If Win 7 or Vista users are seeing the ' Checking for updates.' phase of their Patch Tuesday updates run for long periods (sometimes for several hours) before it reports that updates are available for download, Woody Leonhard's InfoWorld article Windows 7 update scans taking forever? KB 3153199 may solve the problem has a workaround that apparently works for many Vista users as well. Kudos to Vista1972, who posted that link in the VistaForums thread windows update just seems to hang while checking. The Microsoft TechNet just posted an article titled Simplifying updates for Windows 7 and 8.1 about a new rollup for Win 7 SP1 that includes all updates as of April 2016, as well as an upcoming change that will see all non-security updates for Win 7 SP1 and Win 8.1 combined into a single monthly update.
