Windows 10 Update Notifications: Broken

On the business side of things, it seems that when Windows 10 checks in with a WSUS server (internal Windows update server), Windows 10 does not notify users when updates are available. I spent a solid day working on this, thinking that perhaps I did something in a group policy somewhere that caused it, but lo and behold, even taking a freshly imaged Windows 10 1903 computer, with only a (new) WSUS group policy still didn’t work properly.

To add to the story, it seemed that with Windows 10 1803, there was an issue where it seemed to “try” to work; when an update was pushed, an executable called musnotification.exe would launch, but effectively pin the CPU at 100% utilization, cause batteries and patience to drain, and never notify the user either. I usually fixed it by stopping the windows update service, killing the “softwaredistribution” folder in c:\windows, then restarting Windows Update. Now the CPU issue has gone away, but so have the notifications.

Also to note – in Windows 10 (seemingly starting around 1803), Windows update works a little differently, in that there’s a new service called Update Orchestration service that sets up appropriate tasks in task scheduler to follow the settings you apply via GPO. So when you set it to check for updates every X hours; the USO service configures an update task to relaunch every X hours (based on your setting).

More Notes

Last but not least, I figured I’d mention a few things I found along the way…