This is an old revision of the document!

BITS Service Repair

It has come to the IT Department’s attention that many systems on Olin's campus, particularly the freshman D620s, have had trouble with Windows Automatic Updates. The problem has manifested itself in a variety of ways including: the system hanging during shutdown for some, and Automatic Updates simply not working at all on other systems. In most cases, this issue is caused by a failure of the BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service) service to start automatically on startup. We have created a patch to correct the BITS problem such that it starts and allows the system to download available updates.

The patch will perform the following:

  1. Check your system to determine whether the BITS service is actually running
    • If not, it will attempt to start the service
  2. If it is unable to start the service, it will install a Windows Resource kit with various utilities, including one to reinstall the BITS service. Once installed, the BITS utility will automatically run and reinstall the BITS service.
  3. Install a startup script that will check that BITS continues to run in the future and will re-repair it if there is a problem.

After running the patch, your system should be able to check for and download available updates.

To run the patch, click the following link and click Run when you get the security popup window: \\fsvs01\Applications\Public\BITS_Fix\BITS_Fix.bat.

The entire process is automatic. While the patch is running, you may see some text appear in a black command window – you can ignore it. This is a simply part of the process. When the patch finishes, you will see some brief text letting you know that the patch has finished running.

After the patch has finished, please check that your computer is fully updated. You can do this one of two ways:

  • If you see the Automatic Updates icon in your system tray, double-click on it and check that updates are actually being downloaded and installed. Sometimes the icon may be there, but if the BITS service is malfunctioning, the updates are not actually being installed.
  • Go to Start Menu→All Programs→Microsoft Update.
    • The program may also be called Windows Update on some machines.