Windows 10 Update - Frozen at Downloading 100%

I have advocated on this forum in the past to always run all the W10 updates. I have to come clean now. While I still advocate running all the updates, I have been fighting to update my PC for the last week and I've finally made it to the second last major revision: 1809. When 1809 first came out there were problems and I'm one of the few who suffered data loss. I recovered from that but was left with a PC that wouldn't update. Almost a year later I decided it was now or never. The vast majority of people would have wiped their hard drive and started over, but I have too many legacy programs that would be impossible to recover. I can't give you the entire story but I was left with a partial install of a W10 component that I could neither disable or delete. Ultimately I decided to break it even more and then I was able to disable it. Many thanks to the members of the Windows 10 support forum who helped interpret the setup logs and find the errors.

So to those of you complaining about how long a major update takes, I agree with you. I've done it at least 20 times in the last week.

I have not yet decided when to attempt the upgrade to 1903 (the latest version). I think I'll let the dust settle for a few days.

T18skyguy wrote:
I got a Google Pixel Book and I never have to mess with all that. Not a single hourglass or beach ball ever.

My wife and I have between us two Google Pixel phones, a Samsung tablet, an Ipad Mini, a Chromebook, a laptop and PC with Windows 10 and a PC running Linux Cinnamon. None of that has anything to do with the subject of this thread. :)

I got a Google Pixel Book and I never have to mess with all that. Not a single hourglass or beach ball ever.

Lower left corner, "clean up system files"
Make sure there is check mark in the boxes. It will clean system files, then comes back to clean up. Then do clean up. Make sure the boxes are checked for what you want to delete. Make take a while for first time

enblethen wrote:
Make sure you do disc cleanup!

I just let Win 10 update on both my laptop and desktop and it ran OK and didn't take near as long as some here report.

I agree with enblethen about disc cleanup with one caveat. After I saw that the Windows update finished and all was well I wanted to do a disk cleanup and get rid of the Windows.old folder that wastes a lot of disk space. I went directly to Disk Cleanup that gets you to this window:


Apparently the above window is not the route to a real disk cleanup in Windows 10 version 1903 (and maybe earlier versions). It doesn't offer deleting the Windows.old folder as an option as it used to. And if you try to just delete the Windows.old folder it fails due to lack of authorization.

After some online searching I found that this is the path to success:

- Go to Settings - System - Storage that will get you to this window in which you should turn Storage Sense on at the top if it is not already on and then click on then click on Configure Storage Sense or run it now.


That will get you to the window below. Here you can configure Storage Sense to your preferences. No option is visible on this image to delete Windows.old because I have already deleted it on my system, but this method works flawlessly when you click on the things you want to clean up including the delete of Windows.old and click on Clean Now.


Hope this helps someone as it was a little frustrating to me until I found this path.

Make sure you do disc cleanup!

original poster here. I shut it down after another 2 hours. Started the download up again this morning for about 1.5 hour, then shut it down again to hit the road. Started it up again just before 3 p.m.. Finished downloading in 10 minutes, then took 3 hours to install with 5 or 6 reboots. Just got up and running and I'm checking things out now.

My Windows Surface updated yesterday. I took it out of the storage bin and decided to update it. I do that one or twice a year as I only use it once a year anyway to do taxes. It took several update sessions to finally get to the new version, but all worked well, several hours though.

The most expensive PC I ever bought was a IBM PC AT with 16 meg of memory, and a single diskette drive. Had to pay extra for a huge for the time 20 meg hard drive, total cost was over $6K.

I currently use my iPhone or iPad for 99% of what I need to do. For the most part everyday they just work, I don’t have to worry about constant updates for security purposes. Are they perfect, heck no but my experience with them over the last 5 years is so much better that the 20 plus years with Windows. I have only touched a Mac once while helping out a friend and it was not a pleasant time.

My main laptop computer got updated on Tues and the other one I use for social media only came in on Wed. All went smooth on both units...

Roy Ken

Any luck? I would try to wait 24 hours before you pull the plug.