Delete downloaded win 10 update files

When you run into issues though with updates, you may spend hours or even days figuring out what is going wrong. In such case, you can try to delete downloaded Windows Update files to start over. The SoftwareDistribution folder contains files related to updates obtained via Windows Update, it is present on all versions of Windows.

It could have a couple of hundreds megabytes of size. But if this folder is much larger, this indicates that some updates are corrupted. Restart Windows 10 and check for updates. See if this fixed your issues. The command net stop wuauserv stops the Windows Update service. The del command erases the contents of the Download folder and its subfolders. Finally, the last command, net start wuauserv , starts the Windows Update service again.

Download the file. Winaero greatly relies on your support. You can help the site keep bringing you interesting and useful content and software by using these options:. If you like this article, please share it using the buttons below. It won't take a lot from you, but it will help us grow. Thanks for your support! Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer from Russia who started Winaero back in On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software.

Follow him on Telegram , Twitter , and YouTube. Select them all, and tap the delete key. You will need administrative rights to delete these files. If the files fail to delete, boot into safe mode and try again. The files in the Download folder may, or may not be files needed to update Windows Right-click the Download folder and select Properties from the context menu.

In the General tab, check the size of the folder. If the size is considerably large, then they are probably update files. If an update is constantly failing to install on your system, you can check what the size of the update is and match it with that of the Download folder. Delete them and Windows 10 will download them fresh. Note: You can also instead rename the software distribution folder.

Now we have to turn the Windows Update service back on and launch it again. Initially, the Update Manager might take a few minutes to compute details and prepare a manifest for the download. Windows maintains an XML file to keep track of all the update files downloaded, or currently in queue to be downloaded. When we delete this XML file, all the list be lost and when Windows will find the list missing, it will create a new one and reinitialize all the operations. Note: Instead of deleting the list, it is wise to cut paste the file to another location so you always have the option to restore if anything goes wrong.

Catroot and catroot2 are folders which are essential for Windows Update operation. These are used to store the signatures of the update packages and they help in its installation process.