H
Homer J. Simpson
At some point in the recent past some update to the Automatic Updates
components took a turn for the worse, and I *really* wish MS would do
something about it.
I manually visit update.microsoft.com on all my machines on a regular basis
and let it update everything, so all my machines have the latest Automatic
Update components, and they all exhibit more or less the same behavior. All
running XP Pro.
I'll single out the worse machine (out of my half dozen)--a rather plain and
ordinary 2GHz laptop with 512MB RAM: *every* time I turn it on, one
instance of svchost.exe pins the CPU at 100% (always the one instance
hosting the Automatic Updates service, according to Process Explorer) and
remains pinned for a solid 5-10 minutes.
If I shut down the Automatic Updates service, CPU usage immediately drops
back to normal. As I tend to visit the site myself on a regular basis, my
machines are always pretty much up to date already and the automatic checks
at powerup are rather pointless.
Turn off the service however--how dare you, the sky will surely fall--and
you'll get Security Center warning tooltips in your face every 5 minutes.
If I manually go to update.microsoft.com, the scanning phase these days can
go for anywhere between 5 and 20 minutes of high CPU activity. WTH does it
think it needs to do to perform a software check on a clean machine that's
been recently reformatted and has had *nothing* reinstalled other than the
OS itself?
MS needs to look at performance optimization. It used to take *a lot* less
time, even when the machine had tons of crap installed. The more tweaks
they add to the Update components, the worse it's getting.
If it wasn't for the CPU hogging *every* time I boot up the machine, I'd
just let Automatic Updates do its job and let it run in the background--who
cares if it takes half an hour? But half an hour of the machine being
sluggish (especially when the end result is that there are no new updates)
is just unacceptable.
Okay, I'm done ranting.
components took a turn for the worse, and I *really* wish MS would do
something about it.
I manually visit update.microsoft.com on all my machines on a regular basis
and let it update everything, so all my machines have the latest Automatic
Update components, and they all exhibit more or less the same behavior. All
running XP Pro.
I'll single out the worse machine (out of my half dozen)--a rather plain and
ordinary 2GHz laptop with 512MB RAM: *every* time I turn it on, one
instance of svchost.exe pins the CPU at 100% (always the one instance
hosting the Automatic Updates service, according to Process Explorer) and
remains pinned for a solid 5-10 minutes.
If I shut down the Automatic Updates service, CPU usage immediately drops
back to normal. As I tend to visit the site myself on a regular basis, my
machines are always pretty much up to date already and the automatic checks
at powerup are rather pointless.
Turn off the service however--how dare you, the sky will surely fall--and
you'll get Security Center warning tooltips in your face every 5 minutes.
If I manually go to update.microsoft.com, the scanning phase these days can
go for anywhere between 5 and 20 minutes of high CPU activity. WTH does it
think it needs to do to perform a software check on a clean machine that's
been recently reformatted and has had *nothing* reinstalled other than the
OS itself?
MS needs to look at performance optimization. It used to take *a lot* less
time, even when the machine had tons of crap installed. The more tweaks
they add to the Update components, the worse it's getting.
If it wasn't for the CPU hogging *every* time I boot up the machine, I'd
just let Automatic Updates do its job and let it run in the background--who
cares if it takes half an hour? But half an hour of the machine being
sluggish (especially when the end result is that there are no new updates)
is just unacceptable.
Okay, I'm done ranting.