Switched PC on after 5 months

[alan_m]

Or working for a company that mandated turning off all computer at the end of the working day to save electricity.

[alan_m]

On the home version of windoze you cannot turn them off. You can pause them for x days but by doing this you are just stacking up multiple updates. Leaving the computer off for 5 months means that windoze will look for them on switch on and then spend many hours downloading, preparing the OS and then installing them.

[alan_m]

Different versions of windows have different update settings. On older versions of Windows it was possible for the user to turn off updates for ever. With Win10/11 "home versions" all you can do is pause updates for for perhaps 30 days but at the end of this period M$ automatically turns on the updates and downloads enough to make your machine unusable for many hours. The professional versions of Win10/11 may allow more flexibility and control.

[Martin Brown]

That is your problem. Get thee to a Cex and give it at least another 4gb (and get them in matched pairs so it runs at full bandwidth)

I am off to fix a machine in that state right now. 4GB ram the OS will run but it pages virtual memory for absolutely everything and it only takes a few GB OS "upgrade" to completely unhinge it for half a day.

Unfortunately Win 10 and 11 assume an infinitely thick pipe to the internet and resources on the PC to match. 8GB is the bare minimum that I would consider acceptable for Win10/11 and 16GB would be better.

[Fredxx]

Most items? Do any respond to a left-mouse click? Can you highlight an icon with a mouse click.

As others have said, perhaps best to leave for a time while updates occur.

[Robin]

There are different values of "off". Siting there waiting for the magic Wake-On-Lan package uses very little power.

[John Walliker]

Although not the problem here, there can be hardware failures that only become obvious after a machine has been off for some time. One that I encountered was a BBC Micro (maybe a Master) that would not start up after it had been on a shelf for about 6 months. It turned out to be a ceramic capacitor in the cpu reset circuit which had cracked encapsulation and had probably absorbed moisture. Touching its leads with a soldering iron fixed the problem. Leaving it powered up for a few days would probably have fixed it too.

John

[Martin Brown]

It will be the lack of enough ram that is hurt here though.

Win10 on 4GB ram is like wading through treacle even when it isn't applying updates. It will "run" but s/run/crawl/.

[Dave Plowman (News]

Battery in a cordless mouse dead?

[Jonathan]

Switching our 10 year old PC from a trad hard disk to a solid state one has been a miracle. It no longer hangs at all apart from the initial log in.

Lovelly, Jonathan

[Mike Halmarack]

Thanks for all the advice. After about 4 hours it came right and remains so.

[Paul]

The startup sequence for a little-used PC might be:

1) Disconnect network connection. Harder to do with Wifi. I just unplug my Ethernet cable. I noticed on my laptop, for example, laptop booting with Ethernet unplugged drew half the electrical power, of laptop with Eth connected. The CPU can't work quite as hard, without a network to abuse. 2) Start machine. 3) Windows Defender will still scan "critical areas" at startup. System32, Program Files, some parts of home directory. It will use the five month old AV definitions, which is fine, as we don't really care at this moment.

Sysmain (Superfetch) may still be running. In services.msc, you can stop the service if you want. It would only need to be stopped, if there was evidence it was railed or had gone nuts. It used to do that at one time.

SearchIndexer is pretty well always running. Paring down the area to be indexed, does not stop it. Killing the service with a club hammer, does not stop it. It ignores the "three times" rule. When the Windows.edb is three months old, it will rebuild it from scratch. The default settings for this, it should not be indexing very much of the disk. Only if you had some pathological situation with email (a million .eml files), could the thing become quite busy. It also has backoff, such that if the mouse is moving, it reduces its disk I/O rate. SearchIndexer is only rated for handling about 1 million files on a PC, indicating it does not scale well above that.

You could be pestered by the "every three day" dialog for "complete setting up this PC". Sometimes there is a pregnant pause until the dialog comes up.

4) OK, so if you've got any CPU bandwidth left, you open Settings and Windows Update, and find the setting for "Pause updates for 7 days" and it will tell you what date the pause ends. That is a button you can click. 5) Now, plug in network cable.

Using control-alt-delete, you can find the PID (process ID) of things that are busy, in the Task Manager Details tab.

In a terminal, try

tasklist /svc

and it should give a list of all the processes running. For a SVCHOST, the svc option lists the services inside the service host. For example, if a SVCHOST contains "wuauserv", then that is Windows Update Automatic Update, and it can be part of making the machine busy. So if Task Manager shows a SVCHOST using 100% of one CPU core, you check the tasklist and it is wuauserv, then that is to be expected in a situation like this.

Even delaying an update, does not stop a wuauserv. The OS feels a need to scan WinSxS (side by side servicing folder), looking for work. Like on Windows 7 , it could be doing something stupid like that, every couple hours. One difference is, the jumbo updates ("Cumulative") on Windows 10, were invented for the purpose of reducing the pathological conditions Windows 7 used to see. Windows Update (W7) on a 2GB memory machine, used to run out of RAM, leaving no space for a user to run Notepad.

By delaying updates for seven days, using the button, you *might* manage to get enough CPU bandwidth to do something.

If you have installed an AV, such as AVG or Avast or something, that takes the place of Windows Defender, and the table manners of those may be much worse than Windows Defender. All AVs should scan critical areas at startup - that is a given. It's the extra bollocks we could do without.

You control little of the machine you happen to own. If you have a powerful PC, with many many CPU cores, they'll still find as many ways to slow it down, as they can manage.

One of the reasons my single-core Windows 10 laptop is running an old version of Windows 10, is because a newer version would likely be too much for it. I gave the laptop an SSD drive, and that is only a partial help. It does not change the fact that the CPU is underpowered.

Paul

[Paul]

Updates are cumulative on Windows 10.

That means update .888 contains the effects of update .666 and .777. That's the "theory" at least.

What happens in practice, is you can see several Cumulatives listed on out-of-date PCs. It is possible the older ones (like from 2017) represent "stubs" that will quickly install and mark themselves off. Like, some sort of side effect from SSU (servicing stack update). The scheme does not seem to work in as pure a fashion as you might like.

But, whatever Windows Update calculates, it is 100% accurate.

Windows Update is not a mind reader - it does not read intent. It is only as good as the curated wsusscn2.cab file they make at Microsoft, to run it. A common complaint of IT personnel is "Microsoft, do a better job on these".

You can download Cumulatives on a second machine. I had to cheat here, by adding 22H2 to the search, to reduce the returned results to just a couple pages. The OP would not be in a position to cheat like that, as he won't know what exact version of Win10 is currently on the machine. "winver.exe" can tell you your version.

2022-11 Cumulative Update for Windows 10 Version 22H2 for x64-based Systems (KB5019959) Windows 10, version 1903 and later Security Updates 11/8/2022 n/a 687.0 MB <=== November Patch Tuesday

1903 18362.xxx \___ can find 362 and 363 stamped files on here 1909 18363.xxx / 2004 19041.xxx \ 20H2 19042.xxx \ 21H1 19043.xxx \___ all five versions could be stamped and in usage 21H2 19044.xxx / These are feature upgrades as much as anything, 22H2 19045.xxx / not a whole new OS.

If a .msu does not have the SSU for it installed, it'll tell you it's for the wrong machine. This can make it difficult to tell if an SSU is missing, or the file is an x86 instead of an x64. And the SSU is part of what requires a lot of Googling to figure out.

The whole purpose of manually updating, is to "feel you are in control". It's to prevent the OS from stopping for an hour at a time and not finishing the job like you would expect.

*******

Files that typically come in:

Cumulative for the month (base OS) Cumulative for .NET libraries (plus ngen will recompile assemblies - the win firewall is an assembly) Separate scanner for measuring the 50 most common malwares (mrt.exe can be run manually too) Windows Defender definition update [Metro App store updates occur via a separate mechanism] [Pictures for lock screen, may be a Metro App update]

After a five month absence, you'd expect to see most of that.

While you can "stage" some of that, put it on a USB stick and do it without a network connection on the target machine, it's a bit wasteful. The difference is, in terms of timing, you know the machine is working on the thing you fed it, instead of the usual "faffing about" approach it takes :-) Again, this is not much of an improvement. They never want you to feel like you're winning at this stuff. That's the objective.

Some Catalog files are executable .MSU files. Double-click and go.

And for older OSes, the files are .cab and a different install method is required in such a case.

There should not be any .cab ones on Windows 10. Windows 10 also uses SHA2 signing now, whereas Win7 had SHA1 signing at first, and SHA2 signing was added later (and is yet another reason for a Win7 update to fail to work, not having your SHA2 house in order).

Paul

[farter]

That's not going to see the mouse movement fine but not clicking.

Much more likely that the mouse button is now flaky.

Try a different mouse.

[farter]

Win10 works like that by default, basically because most users don't know enough to ask for updates.

[Tim Streater]

macOS notifies you in at least two ways. With a notification popup, and with update messages in the Apple menu. But all may be ignored.

[farter]

But the worst of the users just ignore it.

[wasbit]

You are obviously not familiar with Windows 10. Updates are the main reason I refuse to use it.

[Brian Gaff]

Will the keyboard shortcuts work? If they do then your issue is the mouse, Is it a wireless one or plug in. If keyboard shortcuts fail to work, then my next stop would be to look at the time and date etc, ie is the comes battery dead. Does it prompt for an anti virus update? Often out of date third party anti viurs programs can stop you doing anything until its happy its up to date.... I know too much hand holding of idiots. Other than that do another restart and see what happens. May sound daft but I've known this to work. Make sure its a cold start not a quick start. After than then you might need to find some other way in, but it sounds more like hardware than software to me at this point. Brian

[wasbit]

You are not restricted to just the Edge browser in Windows 10 & 11. I have Pale moon, Firefox, Librewolf & Brave installed. Just be aware that Microsoft will try its hardest to make Edge the default though.