Flashed up my laptop this morning, it applied loads of updates and then rebooted itself a couple of times.

It is now painfully slow.

Can I do anything about it?

Traditional answers:

1: Apple
2: Linux

<Goes off to boot up son’t 8.1 laptop to assess the damage>

system restore to the pre update status…. then avoid future updates.

as i type this my machine is downloading nearly 1gb of windows updates 🙁

Yes on a windows 7 laptop.

You can roll it back if you have a restore point.

Great. Just had to do a complete restore after it cocked up the last set of updates.

If I do a System Restore and switch off auto updates, how do I know which ones are important for security and apply them?

It’s W7 64 bit.

Just rebooted my work laptop, no problems at all.

No problem here. Mine is just set to Auto Update and has never had any problems. Also W7/64

If I do a System Restore and switch off auto updates, how do I know which ones are important for security and apply them?

You don’t. That’s the point of auto updates.

1Gb of updates is ridiculous – you’ve done something wrong. Either not used the PC for years or not had auto updates for years.

A possibility is to roll back, turn off auto updates, wait a couple of weeks then turn them back on, in the hope that whatever dodgy one was causing the issues is fixed. That is, if it’s an update that is the issue and not something borked on your PC.

Can I do anything about it?

You could tell us which update it was.

You could search google to see if anyone else is reporting problems ( search for the KBxxxxxxxx name of the update.

If I do a System Restore and switch off auto updates, how do I know which ones are important for security and apply them?

if you can get as far as turning off windows updates then it’s only an extra click or two to see the list of available updates and only select the security related ones.

If I’ve not used the PC in a while I’ll install updates one at a time. I tend to find that installing them all at once can cause a few headaches. It takes a bit longer but it’s less hassle in the long run.

yes, though it’s working OK now. One of the updates will not install for some reason but i don’t care. AS soon as it finished, it decided there were some more to download and install. And then some more..

That said, i’ve just stopped a load of programes running from startup and taken everything off the desktop and cleaned the disk up and my computer is now running within reasonable speeds!

I have rebooted a few times and things are better. Not sure how that works?

Nope, just a big roll-up of updates it seems (possibly a road-mapped Spring update?). Mine was last checked 4 days ago and today there’s ~1GB of updates, mostly Windows and Office.