Upgraded 3 XP-era PCs with clean installs of Windows 7 for a client yesterday.

One of the 2GB machine (Core 2 Quad processor – so a few years old) displayed a low-memory warning when it tried to apply the 136 updates. What was frustrating was that this was after about 2.5 hours of processing to figure which updates to download and apply, and about 1.5 hours into applying them (at the 124th update or something like that).

Another machine also wouldn’t go past 99% when downloading the updates, even after an hour of waiting at 99%.

Solution: Apply the downloads in batches (rather than in one go – which is very taxing for even brand new computers), but in a bit of a manual way.

1. Stop the download, or the update; not by killing the process but by pressing ‘Stop’ in the Windows Update window. Windows Update seems to be able to handle interruptions.
2. Shut Down the machine – and Windows will apply whatever updates it has already downloaded.
3. Once the updates are finished (it’ll take a while if its a fresh install), change the Windows Update setting to check for updates in the next hour – and leave the machine on for a while for it to detect the next ‘batch’ of updates.
4. Repeat.