I have Windows 11 installed on a mini PC that has not been used for several months so I know that it is behind on Windows 11 updates. However the Windows Update tool in settings is showing that it is up to date and when I click the "Check for Update"s button, it almost immediately responds that there are no updates.
Nor is Windows 11 automatically updating itself.
Note regarding the suggested post.
The difference between this question and the suggested post is that Windows Update just isn’t doing anything. It is not slow, it is not hung, it is not even showing that there are updates available when there clearly must be since Microsoft issues Widows updates periodically during the year and this PC has been turned off for at least 6 months and probably a year.
What I found was the Windows Update service itself was disabled for some reason and when I enabled it, Windows Update then worked properly by taking some time to communicate with the updates server, pulling down updates, installing updates, etc. None of this activity was happening until I enabled the Windows Update service.
What can I do to force Windows 11 to actually do a check for updates?
However when I tried using the command “net stop wuauserv” I received an error message indicating the service was not running. When I then tried to start the service with the command “net start wuauserv”, the command failed with a message indicating that a dependency or needed device or service was not available.
I then opened the Services app to see the list of services and found that “Windows update” service was marked as “disabled”. When I did a right mouse click on the “Windows update” service to start it, the various options to start, stop, pause, etc. were grayed out.
I then looked at the Properties for the service and changed the Startup type to Manual.
After this I opened up the Settings dialog and then navigated to the Windows Update panel and Windows 11 had started update properly.
So the root problem was that Windows Update service was disabled and had to be turned on.