Idea 2: Shrink that even further by only caching the requested DLLs. Of course it means that we'll need to redownload the whole redist if we ever extract another file from it, but that seems reasonable enough to me. I think that should come out to about 40-50 MB total (it's 21 MB for 圆4 didn't check x86). The full list is: amstream, dxdiagn, esent, gdiplus, iertutil, mf, mfc40, mfc40u, msdelta, msftedit, oleaut32, pdh, prntvpt, qasf, qcap, qdvd, qedit, quartz, secur32, urlmon, usp10, webio, wininet, xmllite. Idea 1: Instead of caching the whole redist, cache the DLLs winetricks might extract from it and throw away the binary. This means that I do want to be able to frequently install quartz/qcap/etc. My use case (which admittedly is very unusual) for this redist in particular is that I like to use winetricks directshow and then run crosstests against native DLLs without a whole Windows installation. Feel free to close if none of these are to your liking. I'm opening an issue here to throw out a proposal or two wrt making it smaller. It'd be nice if we didn't have to save that whole 1.5 GB in cache. Haven’t tested with 32-bit Windows 7 or with Windows 2008 Server R2 (for which both patches are available).Both architectures together take up 1.5 GB, which is a lot. I tested this with a 64-bit Windows 7 SP1 installation. The second one contains the Windows Update fix. Note: without the first patch, the second one will refuse to install. At this time (again, circa August 2016) the fix seems to be manually downloading and applying these two updates, in this sequence.Īfter applying those patches (in sequence) to a clean Win 7 SP1 install, your initial check for Windows Updates should take less than 20 minutes and should not consume anywhere near 100% of one core.

Woody Leonhard suggested a couple additional workaround, neither of which work any more (circa August 2016).

That worked for some, for a while, then stopped working. Many workarounds were proposed, discovered, tested. Subsequently, anyone installing a clean copy of Windows 7 SP1 saw the initial Windows Update consuming 100% of one core, and running indefinitely.

In March or April 2016 Microsoft began changing something about the way it’s Windows Update service worked.

Win 7 sp 1