What to do when Windows 7 appears to hang during the installation of updates?
1. Solve the Halting Problem
Obviously you ought to try to decide if the machine's really frozen. The main indicator you can look for is hard drive activity. If your hard drive LED is blinking, the machine's probably still doing something. If you don't have an LED, put your ear to the machine and listen for disk activity. Similarly, if you see heavy blinking on your network card, it may just be downloading some delicious MS-certified spyware (etc). If the machine really appears to be doing stuff, then leave it. If many hours (>5) pass with no change on the screen, it's probably hung.
2. Make a decision
Once you've decided your machine is indeed frozen, you have two basic choices:
- Pretend it's not frozen, until a power surge frees you
- Reboot (press your reset button, or hold in your power button for many many seconds)
It's just that simple.. If it's frozen, all you really can do is reboot and hope that your file system's in good enough shape that it takes care of everything. Else, you get go learn about recovering your data and reinstalling your OS.
Nothing is getting downloaded and the HD activity light blinks every so often but it's not as busy as it usually is for an update. – Nathan Osman – 2011-09-28T21:26:52.220
1Hope that you don't have an SSD :) – Marco Ceppi – 2011-09-28T21:28:57.523
Yeah George, I don't think there's much to do. You can wait or not. You probably have a journaled file system, so it's probably okay. Once you reboot, tell it to do a scandisk (will require another reboot). THEN, re-run Windows Update.. Maybe someone else with have a better tip, I kind of hope so, I just doubt there is one to give, sadly. – James T Snell – 2011-09-28T21:36:37.283
I have an SSD on pci-e... No hdd led, no sound, argh! – Fire-Dragon-DoL – 2013-09-15T18:40:49.007