automatic startup type:

Automatic Updates
Background Intelligent Transfer Service
Cryptographic Services

If these are not running then you will have problem with Windows Updates.

The Date

This is a bit bizarra at first: if your computer’s date is off then Windows Updates will fail. It usually needs to be way off this to happen though.

Why is that?

The explanation lies in the way Windows downloads updates. It uses secure web protocols (HTTPS for the techies) which contains a check for website certificates. If the date is off then this check will return a result saying that the certificate is not valid because Website certificates do expire after a period of time.

The fix is simple: right click on the clock on the bottom left of the screen and select Adjust Date and Time.

Jumpstarting Automatic Updates

I’ve noticed with freshly installed XP machines with SP2 (Service Pack 2) that automatic updates won’t get started until the first batch of updates are manually downloaded and installed. This is probably because the update service itself needs to get updated in order to communicate with Microsoft’s servers. The quickest way to the Windows Updates website is: Start -> All Programs -> Windows Updates.

Update Errors for .NET

Recently I came across update issues with .NET updates. For these I found that the .NET cleanup tool works the best: http://cid-27e6a35d1a492af7.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Blog_Tools/dotnetfx_cleanup_tool.zip

This will cleanup the faulty .NET framework version. If the problem is, let’s say, with version 1.1 and you already have 2.0 or 3.5 installed then just get rid of version 1.1, using the above tool. Otherwise remove .NET framework and reinstall.

So far this fixed all the .NET update issues.

What If These Don’t Fix It?

If you went through all these and you just can’t seem to run Windows Updates then it indicates a serious system corruption – usually you’ll find many other odd behavior in your computer. The only workable remedy I know in that case is: backup and do a clean install of Windows.

Preventing The Installation of Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3)

SP3 is a collection of SP2 updates up to a certain date and some modifications in the activation process of Windows. Because of the latter a few people reported that they got locked out from their computer after installing SP3.

The thing is it’s not necessary to install SP3. If you have SP2 and got all the updates on it you’ll have all the necessary security patches. So far I’ve not seen any software that would work only on machines with SP3 installed. SP2 was a much more major upgrade and many software will only run if you have your XP upgraded to SP2. It’s not the case with SP3.

So here’s a little trick I found that makes it easy to prevent SP3 from automatically getting downloaded and installed on your computer
- Go to http://update.microsoft.com/ (That website works exclusively with Internet Explorer!!)
- Select the “Custom” option. It will show you two options: SP3 and everything else.
- Click on “Download SP3″ when the popup window comes up asking you to agree to the End User License Agreement, select the “Decline” button! And then check the option that you don’t want to be notified about this update again.

This way you don’t have to wait until the whole thing downloads to say NO.

I hope this article will help out some folks with Windows Update problems.