How to Delete Windows Update Cache to Fix Update Failure?

When you check for Windows updates, your system will automatically store all Windows update installation files, because these files might be useful if you need to back to the previous update. However, occasionally, flawed updates or corruption in the Windows update cache folder disrupt the entire process, resulting in Windows updates that are stuck downloading for hours or fail to install with various problems.

3 methods: Delete Windows update cache

Suppose you also have trouble with some updates not loading or installing on a Windows computer. Do you know that deleting the Windows update cache can fix most Windows update downloading and installation problems, for example, Windows updates stuck during downloading, installation failure with different errors, and more?

In fact, after you deleted the Windows update cache, old update files are removed and fresh update files are downloaded from the Microsoft server. So this method can resolve Windows update failures caused by faulty update files.

In this part, we’ll show how to clear Windows update cache in detailed steps, you can choose one or try all if one is not enough to fix the problem.

Method 1. Clear Windows update cache in File Explorer

The first method is the simplest one. You can directly delete Windows update cache files in File Explorer after changing the setting in the Services window.

Step 1. Please type File Explorer in the Search box to open it.

Step 2. Then find and right-click C drive to choose Properties.

Step 3. Click Disk Clean-up and click the “Clean up system files option”.

Step 4. Check the Windows upgrade log files and Temporary Windows Installation files boxes and click OK.

Step 5. Now, press the Windows and R keys at the same time to open the Run dialogue box. Type services.msc and click OK to open the Services application.

Step 6. Find Windows Update from the list of applications, and right-click to select Stop.

Step 7. Next, open File Explorer and go to C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download. Remove all the files in the folder.

After you have completed all of the instructions, please restart your computer. The next time Windows checks for updates, it will download fresh update files from the Microsoft server. This is most likely error-free; download and install without any issues.

Method 2. Delete Windows update cache via CMD

You may also clear the Windows Update cache from the command line, but you must be careful to execute all commands correctly.

Step 1. Type Command Prompt in the Search menu, then right-clicks it to choose Run as administrator to open it.

Step 2. Type net stop wuauserv and press the Enter key in the Command Prompt window.

Step 3. Now please type the following commands and press “Enter” after each:

• C:
• cd %Windir%\SoftwareDistribution
• del /f /s /q Download

Then you can reboot your computer and try to update again.

Method 3. Delete Windows update cache with Script

Another way to delete Windows update cache is to create a script.

Step 1. Open notepad and type:

@Echo On
net stop wuauserv
C:
cd %Windir%\SoftwareDistribution
Type del /f /s /q Download
pause

Step 2. Save the file as Cleardown.cmd on your desktop

Step 3. Right click on the Cleardown.cmd file and select run as administrator

When the script has finished, it will pause so you can see the output of what it has done.

How to Reset Windows update cache

If the above three ways can’t fix Windows update stuck or failure, you can also try to reset the Windows update cache components.

Step 1. Open the command prompt as administrator.

Step 2. We need to Stop the BITS, Cryptographic, MSI Installer and Windows Update Services. Please type the following commands and press the “Enter” after each command:

• net stop wuauserv
• net stop cryptSvc
• net stop bits
• net stop msiserver

Then run these 2 commands:

• ren C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution SoftwareDistribution.old
• ren C:\Windows\System32\catroot2 Catroot2.old

Step 3. Run the following commands to start the BITS, Cryptographic, MSI installer, and Windows Update Services that you’ve disabled.

• net start wuauserv
• net start cryptSvc
• net start bits
• net start msiserver

Then reboot your PC.

Further reading: Thoroughly clear system cache and RAM cache

After deleting the Windows update cache, you may fix the Windows update failed or downloading stuck problems. However, to keep a nice performance and health status of a computer, deleting other cache files is also a great method to avoid system stuck or excessive storage usage.

Windows system and all your programs will generate cache files. They can faster the data accessing speed when you run programs. But the short timeliness of cache files makes them outdated quickly. After a task is finished, they are useless, and then, they accumulate. Thus, you need to regularly clean cache files.

To help you conveniently delete all unnecessary cache files from your computer, here we recommend you AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard, a free disk and Windows PC manager, which supports Windows 11/10/8/8.1/7/XP.

With this tool, you don’t need to open each built-in tool to clean cache files one by one, the tool will scan all locations and filter all junk files for you. You can clean all junk files like cache, registry, and temp files with one click.

Here are the steps to clean all junk files with the handy tool.

Step 1. Download and open AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard, and click "Free up" and "PC Cleaner" in turn.

Step 2. Click "Start Scan" in the new pop-up window to scan your computer for unwanted files.

Step 3. After starting the scan, please wait for a while until the progress bar is loaded.

Step 4. Unneeded data will be automatically selected, you can directly click "Clean All" to delete them. If you still have other unnecessary files, you can tick the boxes of the corresponding files.

Step 5. When you see a correct symbol displayed in the interface, you can click "Back" to leave the function.

Tip: If you want to free disk space or extend drive space, you can upgrade to the Professional Edition to try the "App Mover" feature and “Allocate Free Space” feature.

To sum up

Now, do you know how to delete Windows update cache? Hope these 3 ways can help you clear Windows update cache files and fix Windows update stuck or failures.

AOMEI Partition Assistant is a multifunctional tool for Windows users, besides mentioned functions, this tool can also clone disk, transfer OS only, convert a disk to MBR/GPT without deleting partitions, and more. What’s more, you can choose the Server Edition to manage your Windows Server 2025/2022/2019/2016/2012(R2)/2008(R2)/2003 computers.