I'd rather "waste time" once, fixing it, than waste time forever afterwards having to manually check. And it's likely I WILL forget, in time.

It seems ridiculous knowing there's a service that stops me having to remember, but not being able to get it to work for some reason.

It worked fine for years. All the more reason I'm likely to forget. When you've spent years not having to think of something, because you knew you'd always be told, it can easily slip your mind that now you must check manually.

wuaserv is definitely running.

BITS is showing as stopped, but won't let me manually restart it - comes back with "access denied".

Will check out your link in a bit - need a bite to eat.

Edit: Right, I've just managed to start BITS this way, which was not allowed from the Task Manager.

Crazy, as I'm still logged in as the same user, so no difference in authority - only in where I'm trying to do it from.

It's now showing as running in Task Manager,

Still not getting the option to put the icon back on the task bar.

/Sigh

Edit again: I'm not sure it was essential, since I didn't want it to download files automatically - that was the whole point of wanting notifications - so I can review and choose manually.

Whether I allow automatic download shouldn't affect notification - or should it?

Edited by TLM (Tue 28-Jun-16 13:00:25)

There's been many posts about this problem over the years.

One fix has been to delete the contents of the C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution folder, reboot and see...

Another has been to change Windows Updates to NO. Then reboot. Then change to Notify (or whatever).

All these seem to kick the mechanism into correct behaviour. There are others.

I recall having had the problems 2 or 3 times with Windows 7 and have always managed to get it going again properly. Now running Win10 - so completely different.

I think I have also cured it before - but as I mentioned originally, can't remember how (it certainly wasn't anything heavy like editing the registry).

But whatever fix I previously did doesn't seem to have been a permanent solution, because it's reverted to not notifying.

It's dangerous, because I'm not aware that it's failed. If you don't get any notifications, you just assume there's nothing to be notified of, and not that the notifier has stalled.

It's only when they've been absent for a suspiciously long time (months, in this case), that I've become curious, and realised I have a backlog of updates - many of them important.

I have also found a lot of forum discussions about it, but no universally agreed fix.

It's interesting that many users are complaining this only started happening when Microsoft began aggressively pushing Windows 10. (See MHC's thread about underhand tactics).

The timing does seem a little suspicious, when it's something that's worked for literally years. Although I must admit, I can't immediately see how discontinuing the notifications would trick or encourage anyone into installing Windows 10.

Perhaps they hope that users who used to rely on the prompts will respond by setting everything to automatic (don't prompt me), giving Microsoft a free hand to install whatever they like?

Edited by TLM (Tue 28-Jun-16 14:10:12)

Just wondered if there's any update to this?

You think she should have sent us a notification?

Might be worth a check to see if something has been diabled?

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-disable...

Sorry, I forgot to check the thread for a few days (and no, I didn't have notifications enabled - for thread replies. )

I still haven't got a fix. After I gave it the OK to install all the detected updates I'd been missing because I wasn't notified, I very briefly got the update icon back.

I also got the unwanted Windows 10 upgrade icon, which I swiftly removed from the task bar (sorry, I think I really mean system tray, but have been calling it task bar throughout), to avoid pressing it accidentally! I do NOT want to upgrade to Windows 10, as I think a lot of my existing software will be incompatible.

Anyway, any progress was shortlived, as I notice the upgrade notification has disappeared again, and it's not in the set of hidden icons either.

And if I open Windows Update manually...you guessed it: there are important updates in there again, which I wasn't notified of.

Intensely frustrating. I hate it when something worked perfectly for years, then just stops, and you never find out why.

Worth a try, but it's not on there to enable or disable.

I'm just installing the updates I've found out about manually, and the updates icon briefly reappeared in the system tray to tell me it was downloading them, but immediately disappeared.

Whilst it was actually still in the act of doing something, I found the icon reappeared in the selection of customisable icons, so I've set it to show icon AND notifications (was previously just notifications) - see if I can detect the exact circumstances when it self-destructs again!

It's still in the tray...for now...but it's still busy installing. I'll have to see if it vanishes on completion.

You are saving/OK'ing at each level where it is available when coming out from setting the notification/display parameter? Not just backing out?

Edited by RobertoS (Thu 07-Jul-16 00:34:51)