Windows wanting to update everyday

[Steve M]

Every single time I boot up my laptop, I get the icon in the bottom right corner saying that windows Vista is updating. It starts at 0% complete and gets to twenty - odd complete then vanishes and there is no sign of any updates completed. It does this every day and seems to be really slowing my computer big style. How can I stop this?

[DaveLembke]

Enter Control at Start Run
Goto Automatic Updates

Change Setting radio button to "Download updates for me, but let me choose when to install them"

Click Apply, then OK

* This will stop it from trying to update every day and you will just see a blat at the bottom that will not take away from performance. You then can click on the blat when you are ready for the system to actually update. You may also see why it fails if it is an update that is failing this way vs it just disappearing.

Below is a pic of the interface for XP which is very similar for Vista and 7. Mine is greyed out because I am not the admin of gov workstation. 

[recovering disk space, attachment deleted by admin]

[patio]

Sounds like you have a connection issue and none of the updates are able to complete...

[Computer_Commando]

It's WUS issue, happens all the time on my Windows XP boxes but never on the Win7 box.  Go to Internet Explorer--Windows Update (or Microsoft Update).

[Steve M]

Thanks for your replies, people! Computer Hope forum has always been my first stop for solutions to stuff like this.

I went into my control panel and changed the setting so updates would load only on one day per week, instead of everyday. There was also an update waiting to download so I started it off. It hung there for quite a while then finally got to 24%, then it failed and I got an error : "WindowsUpdate_80070017" "WindowsUpdate_dt000"
I suspect it may be this particular update constantly wanting to download and constantly failing and trying again that is causing this issue. What can I do to resolve this?

[soybean]

Try selecting only one update at a time for installation.  This might reveal a particular update that's causing the problem.  If you identify the culprit, post back with the KB# and perhaps we can help research it.

Also, you can click on a hyperlink shown for each update; the links go to Microsoft.com and provide some info. 

[patio]

A quick search also turned up an issue with this update if your browser Cache is full...try emptying it and retry

[Steve M]

A quick search also turned up an issue with this update if your browser Cache is full...try emptying it and retry

Well, so far today I've had no updates pestering me, so hopefully that has resolved itself. For now...

By the way how do I empty my browser cache? Is that something I should do regularly?