exclamation mark windows update

Recently i’ve had weird situation on my classic laptop, Lenovo Thinkpad X220, which is the shutdown button always shown exclamation mark to update Windows. I’ve tried to click the button to start update and shutdown the Windows, but unfortunately the icon still persist on the next restart 🙁

After search on some pages, now i have a clue. This condition may occur cause by broken updates which has not installed successfully and intercept another updates to relies on. So, how to cover this problem? Let’s go to the next paragraph and I’ll show you the instruction.

First, You have to shutdown the Windows Update service and BITS (Background Intelligence Transfer Service) in order to cut down the transfer files for updates. Just press Windows+R button then type “services.msc” to go to services wizard. Choose Windows Update and right click then stop the service.

exclamation mark windows update 2

Again choose BITS then stop the service.

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Now, go to C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution and delete all the contents inside. This folder contains all updates for your computer. All we have to do is to cleanup the broken updates. Because we don’t know which one update is broken so the best practice is delete all folders 😀

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After delete process is completed, restart  the Windows Update & BITS service again. Finally you’ll see the exclamation mark is gone forever :p

HTH