Windows Update is a very important Windows service used to check, download and install Windows updates in the background. The Windows Update works as a service and runs operations periodically. As a service, the Windows Update services, start, stop, restart, etc. In order to run the Windows service we should start it. In this tutorial, we examine how to start the Windows Update service from the command line.
Display Windows Update Service Status
Before starting the Windows service we can display the current status of the Windows service by using the sc query command like the one below.
>sc query wuauserv
Start Windows Update Service
Windows operating systems provide the net start command in order to start service via the command line interface. This command is provided for a long time and we can use it to start the Windows Update service for all of the modern Windows operating systems.
> net start wuauservAfter running this command if there is no error this means the Windows Update service is started successfully. If there is an error check it. The most common error is the permission error. We should start the command line interface like Ms-DOS or PowerShell as Administrator which is described in the following post.
Stop Windows Update Service
We can stop the Windows Update Service via command line interface like below.
> net stop wuauservEnable Auto-Start for Windows Update Service
Run the following command in the command line interface to enable the Windows Update service which results in starting the Windows Update Service automatically during the operating system start.
reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\Auto Update" /v AUOptions /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f