The latest versions of Microsoft’s operating system, Windows 10 and 11, can be considered quite stable and meet the requirements of most users. However, Microsoft has not yet managed to completely get rid of the bugs that this software can suddenly present.
One of the biggest handicaps that the software giant has faced for years in Windows is that of updates. Of greater or lesser severity, the failures that these updates and patches send to Microsoft and that can affect our equipment continue to be more frequent than we would like.
All this despite the enormous efforts of the company itself to try to avoid them as much as possible. That is why we are going to show you a simple trick that you can carry out, for example, once a month, to avoid these problems that we mentioned regarding updates.
Stop Windows Update service
What we are actually going to do is clear the cache of these in Windows, and we will see how the failures when updating are reduced or even disappear.
In addition, we can perform this trick quickly and easily, even if we do not have much knowledge about the Microsoft system. Therefore, and to achieve this goal and avoid problems with updates, the first thing we will do is stop the Windows Update service. To do this, we write the following command in a run window that we open through the Win + R key combination:
services.msc
In the new window that appears on the screen we will have to locate the service called Windows Update, where we right-click to stop it.
Once this is done, we will be able to clear the cache corresponding to the operating system update function. Let’s see how to do it. We just have to access a specific location on our hard drive directly.
How to clear the Windows update cache
We open a new run window using the same keyboard shortcut we mentioned before. But in this case we are going to type the following command that corresponds to the disk location we mentioned:
C:WindowsSoftwareDistribution
As you can imagine, if you have Windows installed on another drive, you will need to use the corresponding drive letter. Next, you will open a File Explorer window already located in the folder that we are interested in clearing the cache.
Now we just have to delete all the folders and files here, which can sometimes be several gigabytes, to clear the temporary memory that interests us in this particular case. In addition to freeing up disk space, we are going to avoid a good part of the errors that usually occur when updating the Microsoft operating system through the aforementioned Windows Update tool.
We must not forget to restart the service we stopped previously to continue receiving updates.
