Windows Update Clean-up large amount of files and taking a long time

[Koldov]

Not sure if this is a general issue, or specific to OS edition\version.

 

I have a laptop that is very rarely used at home, but I have also noticed it on machines here in shared areas that don't see a lot of action and on laptops used by staff who are only teaching maybe an hour a week.

 

I though I had better update the home laptop this weekend and although it took a while (not having been updated since August) it eventually did its thing...

 

Then I thought I'd do a disk clean-up. I did the 'Clean-up system files' options (as I rarely do it but knew it was an issue) and found that it had 133GB in Windows Update files!

 

 

All machines have 'Storage Sense' set to on, but have to say I don't know whether it actually ever touches these 'system' files, especially if they are only ever on for a short time.

 

The upshot is that it has been running for 2 days and hasn't finished cleaning up the files yet...

 

I imagined it has crashed/hung, but Task Manager still shows high CPU/memory usage for 'Windows Modules Installer Worker' and the figures are changing slightly every now and then.

 

I guess it's not an issue on my laptop as it has a TB drive, but smaller SSD drives would struggle!

[StevieM]

Yep. I did that on our DfE Dell laptops over half-term. They only have a 64GB drive and I still had to leave it running overnight!

[LeMarchand]

Had it take an hour or two, but never overnight - let alone 2 days!

 

Try Wise Disk Cleaner* first, then use Windows Disk Cleanup?

 

*OK for home, and (AFAICT) OK at work too.

[Koldov]

Yeah, normally OK on a decent spec device if done reasonably often, but once you start on the lower end i3 (or worse - yes we still have them) and 4 or 6GB ram ones that has GBs of updates to churn through it really grinds...

 

I think I read somewhere it has to go through each update and verify it (these examples although anecdotal go some way to explaining):

 

"Cleaning up windows updates is slow because it's not just a matter of deleting files. The Windows component store contains a lot of hard links that need to be resolved."

 

"Also there are normally a lot of compressed files in the component store, Windows doesn't just delete them, it has to first decompress, selectively delete, then re compress any remaining files. This I believe is what takes the longest time to perform."

Edited November 20, 2023 by Koldov